Your WHAT Hurts?

It's been a rough couple weeks...also really good...but rough. I say that with all due humility in light of the fact that I'm winding into the second half of an unprecedented six week vacation on behalf of a generous Paid Parental Leave policy from my employer (stop cursing me. I'm about to make you laugh). I repeat as a family man the proverbial sentiment, You can't make this stuff up. The "rough" comes from a few different sources.

1) Two of my children are (re)learning that they have to eat what they're served. It's an understandably bad turn of events for them when mom (the loving, gourmet, short order cook of the universe) has ever patiently indulged their every taste for last several eons of their lives. Perhaps, even worse from their perspective is that she seems to have been permanently corrupted by dad recently.
2) The children have gotten even. I believe the strength and perseverance of the crud they brought home to decimate our digestive and respiratory systems for the last two weeks was intentionally selected by them. They must know they're more resilient and we're responsible for the mess. I'm sure that some of the cough's from around the corners of my house have been covered up laughs at listening to me eject a partial trachea. No one has escaped it's wrath.
3) Spicy food. Normally harmless to the trained consumer, I have (carefully and responsibly of course) trained them in it's righteous usage. Sometimes nothing feels better on what's left of a partially ejected trachea than some plain old heat, the kind that makes you sweat a little even if the food is lukewarm.

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So this ends up having a comic upside as well, starting with dinner and Mr. Bean's Holiday (Don't judge me. It's a good movie). Laughter really is exceptional medicine but it's also an exceptional headache when you can't stop and you've already been coughing all day. None the less, it helps clear the lungs... and a bit more than that apparently if you've had spicy food and stomach problems recently (Related? Nah.). My youngest son jumped up in the middle of the movie to use the restroom. Within a few minutes, we heard some nearly honest blubbering from the porcelain throne calling for the loving, short order emotional comfort of the universe (yes, same lady). She was holding an onion poultice to her ear to ease her own pain so I answered the call myself. I was as gentle as I could imagine when I opened the door but the tears and sadness vaporized the moment he saw me, like he was fishing for blue gill and hooked a shark. The next look was a perfectly composed one that said, "Everything couldn't be better. You can leave now." I asked what was going on just to be caring and responsible. Without breaking his composure, he took only a second to come up with a cheerfully delivered answer that would explain everything, "My butt was hurting. It stopped." Couldn't have said it better myself. Actually, couldn't stop laughing to say it at all.

Playing the Odds

Surveying my house after the last storm, the trend is obvious. Nature is trying to destroy it (and I'm a little slow to repair it). Some of the paint is cracking. A shingle has been relocated to the yard from the roof. And my recycle bin is a little more broken from another wind driven tumble down the street. But the odds still favor my house because I'm here to take care of it.

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Yes. Of course this is a spiritual analogy so you can bail here if you like. In kind, it's a tired analogy too, a spin-off of the tornado-in-junkyard example where a whirlwind happens to assemble a Ferrari (or a Honda, depending on whether the junkyard is in Japan or Italy). Watching anything deteriorate at the hands of nature serves the same purpose, one that's still convincing and ironically encouraging to me regardless of how tired it is. It goes like this: In regard to home maintenance or the existence of anything beyond a perfect vacuum, the odds don't favor us (though they do seem to favor insurance companies. I think there's something going on there). Anyway, we cling to million-to-one odds (or much worse) as if the the rest are merely non-instances, non-events. We just need enough one-in-a-million successes in a row and we will get our desired result, say a house. And the infinity of numbers provides however many one-in-a-millions are needed to build it, so long as we pay no attention to the 999,999 shingles the odds blow off for every one they place correctly. But leave those out and it becomes believable that the house could not only build itself but could gain consciousness and decide how best to do it. We just need enough one-in-a-million's.

Let's cut to the point. My reasoning proves that I'm a marginalized, unscientific idiot. Wait...I meant my point, not everyone else's. I just read it in the funny's this morning. Moving on, at present, nature as we can observe it does not produce things like us. It produces things more and more similar to junkyards and black holes, and leaves us still searching for the thing that produces things like us or complexity in general. For me, this rationally leads to the conclusion that order of any kind is a supernatural product, even nature itself. And, again, not as we imagine but as we actually observe, we are the pinnacle of order and complexity in the natural world. A supernatural creator is indeed what we are rationally looking for. And whether I like him or not, I haven't found one more convincing than the God of the Bible.

Hi Guy!

I have four children now! That's my good excuse for not posting in a while. Our nearly two year old daughter came home to stay last Saturday. Her history has made family titles a little confusing for her and left me with the simple title of Guy. I'm glad to have it. It's as cute as you can imagine to hear an affectionate "Hi Guy" from her quiet, high pitch voice when she sits up in in bed in the morning before anyone but me is awake. Needless to say, I'm wrapped around another set of little fingers. She's adjusting wonderfully.

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Still, I've been reminded this week how being an adoptive family is unique from a child's perspective. For children too young for advanced reasoning, it's especially tricky. I noticed something amiss with my youngest son, five years old now, after Aria had been home a couple days. He was increasingly bothered by Aria stealing the spotlight and started competing aggressively for our attention. We anticipated his difficulty adjusting to not being the youngest anymore so I pulled him aside for a heart to heart when he seemed near his breaking point. As he sat on my lap with my arms around him, I was ready to hear how much harder than expected it was embracing a new sister. "Yes," he confirmed with that tremble in his voice that tells any experienced parent there's a lake of emotion behind a flimsy dam. "What's the hardest part?" I asked. He burst through tears, "I don't want you to get rid of me." My heart broke.

Perhaps we take it for granted that our family is our family. Kai doesn't. He know's very well that Aria came to us because someone else wasn't willing and/or able to keep her. And he's too young to reason that his own situation is any different than hers was. Perhaps we take relationships for granted in general. We expect something besides ourselves to make them work and last. It reminds me of a question my wife asked when we were newly married, "How do I know you'll never leave me?" I answered, "You don't. You'll just have to see me never leave you."

I had a wonderful father/son talk with Kai and he's better than ever now. He understands with new depth what it means when I call him, "son". At the core, it's devotion alone that secures any family. Natural family members abandon their roles all the time. And, though generally more conscious of being family by choice, adoptive families are breakable too. But there is a perfectly trustworthy adoption. The apostle Paul said it's not the natural children who's place is secure in God's kingdom, it's the adopted children, the one's who are his by choice, not default. That is matter-of-factly the only way God builds his family. I know an imperfect yet compelling version through the love I have for my own children, and it adds depth to joyfully anticipating my own adoption as his son. I strongly encourage anyone to adopt their family (children, siblings, parents, etc). Whether naturally yours or not - make the decision that they are yours no matter what and let them know. If you devote yourself to it unconditionally, it will try you in every way and it's the closest to understanding the nature of God's family that you will get on this earth.

Border Line

I avoid politics (except to declare that I avoid them and then write about them). That's like saying, "There are absolutely no absolutes". Except the person saying it would leave out "absolutely" because that makes the absurdity of the statement too obvious. So back to politics (that I don't actually avoid). What I actually avoid is being too judgmental about politics. I don't suffer from the delusion that if the whole world viewed things my way, everything would work out. That's my disclaimer to everything else I'm about to say here.

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A friend recently asked me how I would handle the recent and ongoing topic of refugees, immigrants, stray pets, etc (yes, I'm blaming a friend for this post). More specifically, how do I think Christ would have us handle it. The old WWJD. Knowing very well that there's a tremendous gulf between ideas about how things should be done and actually doing them, here's how things should be done. Based on God being the one who establishes the times and places of nations for the purpose of leading their occupants to himself, we have the obligation to protect whatever Godly attributes underpin any particular nation. Our own underpinnings are transparently put forward in our Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There's a lot of signatures on those statements, Christian and otherwise. What they established for our nation was a practical, nonreligious reverence for a singular, virtuous, creator God. The short list of virtues originating from him that needed official recognition and protection were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those who signed it were ready to die for those and proved it. I am fully convinced that every detail of those statements is entirely credible to this day, and even more so in our scientific age. If you embrace the same thing for yourself and others, you're welcome here. It's the foundation of the superpower nation that followed and I do love being one of its citizens.

That's the end of answers that fit this format. However far away from those roots we are is how far we are from being able to govern ourselves with the success of our past. For Christians, the obedient times of Old Testament Israel are an example of good foreign policy. Aliens and foreigners who shared the national values provided by Israel's Creator God were welcomed and treated as equals, not stray pets. The everlasting kingdom we're looking forward to makes the same offer but it's immune to the selfishness that degrades all purely human governments. Till then, as long as it will have me, I pledge allegiance to one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Because I Said So

I'm going to shoot for generically relatable this time. I'm also going to assure you that everything's fine and I still love Jesus. Now that that's done...
If you've lived through much at all, there's times when you give up on things making sense. By necessity, we have to go on even if we can't line up the loose ends in our minds (that's a lot of loose ends for some of us). It started when we were young and learned to recognize "because I said so" as a final warning that things were about to deteriorate rapidly if we didn't relax and comply. Perhaps we had questioned things too much by that point. Perhaps the first question was too much.

So I've gotten older and nothing has changed except the person that says, "because I said so." The phrase is rendered a little different most of the time now; "That's just the way it is", "If you don't like it, there's the door", "One more time and I'll kill you", etc. But it's essentially the same: you don't have to like it, you just have to deal with it.

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Sometimes, It's God himself who says it, and I respectfully respect that. I've said before that, in the present, I know God as an accomplished ventriloquist and that's still true, but here's my scriptural translation. "Before Abraham was, I am" reads "because I said so". "I only say and do the will of the Father" reads "That's just the way it is".  "Will you leave too" reads "There's the door". I'll leave it up to you to sort out "One more time and I'll kill you".

Work, home and the world at large have that tone lately. And I think I'm just going to let the loose ends spark and crackle like high voltage power lines for a while. It's a good show but it's not mine.

A Ghastly Mistake

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"We must get the truth for ourselves. There may be two explanation for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, has made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the corruption of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages?  Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be  but growing pains. But let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain men obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. But the man who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her/himself is fatal. A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death."   C.S. Lewis - Miracles

Pearls of Wisdom Teeth

I got my lower wisdom teeth pulled this Thursday. That's the short way of saying I'm writing this post while my entire head is in intense pain. That's partly because I hate the way painkillers make me feel and I get off them as fast as I can and partly because I'm fortunate to have very strong, healthy teeth that require exceptional effort to extract from my head, especially when they're growing in sideways like bulldozers.

The conversation between the surgeon and his assistant (or the heavy drilling, cracking and yanking) should have been a solid clue about how how much trauma was actually happening. But anesthetic made it seam like a bit of an exaggeration at the time. Turns out anesthetic affects judgment as well as nerves. Besides causing you to underestimate what's going on, it also causes you to think you don't need more anesthetic.

I've replaced my usual diet of anything that doesn't eat me first with soft, watery things that must be precisely 98.6' or my jaw threatens to explode on contact. Never thought I would be so happy to see oatmeal for dinner. On that train of thought, one redeeming thing about strong pain killers is they also kill your appetite and any profuse drooling that goes along with simultaneously being ravenous and unable to feel your tongue and lower lip. There's a certain irony to not being allowed to eat for ten hours before a surgery that leaves you unable to eat afterward. It's the little things.

An incomplete list of things I'm thankful for today includes: skilled surgeons, vacation pay, ice (outside my mouth), a comfortable couch, a safe home where I can stare blankly into space (more than usual), Netflix when staring into space gets old and drinkable protein. I'm truly blessed.