Longing for Yesteryear

When was your yesteryear?

Was it several years ago, when your children were younger?  Was it a couple of decades ago, when you graduated college, or got married?  Was it half a century ago, when the world seemed to be a far simpler place?

My yesteryear was two months ago, back when my father's dementia was merely stressful.  My yesteryear is the beginning of November, when Dad could still recognize me as his eldest son.

Before he began accusing me of being evil.  Of being Satan.

My yesteryear is even before he began to believe I was going to kill him.

Starting on Thursday evening, and every night since then, Dad has prayed out loud to God for peace as he prepared for me to murder him.  Every evening, in what is called "sundowning" (the process in which dementia patients react in disturbing ways to nightfall), Dad now lives in profound fear.  Fear of Mom, fear of me, and fear of what he thinks we're going to do to him.

He shakes in agony, his voice cracks, he sobs without tears.  He whispers disbelief at how his life is about to be stolen from him.  He prays to God defiantly so I can hear that however I kill him, as he truly expects, I'll know I can't kill his spirit.

You don't see any of this on the Alzheimer websites.  You see lots of information about walking with Alzheimer patients through their earliest memories, but there's nothing about how to handle a loved one who believes you're about to murder them in cold blood.

My yesteryear is the time - about three weeks ago - before Mom began getting so afraid of Dad, and what he might do to himself and us, that she began calling 911.  She's called them three times now, and each time, the police come out and quietly try to diffuse our situation.  The first two times, it worked:  Dad calmed down and his fears subsided.  Saturday night, however, he began arguing with the cops, and I finally encouraged them to leave, since no progress was being made.

Yesterday afternoon, we experienced the earliest onset of Dad's sundowning, with the questions and fear beginning at about 5:00.  He'd scowl at Mom, asking for her identity.  He'd glare at me, disbelieving anything I told him.  I found one of his CDs of hymn music and played it, watching his face sink into his hands, as if in prayer.  Mom and I looked at each other, smiling to see him asking God for peace in the midst of his confusion.

Then he raised his head and looked defiantly at both of us.  He declared that he was ready for whatever harm we were about to inflict upon him.  We then realized he'd been praying for the faith and courage to face his imminent death.

Mom choked back tears.

I silently chided myself for being so gullible as to hope a simple thing like playing soothing music could intercept his worsening dementia.

My yesteryear was when Dad merely forgot that his sister no longer lives in Brooklyn, where they had grown up.  Every time they spoke on the phone, Dad would ask her three or four times where she lived, since the experiences she told him about her day had nothing to do with the old neighborhood.  Last night, for the first time, he angrily told her she was lying to him, and tried to hang up the phone.  Mom grabbed the receiver from him and commiserated with my aunt over what had just happened.  Dad had turned on his own sister, the last person alive who can relate to their family's childhood experiences.

My yesteryear was an almost unbelievable one or two inches ago, back around the beginning of November, when I couldn't wear several old, old pairs of denim jeans.  I fit comfortably into them now, thanks to all the weight I've suddenly lost.  Because of my constant anxiety, my appetite has shriveled up, and so has my waistline.  I'm still hungry, but I can barely brace myself for whatever new hell we're going to face each evening with Dad's condition.

My yesteryear was when Dad refused to go to church because he didn't want anybody to see that he needed to use a cane.  On Sunday mornings, after breakfast and before the time he and Mom usually left for their church, he'd feign an illness, such as being too tired or dizzy.  But then, as soon as I announced that Mom had left for church alone, suddenly he was chipper and professing that he felt fine.

My yesteryear was when Dad fought with Mom and me for trying to help him take a shower safely.  It could take half an hour to coax him into the bathroom to take a 5-minute shower.  And those strategically-placed handrails Mom paid some contractor a ridiculous amount of money to install in their bathroom?  He would disdainfully use them only after I'd repeatedly remind him of their obvious presence.

My yesteryear was back when Dad didn't fear me as his potential killer; he merely considered me the bad guy in our household; the person upon whom most of his anger was directed.  Mom and I had learned that because of the confusion and anxiety dementia patients experience, they tend to direct their resulting anger towards one of their caregivers.  Usually, that unfortunate target of their anger is their spouse.  Yet in our case, since I'm living at home with them, as the overweight, underemployed son, I caught most of Dad's vitriol.  And that was okay, since it usually spared Mom from even higher levels of stress.

But those days appear to be over, and long gone.  When sundowning begins, both Mom and I are equal-opportunity targets for his scorn, vitriol, and outright ugliness.  Some experts say we should nurture Dad's childhood memories and walk through his version of reality with him, validating his humanity despite his confusion.  Unfortunately for us, however, Dad's childhood was irreparably scarred by an alcoholic father.  There is little in his earliest memories that is good.  Years ago, during one of his extremely infrequent mentions of his father, Dad told us that the day he came home from work to find his father dead in their apartment's foyer, there was such profound relief in his family, it took a while before anybody figured they should call somebody to remove the body.

Fortunately for us, there's an elder at Mom and Dad's church who has willingly come over on each of these past few nights and helped to calm Dad down.  This elder, Ron, has a remarkable knack for chatting through topics to find nuggets of relevance that can engage the person with whom he's talking.  With Dad, his only really good childhood memories involve watching Dodgers baseball games at Ebbets Field, and Ron, having grown up as an improbable Dodgers fan himself, despite being raised in rural Texas, can talk to him about the old players.

In my yesteryear, Mom once had me research and print off some information on the old Dodgers and their legendary players, but Dad read just a couple of sentences of it and then filed it someplace.  We haven't seen it since.

Ron is an engineer.  He was also military pilot, and has worked in several different industries, so he's accrued a broad and diverse history from which he can draw stories and anecdotes that touch on Dad's history in the military and employment in the concrete construction business.  Meanwhile, the life histories Mom and I each have are inextricably tied into Dad's.  And since he doesn't know who we are, he doesn't trust us when we talk - especially about experiences it's apparent he should remember along with us.  Mom and I try to talk with Dad like Ron does, but invariably, Dad becomes suspicious, and before long, he's denying what we're saying, and getting agitated.  I suspect that Mom and I are too close to him, even though he can't remember why we're close.  People like Ron are removed from his life just far enough so that there's a certain casualness to their relationship.

Chalk it up to one of the difficult ironies of dementia.  Dad would cheerfully chat away with telemarketers and willingly offer up his credit card information if we let him.  Yet he's fearful of us.  He convinces himself I'm going to murder him, yet he'd shuffle out the front door, off to who knows where in the black of night, if we'd let him.  He enthusiastically welcomes Ron into his reality, but he bitterly accuses Mom and me of holding him hostage.

In my yesteryear, I wasn't a hostage-holder.  I wasn't Satan.  I wasn't about to murder my precious Dad.

I want my yesteryear back, and everything it stood for.

In God's holy providence, however, even today's misery will soon become a yesteryear for which I'll likely pine as we descend ever lower into this netherworld called Alzheimer's.
_____

Update - Sure enough; it's 4:09pm on Monday, and Mom and are getting ready to take Dad to the hospital, where his neurologist has arranged for him to be admitted before his inevitable placement into a nursing home.  As you might imagine, this is very hard.  Very.  Hard.

Bruised Reeds and Weak Wicks

Behold My Servant, whom I uphold; My chosen, in whom My soul delights:
I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up His voice, or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed He will not break,
and a faintly burning wick He will not quench;
He will faithfully bring forth justice.  - Isaiah 41:1-3 ESV

As God speaks through His prophet, Isaiah, regarding the promise and purposes of Christ, it's easier to focus on the grander things, and overlook the smaller.

At least, it's easier for me to focus on Christ's grand purposes, like bringing justice to the nations.  Pretty impressive, huh?  Meanwhile, I overlook the fact that God pointedly assures me that His holy Son will not run roughshod over the weak as He accomplishes His momentous, eternal objectives on Earth.

Of course, God's justice runs broad and deep.  It is the perfect accomplishment of His plans and designs for each one of us, where we live geographically, and when we live historically.  It's as perfect and strategic for you - no matter the country in which you're now accessing this article on the Internet - as it was for the Jews in Isaiah's day.

When we mortal humans accomplish big things, unfortunately, we tend to inflict a considerable amount of collateral damage along the way.  China, for example, has obliterated so many densely-populated neighborhoods in its desire to build the world's most ostentatious buildings, social scientists worry that indigenous cultural features from China's ancient traditions may be vanishing within a single generation.  That is potentially problematic in the long-term because civil stability in any country significantly depends on measured transitions of cultural touchstones.

As my pastor who preached from this text above pointed out in his sermon yesterday, we Americans were pushed into World War Two's Pacific Theater with the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor.  Yet our valiant fight for "freedom" was quietly compromised as over 100,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during the war.  Quite the irony, wouldn't you say?

God, however, will accomplish His epic, universal, and even intimate purposes without destroying His people.  How could He act otherwise?  Pure, complete justice such as the sort God represents doesn't inflict collateral damage amongst those who serve Him.  This means that in terms of our deficiencies or problems, He will not discard disciples who have suffered injury, nor will he snuff out weak-spirited followers.

Isn't His an amazing depiction of sovereign care and grace in the midst of Isaiah 42's sweeping pronouncements about all Christ will accomplish?  Throughout such utterly profound feats as creating us, giving sight to the blind, freeing captives, and defending His glorious honor, God will preserve the lowly, and the damaged, and the weak.

God watches over bruised reeds and weak wicks.

Regular readers of my blog know those things that weaken me, and that have bruised me emotionally and mentally.  And even spiritually.  For years, I've felt like a faintly-burning wick, barely able to cast a glow, let alone a shadow.  My spirituality has been beset by doubts and fears, and it's easier for me to feel sorry for myself than be confident in my future.

Indeed, I tend to see myself more as a wick than a reed.  How about you?  A bruised reed sounds as though it's describing an otherwise innocent person who has been injured by somebody or something else.  On the other hand, a faintly-burning wick seems to more aptly describe somebody who simply feels as though their very being has been compromised by some debilitating deficit within themselves. 

I don't blame anybody for my depression, or for anything else that has affected me negatively.  Not that I'm a model of forgiveness, or champion of letting bygones be bygones.  I simply haven't been victimized any more than anybody else.

What I do believe, however, is that my chronic clinical depression has drained so much emotional, physical, and spiritual energy from me, that if I were to demonstrate the amount of fuel within my soul, and a wick were inserted to try and generate some sort of light or warmth from that fuel, the flame would be faint at best.

Yet Christ didn't come to punish me for having a faintly-burning wick.  He didn't come to snuff me out!  Amen?  He knows my weaknesses, and He's come to save me from them.  Not penalize me!

Of course, in order to benefit from this reality, I need to believe that Jesus - even the baby much of the world celebrates in some fashion at this time of the year - is indeed The Christ, the holy Son of the living God.  I need to let Him be the Lord of my life.  I need to allow His Holy Spirit to produce within me the Fruit of Godliness, which includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  And I need to rest in His promises of deliverance - deliverance in His time and through His ways.  Not my timeframe, nor my expectations.

In our popular parlance, we use the word "break" in conjunction with ending something.  In the context of these verses, however, Isaiah is talking about "break" as in destroy, as if to regard the destruction of a ubiquitous reed as irrelevant.

And how many of us bother with a weak flame?  When you're evaluating the efficacy of a candle flame's illumination quality, what benefit is there in not snuffing out a flame that barely can emit any glow?  What good is a weak flame to us if we want light, heat, or even ambiance?

Providentially, God's value metrics are different from ours, aren't they?  And for that, shouldn't we be profoundly grateful?

Maybe you don't see yourself as a bruised reed, or a faintly-burning wick, and you're enthusiastic about celebrating all that our Christmas season has to offer.  You're full of vim and vigor, and really can't relate to what I'm writing about.  If this describes you, then be thankful for your lot in life, and invite the Lord to glorify Himself through the ways you celebrate His birth.

Nevertheless, meanwhile, if the Lord allows any of us to metaphorically encounter a bruised reed, let's be careful not to break it.  And if we encounter a faintly-burning wick during this candle-burning season, why not resist the urge to snuff it out?

When we're seeking to honor Christ, being mindful of others is simply following the pattern Isaiah told us He'd model.

Depression, Dementia, and Heavenly Relief

Dad used to be deeply concerned about my mental health.

After I was diagnosed with clinical depression in 1993, while I was living in New York City, he'd mail me letters of encouragement, with 3x5 cards on which he'd hand-written Bible verses pertaining to things like hope and endurance.

I've kept several of those 3x5 cards, along with one of his letters.  The letter is from August 1993, when he wrote that he believed I would be healed from my depression soon - with "soon" underlined.

Today, twenty one years later, I have yet to be healed from my depression - which has since been clarified as "chronic".  Not only have I not been healed, my Dad can no longer remember that I have it.  He doesn't remember attending therapy sessions with me, once he and my brother had driven up to New York to move me back to Texas.  Shucks, he doesn't remember that I used to live in Manhattan, let alone that he used to mail me letters of encouragement.  Some of the time, he can't remember who I am.

Yesterday afternoon, he thought I was the son of his childhood neighborhood's ice cream man from Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

A couple of years after I moved back to Texas, Dad retired, and I was going nowhere fast with my therapy for depression.  Nevertheless, with Dad's retirement, he and Mom began spending their summers in coastal Maine, away from the miserable heat here in Texas, and for days leading up to their departure, I'd become physically sick with separation anxiety.  I was supposed to be developing some semblance of maturity and personal responsibility by staying at my job, working, being somewhat independent, and coping on my own.  But it usually took most of the summer for me to calm down emotionally, and by that time, Mom and Dad had begun closing up the Maine house for the season in preparation for their return to Texas!

Dad no longer remembers Maine, or those cross-country trips, or the big riding lawnmower his former co-workers gave him as a retirement present.  The property in Maine had quite a large lawn, complete with a bucolic, bubbling brook running alongside of it, but Dad has forgotten all of that.

Instead, nearly every evening these days, he asks to telephone his mother.  He can't remember that she died in 1979, when she was in her 80's.  In fact, she died 35 years ago this evening.  When Mom and I tell him of her passing, he becomes upset, both because he's learning of his mother's death as if for the first time, but also because he senses he should know that she's dead.

He yells at Mom and me when we urge him to brush his teeth.  His dentist says he's developed an infection in his gums from neglecting his oral hygiene.  If we didn't urge him to brush his teeth, he'd completely forget to do it.  Now, Mom has him swish some Listerine in his mouth, and he complains of the stinging it causes, yet he refuses to admit that better oral hygiene would fix the problem.  He can no longer draw the correlation between clean teeth and pain-free gums.

The other night, he awoke in a wild stupor, vehemently insisting on getting dressed and starting his day.  Even though it was 12:15 in the morning.  As mom's voice rose in their bedroom while she confronted his irrationality, I woke up and went down the hall, walking into a bizarre tableau of his anger and accusations.  He yelled that we had kidnapped him and were holding him against his will.  When I began to pray out loud for the Lord to give us peace, he sneered at me.  Mom called my brother, who's now in Michigan; yet Dad, unable to recognize his other son's voice on the phone, accused him of being the mastermind of his abduction, and hung up on him.

Desperate, Mom asked Dad what it would take for him to calm down.  "Get me the police," Dad thundered.  So Mom called 911.  Before it was all over, we had two cops, two ambulance EMTs, and several firemen in the house - with all their professional regalia, beeping walkie-talkies, heavy boots, and the like.  And Dad was reveling in the attention, charming them with stories of Brooklyn, and showing them pictures he'd painted years ago.

He finally went to bed at 3:30 in the morning.  Didn't remember a bit of it when he got up several hours later.  Mom and I are still trying to recover.

Back in the late 1970's, Dad's mother produced similar outbursts and crises during her struggle with what was then called "hardening of the arteries."  Dad's sister would call us from Brooklyn, at her wit's end, hoping Dad could calm their mother down.  Today, Dad remembers none of that, even as he causes as much pain, despair, heartache, disruption, and anxiety as she did.

This won't end well.  That's part of what makes all of this so utterly sad.  Dementia has been called "the long good-bye," and it is indeed that.  It is long, and it is good-bye.  Its victims don't recover from it in this lifetime.  There is no antidote, no surgery, no treatment that can reverse it.  My grandmother ended up having a massive brain aneurysm while climbing a flight of stairs in her apartment building.  Their Brooklyn neighborhood then was so crime-ridden, it took almost half an hour before my aunt, frantically scanning a phone book in the days before 911, could find an ambulance company willing to enter it at night.  At least when Mom called the police early Monday morning, I could see emergency lights flashing through the curtains within moments.

Everybody says the same thing; Dad's neurologist, their primary-care doctor, the police and EMTs the other night:  there's not much we can do.  This is dementia.  This is elder care in the 21st Century.  It's not even like Dad is the worst case out there.

Still, it's so depressing.

We've known of Dad's dementia for seven years, and we suspected something was wrong for several years before that.  Our faith tells us that we need to trust in God, and find peace through the power of His Holy Spirit.  And yes, some days, it's easier to "be still, and know that God is God."  On many other days, however, the darkness, the morbidity, the irrationality and nonsensical nature of dementia... the despair can be overwhelming.

I used to hear about other families and their struggles in caring for loved ones with dementia.  But I didn't understand what they were going through.  I thought I had an understanding, but now that I'm in the thick of it myself, I realize that nothing else is like this.

Not that people who don't have loved ones with dementia are wrong for trying to help and sympathize with those who do.

Plus, plenty of other people are dealing with plenty of other afflictions at least as bad as dementia, if not worse.

But I'm not looking for sympathy anyway.  I'm looking for relief.  Okay; I admit it: I'm no super-spiritual saint.  I am disappointed that Dad never saw the healing of my depression.  I'm disappointed for him, but also for myself.  I often wonder if I'd be dealing with our current crisis better if my own problems with depression had been alleviated beforehand.

Then, this morning, for the first time in years, I reached for the little dusty bundle of 3x5 cards that have remained, paper-clipped together, in a cubbyhole of my roll-top desk, above my computer keyboard.  And in my Dad's handwriting, I see Psalm 40:1:

"I waited patiently and expectantly for the Lord, and He inclined to me and heard my cry."  With "inclined" and "heard" underlined.

This is another one of those things that's really all about depending on God, isn't it?  We can't make sense out of clinical depression, or of dementia.  Yet does God expect us to?  Or does He invite us to wait patiently for Him to eventually defer to us and receive our request?  In His timeframe; not ours?

In my narcissistic human mortality, I find little comfort in having to wait for God.  And I find zero comfort in my afflictions - afflictions which the Lord has allowed to begin with!  I dislike having anything imposed upon me.  And it sounds pretty haughty of God to say that He will "incline" to us.  So much of our hedonistic enculturation teaches us to make our own way, and solve our own problems.  Now!

Then again, of course, our culture doesn't recognize that God is God, and we are not.  We forget that we don't deserve any of the graces He bestows upon any of us.  Graces like having a mortal father who, when in his "rightful" mind, loved me, and desired to lead me in God's truth.  Graces like salvation, and unlimited opportunities to communicate with my Heavenly Father about issues like depression and dementia.

Life has seemed dark to me for a long time, and particularly recently.  Yet I still wait for the Lord.  In a way, there's not much else I can do, is there?  Many cynics would say that weak people like me simply need to hold on to something.  Desperate for peace, we hold on to God, or some other religious deity, or food, or money, or social status, or our job, or our family.

But I don't see myself holding on, as much as I believe God is the One holding on to me.

Perhaps some personality types deal with these issues with less anxiety and gloom than I tend to.  But I've tried for decades to change my personality, and nothing seems to have worked.  Maybe if I'd gone to seminary, or memorized every verse in the Bible, or gotten married, or... done something else morally and mortally possible that could have benefited me in various ways, including putting some cushion between myself and my problems...

But at some point, the rawness of awful things will impact us.  And we will need something we never could have conjured up for ourselves.  For example, even though he doesn't realize it, Dad needs me today, just like I needed him over twenty years ago.  Far more than this, however, we both need the Lord.

Have you ever considered the irony of Zechariah, Mary, and Joseph all being afraid when God's angels appeared to them in preparation for the nativity of the Christ child?  "Fear not!" each angel commanded them.

And what is my despair, but a fear of God not being as sovereign as He says He is?

Dear Lord, please help me not to fear, but to find relief in Your salvation!

Ask Yourself: God's Glory, or Whose?

Here it is, folks:

When it comes to spiritual questions, cultural disputes, and how we intend to interpret any passage of the Bible, this is how we should do it:  Interpret everything in the Bible and life itself in deference to God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.  Everything.

Interpret everything in a way that gives glory to the Holy Trinity.

Straight-up, no-holes-barred, every time.  No cultural exceptions, no circumstantial qualifications.  Ask yourself, "who gets the glory?  God, or me, or humankind in general?

It's as simple - and profound - as that.  Isn't it?  Do we each need to be an expert in Hebrew, Greek, or seminary-speak?  Do we need to get some evangelical celebrity or political guru to weigh in with an opinion?  When we read God's Word, and when we consider how to apply it to our daily lives, no matter the subject at hand, won't the right way to act be the way that best glorifies God?

If we're living for God, instead of ourselves, these won't sound like trick questions.

Nevertheless, as I wander around our evangelical subculture and listen to different people say different things about their interpretation of faith, it never ceases to amaze me how we all - every one of us - approach God's Word from some degree of our own, unilateral, personal perspective.  We view the Bible, faith, God, His Son, and how we're to live our lives through a prism of our own preferences, experiences, assumptions, education, and hopes.

Yes, that's part of being human, and of our sin nature, but it's also part of the sanctification process, through which we're supposed to be progressing, not languishing, or regressing.

Unfortunately, we tend to forget that our cultures - even in religion - can work against our sanctification.  We're taught that since God loves us, and created us each as individual people, we have a right to think however we want to think.  We're taught that God expects us to think for ourselves.  The more liberal we are, the more we're taught to value other people, and how they think, and what they think.  The more conservative we are, the more we're taught that other people should think like us.  Which, if you think about it, is as inaccurate an ambition as letting everybody believe whatever works for themselves.  As long as the humanity for which we advocate has a decidedly lateral and horizontal focus, instead of a vertical one, we're probably not honoring God.

At least, we're probably not honoring God as much as we'd like to think we are.

We're in trouble when we consider our opinions to have at least as much weight as God's do.  We forget that we're always interpreting, because humans cannot create truth.  We can only respond to it.  On the other hand, God interprets nothing, since He is the Source of all things.  He is omniscient, omnipresent, and sovereign.  We're not, so we interpret how God's Word applies to various situations in our lives, whether that interpretation is fairly direct, or vague, or apparently not supported by much of anything.

What should matter more should be our desire to honor God in all that we do, endorse, and believe.

Sure, some of us are more accurate than others when it comes to how we believe God is glorified.  As our society has devolved into an "all roads lead to Rome" sort of universalism, however, and narcissism has ossified our ability to critique our own motives, it's easier to fall into a reverse pattern:  evaluating what faith can do for us, rather than acknowledging what God has already done, is doing, and will do.

Both inside and outside the church, for example, we treat issues like gay marriage as if we're entitled to craft a viewpoint based on variables that are relevant to our experiences.  Instead, shouldn't we be viewing everything in light of how each thing - person, experience, fact, ideology, motivation, emotion, reflex, fear - exists as a manifestation of God's revealed word and will?

In other words, we can argue 'till the cows come home about love, relationships, fidelity, marriage, selflessness, covenants, commitment, lifestyles, wants, needs, feelings, romance, and how we think or believe God would want us to act when it comes to gay marriage.

But what do you think honors God about gay marriage?  And what does God say honors Him regarding heterosexual marriage?  God has given us some pretty specific facts regarding marriage, sexuality, covenants, and purity that, in and of themselves, aren't open to as much interpretation as we often like to presume.  We like to believe that we are autonomous actors in His presence.  We've seen how our ideas about things can change over time, as we experience new people, and participate in new relationships.  So surely, God changes, too!  Right?

Well, He doesn't.  He tells us He's unchanging, and that what He said when each book of the Bible was first transcribed is as relevant and factual today as it was then.

Besides, we haven't yet answered the question:  what is it about gay marriage that brings glory to God?  The ability of people to marry each other regardless of gender - how does that bring glory to God?  Is love bigger than God?  Is commitment bigger than God?  Is human sexuality and gender assignment bigger than God?  Is what we want to do bigger than what God wants us to do?

What right do we have to decide whether or not marriage honors God in the first place?  That right comes from God Himself, correct?  What right do we have to decide whether or not gender matters when it comes to marriage?  For that matter, what right do we have to decide that even heterosexual marriages can be terminated simply because one or more spouse has tired of it?

People get divorced because they want to get divorced.  Meanwhile, where does God ever say that divorce honors Him?

Don't we make these conversations much more complicated than God intended them to be?  Of course, conversations about gay marriage aren't complicated to people who don't want to honor God with their view of it.  And they're not complicated to people who deeply desire to honor God with their view of it.  To be frank, the only people for whom conversations like gay marriage are complicated are people who struggle with imposing their own personal sense of superiority upon God, Who will not share His holy superiority with anybody or anything.

Actually, it's probably a good struggle to have, as long as you're willing to realize that, ultimately, you're not in control of your life.  You're not able to change God's view of sexual perversion.  A society can vote to allow gay marriage, but such a vote doesn't change God's will.  But that reality doesn't mean much when we concentrate more on what we want, than on what honors God.

No, living lives that honor God isn't necessarily easy for us, but being purposeful about honoring God shouldn't be a difficult desire for us.  To the degree that it is, that's the degree to which we haven't given Him the Lordship over our lives that He desires - and deserves - to have.

Every child of God's has been bought with a Price.  And that Price is His holy Son, Jesus.  Therefore, we are to honor God with our lives.  We are to live in deference to Him, out of thankfulness for Christ's sacrificial death on our behalf.

If any of us aren't living this way, then perhaps He's not yet our Lord.

And if you find that last sentence particularly offensive, then it's probably because you know He's not. 

Meanwhile, we can never err on the side of God's honor.  But we can certainly err on the side of ours.

Trophy Bathrooms, Manhattan Style

A bathroom with a view at Midtown Manhattan's brand-new 432 Park Avenue

Trophy bathrooms.

You've heard of trophy wives, right?  And trophy homes?  Well, when it comes to trophy homes, just about every room gets blinged-out and hyper-accessorized.  New rooms also get added, such as media rooms, gift-wrapping rooms, and even miniature religious chapels.

For a long time, however, the most private places of any home - trophy or not - had been kept in the shadows.  These rooms were usually small, and were ferreted away into the bowels of a dwelling, tucked out of sight, with discrete views, if any, and absolutely nothing to celebrate.

Well, not any more!  The inner sanctum of personal - and often undignified - physical maintenance has now become one of the most celebrated rooms in a trophy house.

That humble ceramic-tiled shower with an opaque curtain?  It is now a glass-sheathed, marble-walled "wet room."  The impolite toilet?  It has now been practically re-visioned as a sleek throne.  Instead of being secreted into a corner or closed off by its own louvered door, toilets can now command prime bathroom real estate.

Uninhibited.  Out there.  Brutally honest.  Nothing to hide.  And leaving nothing to the imagination.

Indeed, it's imagination overboard with today's trophy bathrooms.  And the trend isn't just for today's McMansions and upscale exurban tract homes, where bay windows flank sunken bathtubs. 

A few restaurants, bars, hotels, and other commercial establishments have been tinkering with the concept of unconventionally visible public bathrooms for a number of years, but even public bathrooms expect their patrons to remain mostly clothed.

But not so for a number of prime new ultra-luxury residential towers in New York City.

For generations, the New York City residential bathroom has been designed for cramped, discrete utility, and if they had a window, it was tiny, and faced a back alley.  Today, however, privacy is for commoners.  If only the little people pay taxes, Leona Helmsley's infamous quote could be reinterpreted today as being "only the little people have little windows in their bathrooms."

Witness the pictorial essay compiled by the New York Times of some very immodest, very glassy, and very view-filled bathrooms currently being offered in the city's most expensive residential projects.  At what is perhaps the city's newest celebrity tower, 432 Park Avenue, you can purchase a brand-new apartment with at 10' x 10' plate glass window centered in front of your pod-shaped bathtub, and a glass wall hiding very little of your shower space and toilet area.

From your bath pod, you'll be able to peer down the corner
of 215 Chrystie Street

If such a spectacle isn't enough for you, there's the pod-shaped bathtub - no rectangular tub-and-shower combos at these price points - tucked into the corner of another celebrity building being literally erected with glass corners.  Which, yes, means that you can take your bath practically peering over the corner of your apartment building.

Yet another luxury building in Manhattan is remodeling its bathrooms to have two toilets facing each other behind glass walls.

It's as if exhibitionism has become the next rung on society's elitism ladder.  Talk about conspicuous consumption!  Still, if you've got twenty, forty, or ninety million dollars to spend on an apartment, there's only so much marble and African wood that can be purchased to outfit such skyscraper palaces.  At some point, these apartments have to provide the biggest "wow" factor architects and interior designers can imagine.  And when it comes to "wow" factors, how much better can it get than showcasing Manhattan's dazzling skyline?

Enter Manhattan's take on the trophy bathroom, which outclasses anything you'll find on the ground in suburbia, simply because you need the verticality of these sky mansions to pull off the desired effect.  Like a Realtor quoted in the Times article says, wealthy homebuyers in Manhattan have always wanted a view from their living room; now, they also want a view from their bathroom.  And when it comes to views, Manhattan can certainly deliver.

So what if the bathroom offers some of the best views?  Remember, only the little people would be intimidated by so much glass when they're getting into and out of a bathtub.  Or off of a toilet.

Besides, it's not like these glass bathrooms are going to be on low floors, where the only view will be of other buildings - and their occupants.  It's also not entirely clear how many of these new apartment towers are being constructed with such transparent trophy bathrooms.  It could be that the market for such exhibitionistic elitism is smaller than developers and Realtors say it is.  Then, too, how many of these glass-walled bathrooms are going to have designer shutters over them anyway, after their naked novelty wears off (which will probably happen by the third night in the homeowner's new apartment)?

According to the Times piece, if this is a bona-fide trend, it can actually be considered quite beneficial for the homeowners of these see-through bathrooms:  considering how self-conscious so much visibility could make the people using them, a rise in physical fitness among Manhattan's penthouse population may be forthcoming.  In what other room in your home are you almost always nude, with lighting that accentuates everything you don't want accentuated, and plenty of mirrors so you can't avoid it?

What's more likely, however, is that the type of people purchasing homes with such bathrooms are people who already possess a personal confidence that has either propelled them into pursuing physical fitness.  Or theirs is a personal confidence that says their personal looks don't matter.  What matters to them is being able to own an apartment where one's bathtub can command a view replicating the vantage point of a ship's captain piloting the mighty USS Manhattan down into New York Harbor.  Looking south from high above Manhattan island, its pointy tip makes the borough look like a nautical vessel plying the waters represented by the Hudson and East rivers.

Of course, that ship effect is lost on any north-facing bathroom.  For buildings near Central Park, there's hardly any northward skyline in which to revel, either.  Besides, what happens when other buildings of equal - or greater - height eventually get constructed near these luxury buildings currently under construction?  Hardly anything ever stays the same in Manhattan's skyline.  Will owners of today's crop of trophy bathrooms have to start going to court against future developers who either want to obstruct views - or, perversely, take advantage of them?

Hey - a boom in trophy bathrooms is one thing.  But a boom in high-powered portable telescopes may be forthcoming as well.

Purchased not only by people living in these skyscraper palaces.  But also by folks living within sight of them.

Need More Happy?

"Do you write happy stuff?  I need more 'happy' in my life."

A friend of mine from church was being honest with me, like friends should be.  He's read some of the things I've written, and noted my penchant for pessimism.

And he's right, isn't he?  You know what "happy" is - something cheerful, optimistic, smile-inducing; in other words, everything everyday news is not.

So, do I write happy stuff?  No, not a lot.  I know that.  And it's a reality that tends to bother me.  I can write all day about stuff that saddens me.  But I have to rack my brain for personal memories that are happy.  I have to scour the Internet to find happy news, or topics that spark my imagination in a lighthearted, uplifting way.

Both my friend and I know the reason why "happy" is elusive.  He readily admits that he needs more happy in his life, and so do I.  And, I suspect, so do you.  But we neither need nor truly want the type of happy that is fleeting, or trite, or based on illusion that everything's right with the world.

To be clear and Biblical, we need to understand that happiness is not joy or peace.  Joy or peace can be present even in the worst of circumstances, whereas happiness is more of an emotion that is dependent upon pleasant, if not fulfilling, circumstances.  The Apostle James says we should "count it all joy" when we're suffering, but he says nothing about being happy with it.

My friend, a born-again Christian, knows that everything isn't right with the world, and so do I, and I hope you do, too.  In fact, that's why he - and I, and you - would like to see more "happy" in our lives.  We know that in this fallen world, there's far too much pain, despair, and plain old unhappiness that we deal with every day.

I had lunch today with somebody who'd just lost a job we'd celebrated him getting only a year ago.  Every day this week, my father, who suffers from senile dementia, has had miserable spells in which he couldn't remember anything about Mom, me, or our family.  I imagine you have news from your family and friends that could be even worse than mine.

Happiness?  No!

A lot of my Republican friends are elated with the results of this past Tuesday's elections, but political euphoria has to be one of the most transitory, temporary, and easily-destroyed sensations on the planet.  Just two years ago, Democrats were giddy at what appeared to be the prospect of a severely crippled GOP.  Tides can turn quickly in a democracy, but pundits on both sides of the aisle tend to forget that.

As quickly as it stormed our national consciousness, Ebola appears to have suddenly evaporated as a major crisis for America.  Even in Africa, experts say the number of new Ebola cases appears to be declining.  Yet it's hard to get happy over that, because 99.99% of us don't know anybody who got sick or died from it.  The only people who may be happy about Ebola's apparent downturn likely are the ones who let the media make them panic about it in the first place.

You want happy?  Real "happy"?  So do I.  But I'm not going to over-drink or over-eat to get some sort of pseudo-happy thing going on in my body.  I can't bring myself to read celebrity websites so I can indulge in a bit of schadenfreude when reading about the romantic misfortunes and fashion flubs of famous people.  I don't have the money to go out and splurge on clothing, technology, or exotic travel that may not be bad for me, but that could only give me a brief high of consumeristic gluttony.

Happy?  Happiness is what so many people want, and spend their lives searching for.  Happiness is one reason people invest their time, energy, and money on religious pursuits, or following a favorite sports team.  The search for happiness is something that can drive athletic people, since endorphins are created naturally by our bodies when we exercise.

Meanwhile, aside from my faith, I tend to find my happiness in things that can't really be purchased, or even earned.  I'm no environmentalist quack, but I can honestly say that big trees with broad canopies make me happy, especially on sunny summer days here in Texas!  Any summer day is usually a happy kind of day when I'm in Maine.  Laughing at a good joke makes me happy.  Admiring classic cars, listening to children play nicely with each other, and listening to really good music can also make me happy.

Sometimes, I write about these experiences with happiness.  But, no, not that often; I know.  Most of the time, I write about things that could make us happy, but that have somehow gotten corrupted by our human penchant to abuse otherwise good things.

So, in a way, I'm still writing about happiness, but I'm writing about it in its absence, rather than its presence.

Okay, that's taking the whole thing too far, isn't it?  Of course, there's no happiness in reading about how happiness is corrupted!

Which brings us back to needing more "happy" in our lives.

"Be ye happy" is not in the Bible.  But that's not a good enough reason not to write about happy things more.  Nevertheless, I can honestly say that when I see "happy," I'll try to write about it.  But it won't be fluffy, or cute, or hollow.  I just can't do fluffy, cute, or hollow.

And when I don't see "happy," I'll be writing about that, too.  Not to be depressing, necessarily, but to point out where we might have had "happy" instead of whatever we got.

Let's say that most of the happiness about which I write is a work in progress!

As for getting more "happy" in your life, the next time you pass by a big tree, slow down and admire it. 

Unfortunately for him, Ronald Reagan has been quoted as saying that "a tree's a tree.  How many more do you need to look at?"

I prefer Martin Luther's take on trees:  "Every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."

Social Media Likes Technology and Stuff

Social media may have saved this guy's job.

We all joke about how goofy or improper social media is, or how it makes its users.  But last night, in what would otherwise have been a widely ignored commercial pitch for a new Chevy by a sales guy nobody knew, sports fans around the country are giving a lot of free publicity to a brand desperately trying to look cool again.

The heretofore unknown sales guy is Rikk Wilde, an anonymous manager for Chevrolet in Missouri, and his otherwise simple, non-memorable task was to present the keys of a brand-new, 2015 Chevrolet Colorado to the most valuable player of this year's World Series, which wrapped up in Kansas City after seven games.

The MVP was Madison Bumgarner, of the victorious San Francisco Giants.  Tall, handsome, and suddenly the most celebrated pitcher in baseball.  What did he need with a midsized pickup truck, as if he couldn't go out and purchase whatever he wanted?  It's a goofy schtick, every year, when MVPs of most games, leagues, and championships are "awarded" gimmicks as prizes.  Crass commercialization is what it is, and everybody knows it.  Even the baseball commissioner himself, Bud Selig, who was at the podium with Bumgarner, knew it was a presentation to be endured for the car maker's cash, not the prestige.

Still, Wilde was expected to make an otherwise perfunctory presentation seem somewhat auspicious.  Hopes were high in Kansas City that their hometown team would win the series, and Wilde was chosen by the bigwigs at Chevrolet to make their own marketing pitch because he's known in the division as a die-hard Royals fan.  He wasn't chosen for his charisma in front of the television cameras, or his suave spontaneity while speaking in front of a live national audience.  By all accounts, Wilde is a sports-crazy car guy, not a professional spokesman.

Still - what could go wrong?  Just give a blurb about the truck, congratulate the player, and make it all sound a little classy, befitting the occasion.  You're standing in front of the iconic World Series trophy with a rock-star athlete and the commissioner of baseball, so nobody's gonna even notice you.

Yeah... right...

Wilde started off looking distinctly uncomfortable, but since he's not a celebrity, most baseball fans paying any attention to the moment on television were probably giving him a lot of grace.  Hey, he's a car guy talking to brand-new baseball royalty.  Who wouldn't flub their lines a little?

Yet Wilde seemed to know he was in over his head.  Nervously, he flashed a notecard to check on what he was supposed to be saying, but none of it seemed to be coming out well.

Then came the one little line that, suddenly, lit up social media like Times Square at midnight.

Trying to rave about Chevy's Colorado truck, Wilde innocently stammered, "it combines class-winning - and leading - you know, technology and stuff..."

That was all it took.

"Technology and 'stuff'?"

At first, fans hooted on social media about Wilde's gaffe.  His wasn't exactly a definitive description of a vehicle's advanced features, was it?  You could almost hear Chevrolet executives watching from their luxurious homes in suburban Detroit rising in unison across southeastern Michigan, yelling at their TV sets, "NO, you IDIOT!"

The suits at corporate likely had scripted what they considered to be the most compelling features offered in their new product.  They'd e-mailed the list to Wilde, and told him to be sure and enunciate everything so the truck sounds really impressive.

Instead, the guy spits out "technology and stuff" on live television.

Turns out, the derision on social media didn't last long.  After a while, people began sobering up, and realizing that if they were still talking about it, Wilde's mistake wasn't so bad after all.  Hey - he'd marketed the truck, hadn't he?  He'd gone unscripted - which is usually when memorable things happen - and managed to make his cameo appearance after the World Series an event all of its own.

Chevrolet... truck... what was it?  By the time people began wondering what that truck was again, folks in Chevy's real, full-time, professional marketing department had caught the wave from social media, and were running with it themselves.  This wasn't just making lemonade out of lemons; this was selling trucks thanks to an accidental major league commercial.

And nobody came out losing in this.  It's amazing, actually.  The folks early-posting about how laughable Wilde's gaffe was set the stage for eventually realizing how the whole thing had become its own story.  While some people are making fun about Wilde's looks, it's an indignity that fades rapidly when you consider how beloved Chris Farley - the most common look-alike referenced - was within American pop culture.  And Chevrolet itself, instead of looking like a stodgy, heavy-handed corporate albatross by trying to obfuscate the whole thing, took the entirely different tack of exploiting social media - the same venue making light of "technology and stuff," to say, "well, yeah, it actually does have technology and stuff - cool stuff!"

After all, that's how most truck guys talk, right?

Then, to top it all off, thanks to the 24-7 nature of social media, by the time the rest of us had gotten up this morning, all we had to do was Google "technology and stuff" to learn all we wanted to know about the all-new Chevy Colorado.

It's a credit to Chevrolet - and a shot in the arm for everyone everywhere fearing they might innocently botch a really important opportunity for their company -  that the brand's executives are being such good sports about the whole thing.  They apparently were very quick to realize a good marketing angle when they saw one, even if they were building on a mistake.  Chevy has managed to come out of this not looking like they're trying to salvage something, or struggling to get back on-message, but as a hip and agile outfit that can laugh along with everybody else - except Chevy hopes to laugh all the way to the bank.

After all, it remains to be seen how many people will actually go out and purchase one of those trucks, since the market for mid-sized pickups isn't exactly robust right now.  That was one of the reasons all of the Big Three dropped out of the segment several years ago. 

But if Colorado sales fare poorly, it won't be Wilde's fault.

I Can't Tell if My Past is Over

Experts call it "age regression therapy."

I simply call it "exploring my early past."

It's an early past - my childhood - that wasn't exceptional in any particular way.  And I don't say that like it's a good or bad thing, one way or the other.  Exceptional can be beneficial, of course, but it can also be disastrous.  So I'm not complaining when I say that my childhood wasn't exceptional.

I'm serious!  I'm not complaining.  Now that I'm older, anyway.

I was born in Brooklyn, but raised until junior high in a little, withering village in upstate New York called Cleveland.  It was an environment where it didn't matter that I didn't have an extraordinary family, because I don't think anybody else in humble Cleveland had one, either.

I wasn't privileged by massive wealth, or cosseted by the effusive deference of others.  But neither did I ever go hungry, either, or without any of life's other basics.

Well, actually, "life's basics" is a relative term, isn't it?  We didn't have a television until I went to kindergarten and came home asking who Mr. Rogers was!  My Mom's parents in Maine didn't have a television, nor did my Dad's mother and sister back in Brooklyn.  So ours was the first set in our immediate family - and it was a tiny black and white!

OK, so maybe we were extraordinary.  But not exactly in a way I enjoyed, at least as a young kid.

My earliest memories are of living with my parents and brother in an old farmhouse with tons of antique furniture, six bedrooms, a large playroom, but only one bathroom.  Just down Beach Road from our farmhouse was - no, not a beach - but Cleveland proper, which was populated by about 1,000 people, amongst whom, as I've said, neither prestige nor abject poverty abounded.  Some pockets of town were more run-down than others, while a number of folks kept their properties in fine shape.  But nobody's home was  particularly ostentatious or extravagant.  Things seemed mostly ordinary, quiet, and average for our rural corner of this planet.  I remember when a girl in one of my classes in elementary school told us her parents had purchased a microwave oven - it was like the space age had finally arrived in backwater Cleveland!

That can seem like many worlds away from me today.

Over these more recent years, as I've struggled with chronic clinical depression, I've had therapists warn me against trying to find reasons for present problems in past experiences.  So I've never sat on anybody's couch and wandered down memory's dark, crooked lanes, delving into hidden crevices of obscure pain or misinterpreted events.

And maybe I shouldn't now.

Hey:  I'm exercising my memory.  Exercise is good, right?

Nevertheless, I'm finding myself being drawn mysteriously, inexorably, to my past, and particularly, my childhood before we moved here to Texas.  That was a time, when I was actually living it, I distinctly remember not appreciating.  I didn't think I liked the rural life, not having neighbors in close proximity, the darkness of the country nights, or not having stores or restaurants nearby.  But then again, how many kids appreciate their childhood in the moment, however grand or boring it was?

And, when considering lifespans, childhood really is but a moment of it, isn't it?

Our old farmstead was comprised of acres of fields that, by the time my parents purchased the place, were almost all overgrown by trees.  That one-bathroom, two-story, wood farmhouse wielded a commanding presence at the top of a small hillock, but in retrospect, I realize it was the two massive pine trees flanking its facade that gave the otherwise plain and unadorned house its gravitas.

Well, those grand trees, and the hand-built stone wall that ran along the country road down in front of the property.  That wall was old when we lived there, and it's still standing today, a testament to old-fashioned engineering and sweat equity.  All of those stones and rocks likely had been culled from the fields across the road, back when settlers were plowing up the land to create the Empire State's agricultural heyday.  When we lived there, the small garden Dad carved out of a field that had succumbed back to forestland was the first vegetable cultivation seen on that property in generations.

There were no other houses in sight of our house, and at nighttime, I remember feeling very much alone, isolated from whatever civilization was out there.  Not only were there no streetlights, but my parents would never waste electricity by leaving a porch light on throughout the night.  Maybe it was the spooky Hardy Boys mysteries I read, but I didn't like riding along those old, narrow country roads at night, with only our headlights - usually the headlights of our VW buses (which I loathed!) - as illumination.  How Mom and Dad could find their way along those black, back-country pathways I couldn't figure out.

Even today, I can remember how oppressive that dark air was.  And I don't like driving on unlit roads at night.

Our nearest neighbors, about a quarter-mile away, were an elderly chain-smoking couple in bad health who were raising two of their granddaughters, who were the ages of my brother and me.  The next-nearest neighbors were another elderly couple who lived in an attractive stone house, and drove one of those futuristic-looking Oldsmobile Toronado coupes.  The husband, a gregarious, short, and overweight war veteran, had only one eye, which often unnerved me, despite his consistently jovial nature.

Then we had a German psychiatrist and his tall, blond wife who owned a majestic stone barn nearby that they rechristened a "castle."  The stone barn's soaring roof had burned away years before, and the structure was in a constant state of salvage as the Germans tried to make it a tourist destination.

One of the best customers of my Dad's employer lived nearby, too - he was the reason Dad's company moved us there from Brooklyn in the first place.  Mr. Haynes owned a bungalow-type house surrounded by immaculately-landscaped lawns, and he'd built an office annex in the back where his chain-smoking secretaries worked.  Even though he was a widower, Mr. Haynes always bought two identical black cars, and he had a large collection of pristine antiques, including samples of the green glass for which our village used to be well-known.

Back in the 19th Century, Cleveland had been a bustling place, with glass factories and wire factories providing most of the area's non-farm employment.  Cleveland was a bona-fide town in those days, with what was then a state-of-the-art municipal water system, a volunteer fire department with an iconic firehouse along the main drag, several churches, and one of the earliest public schools in that part of the state.  That school would evolve into Cleveland Elementary School, where I learned about Mr. Rogers and microwave ovens, and from which I graduated back in the 1970's, just before we moved to Texas.

This past September, Cleveland Elementary didn't open for the first time in its history.  And it probably won't open ever again.  The school district has closed it, citing declining student population numbers and a bleak prospect of Cleveland being able to reverse the situation anytime soon.  Another elementary school in the next town over already closed a few years ago for the same reasons.

Cleveland and its adjacent communities - or, what's left of them - sit on the north shore of Oneida Lake, New York State's largest in-state lake.  It's a scenic place - even as a kid, I could appreciate the lake's aesthetics, at least in the summertime!  And it's such a shallow lake, it freezes solid most winters.

Oneida Lake's entire north shore, however, has been mostly industrial throughout its White Man history, and as you probably know, New York State has pretty much let its industrial might evaporate.  Today, there are no jobs left along the north shore.  One small wire factory remains, but the glassworks have been gone for over a century.  We have some family friends still living outside of town, but all of their kids have left the area in search of jobs.  The only work the husband could find was at the Oneida Nation's casino, a half-hour away.

That casino, just outside the city of Oneida, didn't exist when we lived in the area, but like so many communities where casinos exist today, it's the only economic game in town.  Even if gambling really is only a poor man's tax.

Oneida's Native American tribes - the only people with money these days in that region - have begun buying vacant property along the north shore, but that's mostly because nobody else wants to.  Along the shoreline, some waterfront homes can still command a respectable price, but their buyers are usually retirees, or folks from suburban Syracuse an hour away, looking for a vacation home.

My Dad's employer moved us to Texas after his big customer in Cleveland, Mr. Haynes, passed away.  In retrospect, our family has been grateful that God allowed us to leave that area before the bottom really fell out of its economy.  Driving through a few years ago, Cleveland looked absolutely pitiful, with vacant land where big, rickety wood buildings used to sit.  Sure, most of those old structures had been empty long before we'd lived there, but seeing them gone only reinforced how commerce had left town, and wasn't planning on coming back.

Much has been made about how the taxes and cost of living in New York State have killed its small towns.  But frankly, the same thing is happening to small towns all across the country, including right here in the Lone Star State.  Only in Texas and other places, it's not high taxes and ridiculous costs of living that are sabotaging small towns.  It's the consolidation of commerce in bigger towns, coupled with our changing social preferences, in which urbanized areas are now desirable places to live.  Back when rural America was prime family-raising country, that was because cities were filthy, dangerous, polluted, and noisy.  Cities may still be those things to some people today, but even Detroit is a lot cleaner than it used to be.

When we moved to Texas, a family from Queens purchased our house to use as their summer getaway.  My parents were dubious, however, as to how much they'd be able to get away from New York City, three hundred miles to the south.  Sure, lots of affluent New Yorkers have second homes, but they're usually within an easier commuting distance than Cleveland, New York is.  And it's not like vacationing New Yorkers are warmly embraced in places like Cleveland, where nothing is even remotely cosmopolitan or urbane.

Well, it wasn't then, anyway.  Eventually, the Germans retired and moved away, and famed actor Adrien Brody bought their stone barn for a Spanish girlfriend of his at the time.

I'm not sure who owns the stone barn today, since Brody is no longer dating that woman, but while they were together, they reputedly hired designers from Giorgio Armani's firm to help redecorate the place.

That's pretty cosmopolitan, right?

Maybe if Brody and his Spanish flame had gotten married, set up housekeeping at the stone barn, and, in the fullness of time, produced little Brody-ites to populate their country manor, Cleveland Elementary School could have stayed open.

As it is, however, Cleveland is still utterly ordinary, if not a bit derelict.  And empty.  With little prospect for a reversal of fortune.

And I'm trying hard to not draw correlations with my own life!

Tree Testimony on Windy Days

The sun's out today in north central Texas, and so is the wind.

Wind is one of those amazing things that we can't see... but at the same time, we can.

Technically, of course, we don't see the actual air or its currents, but we can see what wind does to water, and to tall grass, and to trees.

But we can't see the wind.  Well, hardly ever.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a freakishly strong storm of wind and rain blow through north Texas just before rush hour.  I had been in the backyard, and noticing the breeze turning up a few notches, saw a particularly ominous black sky gathering over our neighborhood.  Turning to go back inside, I found myself watching what looked like a large, oval-shaped bubble of grey and brown debris suddenly shoot over and down the roof of our house, across to where some plastic patio furniture had been set up.  I witnessed that oval-shaped debris cloud pick up two plastic Adirondack chairs, and fling them into a brick planter and another potted plant.

So while I didn't actually see the wind, I sure thought I had!

That storm would go on to decimate a neighbor's 80-foot-tall tree, sending limbs crashing onto two cars parked in a next-door driveway.  Another entire tree would be blown over into the front of a neighboring house, covering it from corner to corner with a mass of branches and leaves, and damaging its roof.

Meanwhile, I was inside with my parents.  My father, who is in the grips of senile dementia, couldn't really process the storm outside.  None of us had really ever seen wind like that - everything was blowing horizontally.  What was even more amazing, however, was the way most of the trees around us - we have 11 full-grown trees in our front yard - were literally dancing.

Well, actually, they were jerking, or twerking.  Seinfeld fans might have even called it the "Elaine dance."  Enormous limbs were heaving up and down, bending backwards and splaying apart with such viciousness that I thought we'd have piles of shredded trees all over the lawn before it was over.

Behind our house snakes a quiet creek, with tall trees lining its banks, and those trees looked like they could have been touching the creek's rapidly-rising water, they were swooping and bending so low.  Yet those trees would pop back up and take the next hit, with wind pummeling them for about twenty minutes straight.

These magnificent trees define our neighborhood, and help give it the beauty it's got.  Without our old, tall, full trees, I suspect our neighborhood, which is otherwise full of dated homes, would be far less appealing a place to live.  As I stood with my father in our living room, watching the trees whip around in the fierce wind, I figured we were about to find out how bad our neighborhood was going to look without them.

Thankfully, we only suffered minor damage to small limbs on our property.  About 95% of our neighborhood emerged relatively unscathed, for which all of us are extremely grateful.  But I keep thinking about all of the physical forces against which these old trees had to contend during that storm, and I grow ever more amazed not only at how gracious God was to us, but at how He designed and constructed these trees to begin with.

We normally don't put a lot of thought into how trees stand up, and we mostly assume that they're strong and hardy until they die.  Only then, if you've ever tried to cut one up, you know what an effort it can be, and how impressive their existance was.  Otherwise, it's easy to forget that each tree stands as an amazing testament to the ability of different types of wood within itself to stabilize itself, provide for its nutritional needs, protect itself, and strengthen itself.

Think of all the irony in trees.  Roots need to admit moisture, for example, but bark needs to repel it.  Trees absorb carbon dioxide, and emit oxygen.  They also grow faster the older they get. 

On moderately windy days like today, when our trees are merely swaying, and some limbs are ever-so-gently bobbing around, I try to imagine what's going on behind that bark, as the tree's biological systems are having to accommodate all of the fluctuations and gyrations the wind is forcing upon its entire structure.  After all, the roots need to absorb the rest of the tree's motion to stay grounded.  The trunk and each branch have to bend, yet remain solid.  When the wind is gone (if it wasn't catastrophic, of course), are you ever struck by the fact that the trees haven't changed shape?  Everything in each tree somehow gives and takes, opens and closes, expands and contracts, without the tree's structure becoming permanently re-bent.

And when they do fall, all of that nimbleness and flexibility suddenly becomes dead weight as the tree crashes into anything beneath it.

Most everybody who's bought into our neighborhood values these trees, and is loathe to cut any of them down.  Sure, in bad storms, they can fall on houses and cars, and inflict considerable damage, but when you consider how mighty these trees are, and majestic, few homeowners regret ever having had them to begin with.

Many metaphors to the human condition, of course, have been made about the remarkable strength and resiliency of trees.  And for good reason - I'd sure love my life to bounce back during and after a storm, without showing any signs of wear.  I'd love for all of my internal systems to be so accommodating and reflexive so that I don't need to fear the wind, or the rain, or the changing seasons.

Storms like the one we had a couple of weeks ago can damage even hardy trees forever.  Sometimes, the wind can be so severe, trees that are otherwise healthy simply can't withstand it.  Or, like the tree that fell against a neighbor's house two weeks ago, it's easy for us to see why they succombed to the wind, while other bigger, older trees didn't.  That particular tree snapped off at its stump, exposing a rotten, black core at the base of what was a robust-looking tree.  Nobody knew the rot was there, because the rest of the tree looked so good.

Now, there's a wide, circular hole in the remaining canopy of trees that towers over the house.

Dear Lord, please help me not to be rotting inside!  Help me to sway in the breeze like an elegant yet majestic tree.  Help me to remain faithful no matter the weather, and bounce back after encountering the headwinds of conflict and oppression.

And please, Lord; help my sap not to drip!

Praying Habakkuk 3 in a Mezzo Cammin Life

"Who am I?  Why am I here?"

Those of us who remember Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign likely also remember Perot's dubious choice for his running mate, the retired admiral James Stockdale.  During that year's vice presidential debate, Stockdale began his remarks by asking these two universal questions, ostensibly to illustrate how he was virtually unknown to the American public.

Stockdale's questions might have faded into political obscurity, if not for the comedian Phil Hartman, who soon mimicked them into immortality for a Saturday Night Live sketch.  Hartman's hilariously fuzzy caricature of Stockdale better captured the public's perception of Stockdale than the actual debate itself (apparently, Hulu owns the rights to this video, and has removed all free copies of it from the Internet).  Stockdale, himself a decorated Vietnam War hero and respected academic, seemed confused and disoriented during that televised debate, and him asking "Who am I? Why am I here?" seemed to publicly solidify, however erroneously, his general competence.

As far as the existential nature of these questions is concerned, however, has anybody ever gotten through their time on our planet without asking them?  Who are you?  Why are you here?  Do you know the answers; or, like almost everybody, are your answers a work in progress?

Lately, like a lot of men my age, I've found myself asking those questions, and chalking it up to that mid-life crisis thing that's supposed to be hitting us men about this time in our mortal existence.  I'm a couple of years away from the Big 5-0, which has historically been a time of reflection, contemplation, and outright angst over where guys my age have been, where we are, where we're going, and how much money it's gonna take to get us there.

Almost a year ago, I alluded to this existentialism in an article I wrote for Crosswalk.com, incorporating the haunting poem, Mezzo Cammin, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Half of my life is gone, and I have let
   The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
   The aspiration of my youth, to build
   Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
   Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
   But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
   Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past
   Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,—
   A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,—
   And hear above me on the autumnal blast
   The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.


Kinda eerie, isn't it?  Did you start off your adulthood with grand plans, only to see them languish?  Do you sense an air of encroaching doom as your life begins to run out?  After all, you've been fortunate that God has given you as much time as He already has on this Earth.  But none of us have deserved this time, and we don't deserve any of the time that might be remaining for us - however long that may be.

If I am having a mid-life crisis, sadly, it's gonna have to be
without this 2015 Corvette Stingray convertible.
A friend who manages a local Chevrolet dealership
wouldn't waive the $70,000 sticker.

For me, let's take my pesky diagnosis of chronic clinical depression out of the picture for a moment.  I've learned that much of my "Mezzo Cammin disappointment" may stem from being a really, really bad planner.  In fact, it seems I'm not much of a planner at all.  When friends in high school were mapping out their lives, I was struggling to pass the next exam.  When fellow classmates in college were scouting grad schools, I was putzing away working my dreary college job at the clothing store.  When I managed to find myself in grad school, I balked at the amount of effort other grad students were pouring into their professional development and relationships with our professors.

I figured all those folks either were insecure about their abilities, or they enjoyed schmoozing with our professors.  In retrospect, I now realize I was either over-confident in my own abilities, or underappreciative of the doors professors could open for their schmoozing students.

During my working life, I've simply shifted from one gig to another, working for whomever will hire me, and not really taking seriously my own individual responsibility for climbing career ladders, making myself look good for promotions, and indeed, making myself more employable at all.  Naively, I readily shared credit for stuff I did well, and viewed competition as something in which people who couldn't advance on plain merit engaged.  It took me forever to figure out that capitalism isn't all about merit.  It's about competition, and I never planned for what would happen if I ended up consistently being on the losing end of that competition.

After all, in the eyes of many people today, I'm a loser.  I've lost whatever chances I might have had when I was younger to get my hands dirty on the lower rungs of corporate ladders.  Maybe I figured that marriage and family duties would automatically fit the pieces of my job life into place as we went along; my spouse, kids, and me, cruising through suburbia.  Hey - people who seemed far less competent than I were making it!  I was relatively intelligent, people told me I was a good worker, and I guess I just assumed that rewards are earned, not won.

Boy, have I been so wrong!

I look back now, and wonder what I was thinking.  How could I have been so stupid?  How could I have been so blind, or was I simply lazy?  All these 30 years since graduating high school, I've been waiting, but not planning.  I've been presuming, but not acting.  I've been walking, but not jockeying.  And now, it seems that everybody else my age has kids in college.  What?  Where did all of this time go?  The years have indeed slipped from me, and the aspirations of my youth?  What were they?

Let me think:  the aspirations of my youth...

Hmm, you know what?  I'm drawing a blank here.  They had something to do with enjoying a comfortable lifestyle when I got older, and for a while, I tinkered with the idea of being a lawyer, and in college, I started out studying architecture, and in grad school, I studied urban planning...

If I was a striver and an achiever, I'd have pushed myself to get both the graduate degree in urban design and the law degree, right?  I'd be hiring myself out to municipalities all over the world as a consultant on their big urban renewal programs, and guiding them through complex legislative agendas.  Or maybe browbeating recalcitrant landlords with rezoning requests, and lobbying city halls for developers, or trying to find funding for massive new mass transit infrastructure projects.

But I'd probably be hating it!  Looking at that job description, I have no desire to do any of that.  In a way, I'm relieved that my life hasn't turned out looking like that at all.

Still, if I was doing anything even remotely associated with such work, I'd probably at least have money in the bank, a compounding retirement account, and a home to call my own.  And without the kids - and the spouse - all of that money would be mine, right?  Even if wasn't the big dollars I somehow assumed would be growing on trees in my backyard.

Instead I've got none of it.

Uh-oh.

Enter the testimony of God's unlikely prophet, Habakkuk.  In the third chapter of his Old Testament book, Habakkuk writes of a despair even more grim than mine:

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

Meanwhile, am I joyful?  Have I rejoiced in the Lord?

One of the questions that haunts me even more than "the cataract of Death far thundering from the heights" is my sober confusion over why, despite my profession of faith, I have a woeful lack of joy in my life.

Habakkuk himself seems to have had plenty of reasons to lack joy in his life.  He's the prophet, you'll recall, who asked God a lot of pointed questions about why He allows so much misery to infest His people.  And God's reply was basically to remind Habakkuk that he should be silent before his holy Lord.

How many of us today would be insulted if God told us something like that?  I know I have a stubborn prideful streak.  How about you?  Yet God told Habakkuk to tell us that He is in His holy temple, and that we are to be silent before Him.  Granted, that's more of a metaphor than anything else - from the fuller context of God's desire for a relationship with us, we know that He invites us to fellowship with Him, and that it's not a sin to ask Him questions.  Doubt isn't even always a sin, because our gracious God looks at our hearts, and doesn't just hear our crude mumblings.  Yet still, doesn't it seem as though Habakkuk would have been within his rights to demand more direction, more answers, more concrete proof of God's divine providence?  But he doesn't.

Instead, Habakkuk confirms, "the Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights."

In our North American culture, the "heights" generally refer to the best, or the pinnacle.  However, what if the "heights" for many of us are not here on Earth, but in Heaven itself?  Then again, Habakkuk says we go "on" the heights, not "to" the heights.  Might these heights not be as much of a destination as they are a state of being?  A state of being as a child of God that requires sure-footedness and accurate perception, so we don't stumble and fall (way, way down)?

Perhaps one of the reasons I don't rejoice in the Lord stems from my belief that I have more in common with Longfellow's Mezzo Cammin than I do Habakkuk's third chapter.

I think I need to concentrate less on what I've gotten wrong in my life, and more on the strength available to all of God's children through His sovereignty.

For however much of this life I've got left.

How about you?  Though your fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on your vines, though your olive crop fails and your fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in your pen and no cattle in your stalls, will you yet rejoice in the LORD?  Will you be joyful in God your Savior?

Dear Lord, please help us to!

EGR Syndrome Tests Church Performance

EGRs.

For years, I'd known about "Extra Grace Required" people.

They were those unfortunate souls the rest of us avoided every Sunday in church.  They were the ones with the difficult personalities, or the awkward questions, or the unpolished personal behaviors.

Looking back, I've wondered if such people suffered from some form of autism.  In those days, of course, we assumed they were either mentally challenged (we used the term "retarded"), or oblivious to normative social protocols.  Maybe they were simply the innocent victims of parents who themselves were too far removed from the sociability spectrum to be desirable human beings.

They were people who seemed angry, or confused, or distant, or too intense to be thinking logically.  Sometimes they were actually brilliant people, like scientists or pioneers in the newly-developing world of computer technology.  EGRs with milder forms of socially stigmatizing behaviors were called nerds, but the rest of them were simply weird.  They required too much time to get to know, too much energy to follow their conversations, and too much care to tolerate their, um, uniqueness.

They were people who required extra grace.  As if others of us really wanted to be gracious to them in the first place.  Usually, the rest of us hoped somebody else - anybody else - would bother to invest that extra grace into their lives.

I've Become What I Avoided

Unfortunately for me, however, I realize I've become one of those "Extra Grace Required" people.  And all of the shunning I did back in the day, trying to avoid those socially awkward people, is coming back to haunt me, like some sort of dark karma, if I believed in the stuff.  At least I used to try and be friendly with EGRs, although I never went out of my way to display the level of kindness they needed.  After all, I was stigmatized myself growing up, bullied in school, and never popular.  I was trying to claw my own way out of the social basement, and it was survival of the fittest.  I couldn't afford to squander any of the social leverage I'd managed to acquire for myself - especially on EGRs who'd only drag me back down to their level.

Now, I know better.  Because I've become one of those EGRs other people fear will squander their own resources, and drag them down to my apparently pathetic level of existence.

Fortunately, I have a few friends who still will socialize with me, but ironically, none of them attend my church.  Or... is it really much of an irony?  After all, in every church I've ever attended, it's been this way with the social outcasts.  It's just that now, in the church I've attended for the past 15 years, I've realized I've been on the outside, looking in.

Technically, in terms of churches ostensibly being faith communities, it shouldn't be this way.  But it is, and probably always has been.  And I shouldn't be surprised at my personal predicament.  I have chronic clinical depression, combined with what I suspect is a mild form of Asperger's.  That's two strikes against normalized socialization, right?  Plus, I've been told that I "think too much," which turns out to be a negative thing, especially in church!

For all practical purposes, I'm unemployed, although I help care for a parent with dementia, which itself is its own debilitating reality, especially for caregivers.  I've no money, no social status, and no spouse or children to shine brighter than me, and distract people from my lack of accomplishments.

It would be easy to simply blame the specific church I've chosen to attend - a wealthy, large church full of strivers and achievers - for my perceived inadequacies.  Go to a poorer church with more ordinary people, and see how much less my inadequacies matter, some might say.  But hey - I've attended a variety of churches all my life, and even worked in one, and I can say with full authority that when it comes to EGRs like me, this is one area where virtually all churches are the same.

Church Staffers Aren't Hired to Minister to Individuals

If you think about it, the reason is pretty simple.  Church staffers, at least in North America, face a significant dilemma, no matter how much they might want to be inclusive of us EGR folks.  You see, contrary to popular belief, pastors and church staffers aren't hired to "minister" to individuals.  Church employees are hired to perform specific functions within the church organization for the congregation as a whole.  They answer phones, or conduct a choir, or prepare sermons.  But they do not get paid to heavily invest themselves into us EGRs.

Sure, a certain amount of leeway is granted most church staffers to personally interact with individuals, but there are limits to that interaction, especially when it comes to EGRs.  EGRs don't fit neatly into day planners, to-do lists, or performance reviews.  The intangible nature of the overall product being delivered to consumers by the church organization may provide some wiggle room in the schedules of church employees, but the reigning expectation is that they perform productively in tangible, macro-focused ways.

Part of this is due to the nature of church boards.  Elders and deacons are almost universally chosen based on their admirable business acumen and other measurable metrics.  It's part of the modern credo of running a church like a business.  On the one hand, we think we need to be accountable to God for every dime members tithe, and that such accountability can only be secured if it can be quantified.  On the other hand, however, if God is looking at our hearts, He'll still know when we're being His servants, or we're being the servants of our results-oriented pastoral staff and elder board - and congregation.

In my case, I don't expect the senior pastor at the 4,500-member church I attend to heavily invest himself into my problems.  How would the senior pastor of any church that size determine the amount of time he can devote to specific individuals?  However, I guess I've been taken aback by the unwillingness of others at this church to tolerate little more than my presence in their midst.  I'm aware that everybody has problems, and that in the smallest church, there can be enough personal crises to choke a horse.  Nevertheless, as I get older, I've come to see that the expectation of virtually all congregations and their leaders is that their staff produce as near-to-flawless a corporate worship service as they possibly can, no matter its style or substance.  And as long as everybody puts on a pretty front, the congregation will give money so the church can at least meet payroll.

Hey - I don't like having problems.  I didn't go looking for this dastardly depression!  And I'll be the first to admit that I'm mishandling parts of my condition.  Sure, some of my problems are of my own doing.  Sure, I have a bad habit of focusing on what can be improved, instead of what doesn't need improvement.  But neither do I like now being branded as an irredeemable sourpuss, or a powerless, moneyless malcontent who isn't worth trying to even pacify, let alone be taken seriously.

Sinking and Shrinking

In his comments regarding a recent survey on the church's response to clinical depression, pastor and seminary professor David Murray writes for Christianity Today that experiences like mine aren't as unique as we might think they are:

“22% of pastors agree that they are reluctant to get involved with those dealing with acute mental illness because previous experiences strained time and resources.

"I admire the honesty of the 22% (the real figure is probably higher), and I sympathize with the desire for time-efficiency, but I do not agree with the response (or lack of it). These are the bruised reeds and the smoking wicks that God sends to us to strengthen and fan into flame; and we say, 'Sorry, not enough time'?!"

Not that all people with mental illnesses are EGRs.  But many of us are, or are presumed to be, as fellow Christians become confused or frustrated as they encounter us in our struggles with depression.

Then again, maybe I'm simply feeling too sorry for myself.  I know that I'm terribly selfish - I've always been.  And I've come to realize that, as the years I've spent sinking into my current church have taken their toll, I'm less social and more reclusive than I've ever been in my life.  I care less about how what I say - and the way I say it - impacts other people.  I don't even like spending time around other people anymore.  I'm more cynical than I've ever been, and more cavalier about the importance of church and church attendance than I've ever been.

With his ever-deepening senile dementia, my father wants to attend church less and less.  Mom and I have argued with him, tried to cajole him, and have even taken turns staying home with him so the other could go to church.  Now, I'm coming of the view that if I stayed home with Dad every Sunday, we'd solve a lot of problems:  Mom would be able to get out of the house and attend her church, we wouldn't have to spend Sunday mornings in distress over what Dad's going to do, and I could finally have a legitimate reason for ditching church altogether.

Except... there's a nagging in my noggin that such a scenario isn't exactly glorifying to God.  Even if it sounds quite appealing to me.  Yes, I see this continuous sinking of my church life, but I also see my broader existence shrinking right before my eyes, like something dissolving in slow motion, and while I've been taught that, ostensibly, the deconstruction of one's life is a negative thing, in a way, it seems like the easy solution to an otherwise perpetual social misery.

Funny that my church experience is leading the charge... or the retreat.

Christianity's Relevance and the Expendability Factor

Of course, there's nothing new here in any of this.  There have always been Extra Grace Required people, and there always will be.  God makes us all individually, yet many of us have a hard time finding value in individuality.  Some church development experts say that what we need to do is create new mechanisms for understanding and appreciating what makes some people socially different from the "normal" majority.  But frankly, if we've gone this long without bothering to explore those mechanisms, and those differences, then it seems suspiciously likely that the "normal" majority really doesn't care.

It's about expendability, isn't it?  People who are expendable are determined to be so based upon parameters unilaterally established by those who consider themselves to be society's conventional ones.  In other words, we EGR's are at the mercy of people who generally don't see why it's in their best interest to spend the resources necessary to embrace us.

After all, is it in their best interest, really?  If you're not an EGR, why should you bother being little more than tolerant of my existence?  Why should you offer anything more than basic politeness when you see me in church?  After all, people like me can't elevate your social standing, or help you earn more money, or make you feel better about yourself - unless comparing yourself to people like me helps you realize that "there, but for the grace of God..."

Meanwhile, even though I'm not comparing myself to Him, I find some comfort in the sad fact that Christ was "despised and rejected."  There's no reason to believe that anybody in church despises me - at least to the level that my holy Savior was despised.  People don't like my candor, or many of my opinions, or even my willingness to consider unpopular ideas.  And I can't even remotely suggest that the way I interact with other people should be some sort of ideal pattern for socialization, like Christ's was - and is.  But God never promises us popularity.  In fact, He warns us about popularity, and the qualities we choose to celebrate in the people we popularize.

In James 2, we're taught not to show partiality to people with social traits we admire.  In 1 Samuel 16, we're instructed to not evaluate people by how they look.  And in Luke 14, we're reminded how tricky it is when we try to evaluate how important people are - and how such evaluations, whether high or low, can come back to shame us.

Further down in the survey about which Murray writes for Christianity Today, it was found that nearly 20% of people experiencing a disconnect between their mental illness and their church's interaction with them end up dropping out of that faith community.

That means that in church, there may be a faith in something, but not necessarily a community for everybody.