Coming Up For Air

I just finished watching The Unit , a fictional drama on the Army's Delta Force operatives, and Sergeant Major Jonas Blane is my current standard for manliness. Not only does he come up with the right quote for the situation, all without ever having a book in sight, but he seems to be able to apply his knowledge to come up with the perfect plan for the most pressure-packed situation. An episode in the show's fourth and final season put this capacity to the test. Our team of heroes was actually in the air on the way to a crisis without a plan in place for how to handle it. Jonas leaned his head back, closes his eyes, and opens them with an announcement that he has an inspiration. Not taking his own wisdom too seriously, he says before delving into the plan, You know what inspiration is? A momentary cessation of stupidity." Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn on my usual favorite show The West Wing also works in a high-pressure hothouse of self-sufficiency, but ...

The two teenagers who would one day become my parents walked the halls of the same high school for three years. My dad was a little different in his particular self-confidence, and my mother was a little shy. She didn't approach him until she sensed and need – for a hairdryer. He was a salesman at Sears. The rest is history. Likewise, we don't expose ourselves to the risk and have love real relationship until we understand the need for it. Even for Someone Whose offered virtues should have been as apparent as those of Christ, contemporary humans were more ready with excuses than embraces. Knowing the end from the beginning, the One Whom Isaiah 9:6 called, "wonderful, Counselor" pointed out the pattern. He gave fair warning in Luke 13:25-26 by voicing the thinking of those who wanted only so much of Him. Perhaps the same objections to true, total dependence on Christ are offered today. (1) "Houston, we have a problem." The first offramp Jesus points to that ...

House Speaker Sam Rayburn advised a freshman congressman, in language later adapted by fictional presidential candidate Sen. Arnold Vinick on The West Wing , "Son, if you can't take their money, drink their whiskey, and then vote against 'em, you don't deserve to be here." Most of us need more help resisting pressure in productive ways. Perhaps that's why one of the most consistent questions in the four months of job interviews I've gone through asks how I've dealt with upset customers or clients. Perhaps that's also why the human writer behind Psalms 7:6 was so candid that he needed help when people raged against him.  All I typically get to share in a job interview are the secularly acceptable outward results of dealing effectively with people's anger. Especially since I dealt with why WE get angry last week, I thought I would share some of what ensuing verses in Psalm 7 impart to us to help us deal with other people's inflamed expectati...

I've only been in court once. Yet being called adversarial by my own lawyer was more memorable. The case against me actually had some validity, but it was falling apart under the weight of an unnecessary and basic overreach. All I had to do was watch, and the judge was all but certain to vindicate me. I couldn't manage. As the plaintiff's attorney flailed and swiped at my character while questioning another witness, I failed Client 101 and piped up in my indignation. My attorney hissed, "You are about to prove his case for him." I thought of that window into my heart and the human condition while considering the opening of Psalms 2. The psalmist questions why the nations rage and why kings conspire together. The very people, it seems, who are most blessed and who are best positioned to point away from the common, bitter passions end up reinforcing them. They even use their regal company to do so. A well-adjusted student of the Bible would move on from the rheto...

Gina and I made for an odd pair. Aside from the wheelchairs we rode in and the fact that 20 years ago we traveled with a little band of fellow residents in an inpatient rehabilitation program for about a month, we had nothing in common. Black. White. Democrat. Republican. New to the adult world. Experience in the halls of power with the stories to prove it.  Close-cut Afro. Opie Taylor haircut. My vague notions of changing the world through politics so as to avoid getting a real job but with no concept of confrontation contrasted sharply with her willingness to name the Opie Taylor haircut and assertiveness to volunteer to pay for its updating. With that same assertiveness, she told me I needed to make the most of my party's ascendancy. I basked in the attention. I also wanted to make it clear that as a very recent college graduate, I was a man of the world. To prove this, I brought Gina a photograph made with a congressman for whom I interned. I undermined the effo...

Wizened political sage from The West Wing Leo McGarity intoned, "Presidential elections are won and lost on one square foot of real estate." Pointing at his wrinkled brow, Leo designates the crucial space. "Up here." The campaign to rejoin the 95 or 96% of you who are employed, or for anyone trying to navigate the crucial barrier from outsider to insider, is also maintained in the mind before it is waged anywhere else. Since a career as an actor or actress seems to be one long job interview, that might explain the state of mind the late, blessedly candid Carrie Fisher opens up to us in The Princess Diarist . "It's not nice being inside my head," she admits. "It's a nice place to visit but I don't want to live in here. It's too crowded; too many traps and pitfalls. I'm tired of it. The same old person, day in and day out. I'd like to try something else." Me too. Unemployment increases gratitude for breaks from the same old...

Good writing and mutual frailties can connect us with people whose labels are different from our own. Great writing made it possible for godfather of rap Kevin Lee to make the week's biggest impression on me as this sheltered, preppy white guy comes up for air. In "Street Sense" in the issue of the New Yorker magazine dated December 18 and December 25, Kelefa Sanneh. "Lee," Sanneh describes, "is forty-six, an age that offers some advantages of its own." Lee says of his professional influence on youth culture, "With this gray beard I'm a O.G. When I say something, they listen – like, 'Oh, the O.G. must have been through it." The Bible says as much, signifying gray hair as my crown. When I look in the mirror at the same graying whiskers Kevin Lee sees, I'm gratified for the confirmation that some of the youth culture I hope to influence in my next job might have the same reaction. If being the O.G. and owning up to it, rather tha...