Coming Up For Air

In school, I had a friend named Sarah. She wasn't the bubbly sort, but she was unflappable. Shortly before a major paper was due, Sarah's grandmother was near death, and she dutifully went out of town. Although completing the paper required all night upon her return, she completed it. Knowing my own anxiety, I gushed that I could not have stayed calm under such circumstances to complete it. You didn't see me, she said. I wasn't calm. David allows us to see faith's battle with anxiety as a work in progress. We take steel's strength for granted as we ride in vehicles or ascend in skyscrapers. Here, the smelting of faith's steel in Psalm 56:8-10 ( NIV ) is transformative enough to slow down for stop-action examination. 8 Record my misery; list my tears on your scroll – are they not in your record? This is an honest, detailed complaint. Trailing the particular human causes of his misery  is prayer as a kind of protest. "God, are You getting this down? I...

Professor Joshua Chamberlain was out of his element. As portrayed in the movie Gettysburg , the novice at soldiering was summoned by his commanding officer. Chamberlain figured he might need to explain his decision the day before to order an anachronistic bayonet charge against superior numbers – even though it worked. Instead, he found headquarters noticeably relaxed. His decision was celebrated for its results. Since no fighting was expected in the day ahead, the tone was conversational, inching on an optimistic arc. That wasn't good enough for Chamberlain. "My men need a meal, sir," the just commissioned Colonel spoke directly to instruct his superior, unlike Chamberlain a seasoned military professional, "and ammunition. We are out." The commanding general was just as blunt. Turning, he delegated, "See to Col. Chamberlain's request." And it was done. A pervading air of optimism met the specifics of individual need. Logistical advantages, the mom...

Last night presented a perfect April evening. The humidity hasn't yet settled over South Carolina, so the party honoring my wife's birthday opted for an outdoor table. The subtle splendor was marred by a man-made buzz from overhead. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's, well, yes, it was a small and noisy plane pulling an advertisement across the sky. Naturally, the eye followed the ear's unwilling fixation on the unusual. Only, the eye couldn't find its reward for turning its attention skyward. As we watched the plane hired at great expense, the message it thrust before us was unclear. The merchant traded altitude which put his message before more people for clarity. The print was too small. Even as we pieced together the point deemed important enough to take it to the skies, we were underwhelmed with the snippet about offerings from another local restaurant. There is a Scriptural point here, and it can also be found in 2 Samuel 18:21-22. King David's genera...

The current National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, HR McMaster, knows something of the dangers of Isaiah 1:23 and the parallel restoration God offers three verses later. He doesn't use the biblical cadence, and neither does Patrick Radden Keefe profiling McMaster in this week's New Yorker , but the same tension pulls taunt both pages. McMaster knows what distorts the advice of counselors to the nation's highest leader. As an academic, McMaster warned in his book Dereliction of Duty of the pull to tell President Lyndon Johnson only what he wants to hear and of the dangers to a nation that can result. If rebellion and bribes tempt the princes of Isaiah 1:23 and wine addict and distract the nation's leaders in Isaiah 28:7 and Daniel 5:1-4, surely the lure of approval can be just as intoxicating. Leaders from the days of Isaiah and Daniel, and including more recent examples the 1960s to the present are capable of overemphasizing what is importan...

Dana Goodyear profiles novelist Rachel Kushner in this week's issue of the New Yorker . Of Kushner's adolescence, Goodyear reports, "Among her peers, she says, 'Intelligence with a form of ugliness,' so she did her best to hide it." This glimpse gives me a chance to reflect on why I don't. My insistence on seeing the beauty in lively, intelligent curiosity finds its roots in the same murky passage of adolescence through which Kushner deemed it essential to hide her gifts. It was during this period that I met Jim Garrick, a man incapable of hiding enthusiasm for anything. He countered coolness as the coach of a national elite academic team. In my most formative years, my psyche was shaped by associating points and praise with pushing beyond the basic outlines of a subject in order to move on to the next minimal requirement. This was my conditioning and Garrick desired to win based on the performance of his starting lineup of knowledge machines at least ...

Literary biographer Stephen Greenblatt intersects again with more lives than just Shakespeare's in his Will in the World . Writing on the impact of his subject's chosen profession on Shakespeare's self-criticism, Greenblatt discerns, "That Shakespeare was acutely aware of this stigma can be surmised from the sonnets, where he writes that, like the dyer's hand, he has been stained by the medium he has worked in." So have we all. Our hands have been stained, our minds have been imprinted, by the medium in which we have worked. The education we acquire in order to qualify for a career seems to narrow what we notice. As Greenblatt says elsewhere, the vocabulary of our daily dealings seems to impact how we describe everything else. We readily, subtly, over time associate the work we do with literal life and death, and so we begin to take on the assumptions about workplace, it seems, as the cost of doing business. Removed from any particular workplace, we can begin ...

I missed the 1950s in New York City by a quarter century and a considerable cultural distance from my Bible Belt existence. Still, my recent reading has given me a sense of Gotham's pent-up frustrations, the collective tension of millions of dreams deferred. Civic planner Robert Moses takes broadsides in both Robert Caro's biography The Power Broker and in an anthology of articles from the decade in the New Yorker magazine. The theme from Friends could be playing 40 years in advance as crowded masses mutter that no one told them life was going to be this way. The vision that sustained through some portion of Depression and war was more compelling than the reality they are experiencing as mass prosperity creates mass congestion and competition. Even the glass occludes and frustrates. Grouses one writer in "The Lesson of the Master" "A transparent glass roof in New York is a drawing-board dream; even a daily hosing down of the canopy would not guarantee a transp...

My pastor Matthew Sink today passed on a story from Soren Kierkegaard. In the parable, some thieves broke into a jewelry store. They should have earned the name of the Ironic Bandits because instead of stealing the merchandise, all they did was switch the prices. Thus, they forced staff to reevaluate what was common and what was treasure, what was man's markup, and what was true rarity. The connection to Matthew 6:19-20 is clear. Just as Jesus insists, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal," and the corresponding affirmative, "but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither my nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal." ( New King James Version )  As we start a new week of work or looking for work, indeed, if the paycheck is the ultimate goal, we are going to be shortchanged and frustrated. That God is teaching me during my interim of unemployment that m...

I'm captivated by stories of becoming, stories that study and suggest subtle influences on people we know as the finished, polished product. As I toddle as a writer, I'm especially interested in this becoming process. How did flesh-and-blood people we honor with that exalted sobriquet arrive at that acknowledgment? From whom did they borrow? What did they get wrong before they got it right? Perhaps most intriguing for one who would see himself as writer and counselor both, who implanted that imperturbable self-confidence to write, to listen, to slash, and to write again? Enter my interest in Stephen Greenblatt's book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare . With what must have been painstaking research combined with the pluck to guess, Greenblatt is reconstructing the Bard's childhood. Already I've taken to school in midlife by what Greenblatt suggests tutored Shakespeare at about six. At this formative age, little Will would have seen his first drama...

About a week ago, my phone rang. Before losing my job on September 1, this would have prompted a desultory nod to anachronism. Everybody texts. Nobody calls. Must be a salesman, or a representative of the shrinking remnant believing they can eradicate all that is wrong with 2018 by refusing to conform with the most prominent vestige of its technological norms. No longer. My response to a ringing phone is Pavlovian, as eager as it was once dismissive. Somebody Wants Me. Perhaps a new life beckons. This was an employer. As my pulse quickened, I fought physiology and forced my voice down an octave and into a slower pace. Impromptu interview subjects and those receiving a wake-up call from the few live humans performing such functions in a hotel anymore want to give every impression that we were expecting this call and prepared for it. Of course. I've been awake for hours, but thank you for your call. Of course. Yours was the only job I applied for as I have been hurtling toward this...

On the television show The West Wing , newly elected President Josiah Bartlett faces the use of force as an abstract concept. He says he knows America has enemies but doesn't feel any personal animosity toward any of them. When an aid plane filled with actual Americans including a doctor he has met is shot down, the president is transformed. He wants to meet those enemies, he declares, with the fury of God's own thunder. Isaiah 1 has been building to that fury of God's own thunder. If there were music, it would be increasing in tempo and depth. Your sacrifices are offered halfheartedly, God charges. You show no reverence for Me, the confrontation continues, in the way you handle the human needs in front of you. You use and murder one another made in MY image. Even the highest levels of your society are rotten. Verse 24 thunders, "Therefore the Lord says, the Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, "Ah, I will rid Myself of My adversaries and take vengeance on My ...

In the home-based job search, one day is very much like the next. Tuesday mornings provide something distinct to celebrate. Tuesday mornings open a little window on the wider world when I download the latest edition of the New Yorker magazine. Each new, vibrant cover is enough to color my familiar surroundings. This reader's experience with the New Yorker allows for reaching back as well as reaching out. In manageable weekly installments, the magazine's missive provides access to an education better and more recent than mine. Unaccompanied, I would not mine the writings of Heraclitus, nor share them with my friends. Guided and goaded in the best sense, I hear Heraclitus offer from the unfamiliar days about 500 years before Christ, "No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man." As similar as this midweek edition of our lives may appear to the ones that have come before it, it is not exactly the same. Nor are we. Reali...

Fred has been known to interrupt me in the shower. Fred has been known to impede my progress in pulling on my pants. Fred takes what seems to be particularly spiteful glee in keeping my stock from balancing on my foot until I can complete the job of pulling it up. Yet, as much access to my life as Fred has, I've only known Fred's name for a couple of months. An eight-year-old put us on a first name basis. Her name is Bailey. Bailey has already beaten a brain tumor. She and her parents told their story to my church, and that is when I learned from Bailey that Fred had a name. Although Bailey's tumor is gone, difficulty moving her right side remains. As she progresses in physical therapy, Bailey refers to Fred's stubborn reluctance to follow the signals her brain sends. She coaches Fred. She scolds Fred. Gradually Bailey is gaining begrudging mastery over Fred. Although her brain's challenges differ from my cerebral palsy, I have found it helpful to name Fred when he ...

The validation Bart Millard could get from his father and from the high school scene had eluded him because of damaged knees. Struck a blow by life, Bart in the movie I Can Only Imagine sounded the note he was forged to sound. Even in the extracurricular backup to which he had been relegated, he sang as he served in the sound booth of the school's musical production. The fact that the notes he sounded would strike the ears of a music teacher and launch a new dream was secondary. He sang for the same reason that he will later say he writes. It feels really good. So it does. So, in a wheelchair, as Bart was with his football injury and with future in flux, I'm singing more often than sulking. My song wafts in cyberspace rather than acoustics. I'm enjoying writing for writing's sake. Words, contemplated and written, are my connection with my Creator. They are my sentries posted against the encroachments of my enemy, and yours, and His. Bitterness be gone. Loneliness lapse...

How opposing starting pitchers Anibal Sanchez of the Atlanta Braves and Yu Darvish of the Chicago Cubs arrived at yesterday's start makes for interesting comparison. Darvish was courted by the Cubs with a six-year contract rarely given to free agents. Sanchez was scooped up by the Braves after being released by the Twins near the end of spring training.  Darvish got his deal after establishing himself as one of baseball's most imposing strikeout artists. Sanchez is a savvy survivor. That Sanchez was the one exhibiting mastery yesterday is what makes this a memorable event for this Atlanta fan. Narrating the action as it unfolded, one of the Braves' announcers said watching such subtlety flummoxed the planet's best hitters is similar to the pleasure weekend duffers get from watching PGA pros struggle in the sand trap. When an overanxious hitter swung comically early at Sanchez's 76 mph offering which arrived at the plate and two-thirds of the time he might have antic...

Somehow, James Wood won't let me get chocolate off my mind. He's a writer for the New Yorker magazine, but his words in this week's issue didn't bring to life the taste of the sweet stuff. Instead, with the unenviable task of reviewing the novel All for One that deals with daily life on the home front in Nazi Germany, Wood pauses the action for chocolate or its distressing absence. Two Ukrainian maids are complaining to each other about the collapse of society around them. Wood notes that they seem more concerned for the chocolate they haven't had in a long time than the disappearance of their mistress. "Monstrous," Wood rightly harrumphs with our initial reaction. But wait, he insists. For these two, money and time for chocolate has in the past been a sign that were crucial issues were already in order. It was a sweet flourish of well-being, so its absence is noteworthy. How often do we just tune in long enough to hear the people around us lament the abs...

"Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes and followers rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, nor does the cause of the widow come before them." Isaiah 1:23 ( New King James Version ) John Gardner admitted, "All too often, on the long road up, young leaders become 'servants of what is 'rather than 'shapers of what might be.' In the long process of learning how the system works, they are rewarded within the intricate structure of existing roles. By the time they reach the top, they are very likely to be trained prisoners of the structure." The first 22 verses of Isaiah proclaim a vivid, disturbing indictment of the "what is" in Israel's culture. The problems don't start with the princes. Corruption begins in proud human hearts at every level of society. Wherever people’s offerings convince them all is well while their brothers and sisters suffer, the culture rots. The miasma flowing from thi...

In a profile of  Becky Hammon in this week's New Yorker magazine, Louisa Thomas describes an airport encounter Hammon had with NBA coaching legend Greg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs. Although Popovich knew her from her WNBA career, Thomas writes that he wanted to find out if Thomas was, to use Popovich's word, "worldly." The article describes Becky Hammon as a devout Christian. To devout Christians, the word "worldly" can be code for compromised in keeping with James 4:4's caution that friendship with the world is opposition to God. If typical of the prickly language sensitivity that defines both the Church and the secular culture, this encounter should have been a missed connection in more than the airport's sense of the word. It wasn't. The fact that Hammon is now Popovich's assistant coach in the NBA is what drew the New Yorker's attention. There must have been an essence in what Popovich was attempting to convey with the world wor...

That a 44-year-old unemployed for the last eight months can resolve and expect his resolutions to have any sticking power is a gift of grace in itself. Two of my recent resolutions stood steadfast in the bracing breezes of a cold Sunday morning. (1) Don't complain. Philippians 2:14 says it is possible, indeed commanded, for me to do all things without murmuring and complaining. (2) Combat complaining with more than stoic neutrality. In this effort, a friend and I resolved to accompany the prayer requests of our Sunday school class with specific praises so small and constant they are often overlooked. Instead of complaining about the cold, I decided to praise God for the warm blood in my veins. With all Scripture cautions about human vulnerability, God designed us as a fairly hardy breed able to function unaffected, except for complaining, under a variety of conditions. As if to immediately endorse my resolute observation, thousands of dollars worth of equipment expertly designed ...

Even the wise men in one's life can be wrong. Gerry makes his sixty-some years of life experience available to me in this role. He spent days considering a query I sent out to connect with my readership. If pitching advice given to a Braves hurler by an opposing minor-league coach can continue to have a dramatic secondary impact on people not involved in the initial conversation, what advice have you gotten that has made the biggest difference? Gerry had no specific answer and concluded that he is a better giver of advice than implementer of it. I was suspicious. A few days later I met Elizabeth, and my suspicions squawked. Elizabeth is a pharmacist by training, but she spends her days guiding first graders as a teaching assistant. This is not a trajectory of experience one encounters every day, so I asked, what has been the biggest surprise you encountered in the first-grade classroom? What has been the biggest difference between this learning environment and the ones to which you...

I recently read a memoir from a politician acknowledged as an expert of his art by opponent and admire her alike. Since I've no desire to divide my readership between those two camps, I'll refrain from naming him. Said political Zen master invited the reader a scene in which he was sitting across the negotiating table from his ideological opponent. The memoirist admitted to liking his opponent as a person, but not as a representative of a constituency he opposed. The author confessed, for anyone, it is difficult to restrain the source of one's power. Cue the sermonator. Other People need to digest this. We can quickly homogenize the particular materials of the human condition and come up with predictable pablum. Where popular consensus is the source of human power, Other People will end up with Pilate's predicament between acknowledging the supremacy of Christ and bending to the wind of popularity. Where material security is the source of human power, Other People need ...

Cheetos have probably never gotten to star in a story. Even in their commercials, Chester the cheetah tended to get all the attention. Yet, here they are in my lead, as indelible as the orange powder left on my hands after lunch, and wiping, and wiping. They made a similar impression on my book, and it's the placement of the incrimination that makes this worth considering for a moment. Just as I read, "Sociologists know that we tend to find most plausible the ideas of the people with whom we spend the most time and to whom our admiration is most directed," from Tim Keller's God's Wisdom for Navigating Life , I thought I could escape the iron law that my most recent associations will leave their mark on me and my trail of touches. The orange fingerprint at the top margin of my new book, as well as the content itself, contradict that notion of on impressionable independence. Around my orange evidence, Keller goes on to prognosticate, "Today we believe we can cr...

From Isaiah 1 ( New King James Version ) – 21 How the faithful city had become a harlot! It was full of justice; righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. 22 your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water. Two of the lenses through which I tend to interpret Scripture are as thick as Coke bottle glasses, and my prescription from the Divine Optometrist may or may not be helpful to other interested parties. I am especially likely to hunt for continuity in any biblical list, or between any verse and the next, or any topic and the next. Second, I am finding that my training and work as a counselor tends to provide much of the mental furniture I move around in order to approximate ultimate meaning. Admitting this perhaps unusual disposition, I'm fascinated by Isaiah 1:21-22. Constitutionally, I'm unable to see this as simply a list of indictments, serious as sexual sin, murder, and mercantile chicanery might be. The word "attachment" lends a lurid glow from o...

Wednesday. Hump Day. Midweek doldrums, unusually without the prospect of gathering with my brothers and sisters in Christ to cheer me up. Even the four job applications I aspire to complete each morning were difficult to come by. Promising possibilities seemed especially likely to stall with the requirement of a driver's license my disability prevents. The Lord had an interesting way of showing that His glory is not checked or confined. First, the biblical cadence to "Be of good courage," sounded a lot like, "PLAY BALL!" The Braves' unusual noontime start led my thoughts to lie down in the green pastures of SunTrust Park. That the game is there when you need it, said Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell in Ken Burns's Baseball documentary series, is consolation enough. Today I needed it. There's more. Atlanta's starting pitcher for the day is Mike Foltynewicz, blessed with a path straight enough toward success that he was one of the first pi...