One of the big perks of being me is the bi-weekly Friday night Happy Hour.  That’s what we call it, except that it’s usually more like six hours.  And ‘Happy’ isn’t nearly a big enough word.  Our group gathers on a huge shady deck for potluck nom-noms, spirits, card games, and soul-saturating old-timey-music performances by a few of the best players anywhere (who just happen to walk among us).  I took a little bit of video with my phone last night, see it here.

Before I put it away I quickly checked a new text message, then happened to glimpse another one from earlier in the day, one that I’d already read but forgotten about.  It was from my friend Jennifer, who had texted asking advice on her remodel.  I told her what I knew (not much), and then the topic veered to a mutual friend:

Jen: “Saw Carmen today, she is adorably pregnant.”

Me: “She is adorably everything.”

Jen: “True and sweet and kind and graceful.  There is something subtle and peaceful about Carmen that I wish I had a dose of on a regular basis.”

As I now was re-reading this conversation on the porch, hours later, it just happened that Carmen was sitting next to me, adorably pregnant with their third child and quietly enjoying the music.  Without permission from Jennifer, and completely on an impulse, I handed Carmen my phone.  She looked at it confused for second, then realized what it was: a private conversation between two friends about…her.

She read it carefully. Then she blushed, smiled, handed it back, and went on listening.

And that’s how Happy Hour got even happier.  I felt so grateful that I’d seen and been reminded of it at the very moment I was sitting next to her.  What a sad waste it would have been if it had just languished on my phone for a few days until I got around to mindlessly deleting and forgetting about it completely.  Carmen would never have even known.

As the fiddles played on I sat wondering how many potential blessings go to waste just because we don’t make the effort to pass them on.  How many people in my life could be blessed if I just made it a point to tell them how I feel about them once in awhile?

I have many close friends and I love them dearly, each for their own unique combination of reasons.  And yet I rarely share those reasons with them out loud.  Because of…what?  Male pride?  Fear of an awkward moment?  Laziness?  Which of those excuses are more important than letting the members of my tribe know why and how much I cherish them, how utterly amazing I think they are?

It is one of the great unexplainable absurdities that most of us never express our deepest, happiest feelings about one another to one another.  And we then find ourselves at funerals with our hands in our pockets, wishing we had.

So let’s change that.  Let’s each think of our five closest friends and love-bomb one-per-day this week, starting on Monday.  Out of the blue.  Ambush.  A phone call or an email or a knock on the door, just to say here’s why I love being your friend.

Put five names on your calendar right now.  Do it.

Both your hearts will melt with happiness.  I guarantee it.

It’s now been twenty years since I started woodworking as an apprentice.  And by nice round-number coincidence, just this year I’ve taken on an apprentice for the first time myself.

Todd is talented, enthusiastic, and eager to please. Just like I was in 1993.  Also just like 24 year old apprentice me, he sometimes messes things up. (44 year old me does too, just not nearly as often, thankfully.) Todd sometimes gets ahead of himself, moves too fast, takes unnecessary risks or gets overconfident with the tools, and the result is an errant saw cut or a mortise in the wrong location.

He usually recognizes it right away, and then we share ‘that moment’ together.  That moment I remember having with Michael, two decades ago.  When I’d bring him a table leg with the holes in the wrong place, twitchy with fear and shame, desperately reaching for something to say to make it better.  ”I’m sorry” was usually the best choice, because Michael is a very gracious teacher and boss.  He’d look at the mistake, grimace and sigh a bit, then say, “Well, how are you going to fix it?”

Repairing the damage was the only price I ever had to pay for my mistakes, which has a beautiful aesthetic symmetry about it.  No wrath or punishment beyond just making amends.  Which is the way the world should be, would be, if it weren’t mostly run by people with deep anger issues.

Anyway.

Todd has extraordinary talent for woodworking, and he’s already become very valuable in my shop. And he makes far fewer mistakes per capita than any of my newbie friends who have helped me out from time to time.

Still, he makes them.

A couple of weeks ago, he dropped a metal clamp smack in the middle of a completely finished piece of furniture that was sitting (by my own negligence) too close to the tool he was using, waiting for delivery.  It left a pretty ugly dent in the top, one that would take time to repair.  He looked at it, then looked at me, then back at the dent.  Then he moved the piece, covered it up with a blanket, then carried on with what he was doing.  We didn’t need to say out loud what we were both thinking, because we already knew it.  It’s become our mantra:

There is nothing that can’t be fixed.

In the twenty years I’ve been doing this I’ve had a lot of mishaps.  I’ve ruined countless pieces of wood and had to start over. I once dumped a friend’s table saw out of my pickup and into the middle of a busy street. I even mis-measured the opening of a client’s doorway so that when we delivered his piece it wouldn’t go into the room where he wanted it.

But one thing that’s never happened, ever, is calling a client and saying, “Sorry.  That piece you ordered?  We are not going to be able to finish it.  We just made too many mistakes, so we just gave up.”  Always, somehow, the piece gets finished and delivered.  I have a 100% completion rate.

Todd has the appropriate amount of male pride and cockiness, so last fall when he first messed something up, he was beside himself.  Visibly angry and frustrated, chastising himself bitterly.  I got his attention, looked at him calmly, and said, “Todd, there is nothing that can’t be fixed.  There is nothing that can’t be fixed. Sometimes we might even have to start over from the beginning.  But whatever it is, it can always be fixed.  Relax.”

It wasn’t just to make him feel better that I said that, it was because mental agitation and power tools don’t mix well.  You have to be cool to do this or you will mess up again and again, maybe even hurt yourself.  These tools aren’t playing around.

There have been a few more mistakes since then, and each time Todd gets a little less agitated.  Which I’m happy to see.  And when he dropped that clamp and made that dent the other day, then simply moved it over and carried on without saying a word, I realized that the message has finally sunk in.

There is nothing that can’t be fixed.

I think it can be said that good craftsmanship is largely the ability to fix your own mistakes.  There are a lot of tricks in this trade to repairing missteps, and we woodworkers exchange them like stock tips.  Every time Todd messes up, part of me sees it as a fun opportunity to teach him one of these things.  For they are like magic, and his eyes reflect the enthusiasm of a little kid when he sees the result.  Watching your mistakes vanish into thin air is a calming feeling indeed.

Half a year into Todd’s apprenticeship, the air in the shop feels a lot less charged with anxiety.  He is calmer, more confident now.  Once you’ve made mistakes and learned to repair them, once the truth sinks in that nothing you do wrong will ever be fatal to the project, you start to breathe a little easier.  And when this happens over and over again, you just naturally start to relax.

And this is where I draw the parallel with life.  You knew it was coming.

At 44, I’m way more chill in general than I was at 24.  I bet you are too.  Some of that is probably just natural aging stuff, brain chemistry mellowing and such.  But I bet a lot of it comes just from living, realizing that you are going to make mistakes, that you are not going to do things perfectly, and that life goes on anyway.  The world does not hinge on your performance.  No matter what damage you do, the sun is going to rise tomorrow, and eventually things will somehow be fixed again.  Maybe all the damage you did will be perfectly, symmetrically repaired at some point.  But even if it isn’t, hearts have an uncanny ability to heal around scars, like the bark on an elm tree.

And the more you live, the more you believe in second chances.  And third and fourth chances.  Life – or God if you so choose – keeps giving them to you, like a gracious master craftsman who only wants you to learn to do better, handing you yet another piece of fresh wood.

And this is why I don’t mind getting older.  I will happily trade in my anxiety for a few achy joints and gray hairs, a little bit at a time.  I’m glad to swap my narcissistic belief that the world only turns as long as I turn it for a deep, abiding sense that no matter what I do, there is nothing, nothing that can’t be fixed.

Todd and I fixed it together.  There’s a little trick where you soak the dent with water then hit it with a very, very hot iron.  The wood swells up, nearly to its original shape. Then you just sand it over and refinish it.  The whole thing took about twenty minutes, and when we were done it looked even better than it did before.

Then we shared a fist-bump.  Because that’s how guys hug.

$1,754.

I write a check for that much every spring and mail it to Hays County.  It’s the property tax on nine of the eleven acres we own.   The nine that does not contain either the house or the shop.  Or anything, except trees and rocks and little animals.  The tax on our structures, along with the two acres they sit on, was lumped into escrow years ago.  So we pay it, but we don’t notice it. You know what I mean.

But we notice this.  And every year, as I’m licking that envelope and tasting the glue mixed with my own bile, I’m reminded of something an older wiser friend told me back when we were looking for land:

“Remember Mark, you don’t have to own land to enjoy it.”

Zoom.  Right over my head that went.

I wanted acreage.  I wanted to build a house with a great deal of padding all around it, land that I could be sure would always stay undeveloped.  I wanted trees and privacy and chirpy birds, forever.  I needed to control it.  And you don’t get to control it unless you own it.

I imagined hikes and trails and little familiar spots to sit and read Whitman by leaf-broken moonlight.  I was sure I’d fence it in someday and get some goats or something country-ish like that.

Well. It’s been fifteen years.  I can now report that those visions never materialized.  I now walk through parts of the nine acres, um, about four times a year.  For no more than ten minutes each time.  And just because I feel like I should.

99.999 percent of my life here is spent on the two acres where I’m now sitting as I type.  My primary relationship with the other nine is writing that check once a year.

I think back to my friend’s comment.  (He, by the way, owns more land than we do, and writes an even larger tax check every year.  His wisdom in that statement was well earned, and I should have listened.)

I think back to our year in Oregon, when we lived in a little house on almost zero property but spent every free minute hiking or biking or swimming or camping with friends on some stunning bit of public land.

You don’t have to own land to enjoy it.

I do enjoy the nine acres.  From a distance.  Over there.  It is nice to know that nobody’s going to put a house in next to us.  I’m just not certain that this assurance is worth all the money we paid for it, and continue to pay.  And sometimes, I think, it would actually be nice to have neighbors we could see.

I want to sit twenty-eight-year-old Mark down and have a discussion with him about the need to control.  I want to show him a list of things that $68,000 (the price of the nine acres plus all the taxes we’ve paid) could have bought us instead of this isolation.  I want to ask him what he has against neighbors, against seeing other people and houses out his window, against hearing kids play together in front yards.  I want to ask him why he thinks he has to own and control all the space around him to enjoy it.

It wouldn’t do any good though.  He never listens.

But still, I hope he’d hear this:

You don’t have to own something to enjoy it.  

After forty-four laps around the sun I think I’m just now beginning to understand this.  I’m just now (as in the past few months) learning that I can taste a little bit of a brownie and deeply enjoy the taste, without then devouring the entire thing and the rest of the pan and feeling sick later.  Or that I really can stop after one glass of wine, and thereby not wake up later at 3:30 AM with a pounding in my eyeballs.  I’m learning that I can play two rounds of golf a year and profoundly enjoy the time without feeling the burn to start playing twice a week (as I once did), spending up so much precious time and money. I’m realizing – even though I can be clingy by nature – that I can enjoy a very close friendship and not feel the need to have that person ever-present-every-minute, that in fact I often feel closer to a friend after some time has gone by between visits.  I’m finding that I enjoy being with my kids so much more – and that they are so much happier – when I’m not filling their ears with my own voice all the time.

When I back off a little.  When I own the need to own.  When I control the urge to control.

There’s this Hebrew word Tzimtzum, which means contraction or withdrawal.  I remember years ago reading someone talk about creation as Tzimtzum.  Which is to say that before anything was created there was nothing but God, and God filled everything.  So in order for God to create something, step one was Tzimtzum.  God had to move over, pull in, withdraw a bit, make a place for this new creation to live and breathe.

So out of Divine Hospitality this is exactly what God did.  God contracted, made a space, and created.  And only then, after his Tzimtzum and all that followed it, could he profoundly enjoy his not-God creation.

I am a large person.  I fill spaces with my body, and with my words.  I’m not loud, I’m just…large.  For most of my life I’ve been able to control my environment, to own all the land around me.  I am able to influence people to do the things I think they should, probably more than I ought to be.  That doesn’t have to be all bad, I guess.

But as I think about this Tzimtzum I’m not sure I’ve intentionally contracted myself enough, given the people in my life the space and the grace to become who they ought to become.  I’m fairly certain that I’ve tried to steer a few vessels when it would have been better just to let them drift for awhile.

So I’m kind of feeling the need these days to learn better Tzimtzum, to pull myself in, to remind myself that I can love people and things and without owning them.

In fact I think it’s possible – probable even – that I could love them even better.

Tuesday was the nine year mark of my father’s death.  April 30th has a different feeling every year, it brings a different set of thoughts to ponder each time.  A different collection of memories to replay.

This year I’m thinking about anger.  Not because I’m feeling particularly angry right now, but because I have two very close friends who are grieving tragic losses at the moment, and in the past week I’ve sat with both of them as they’ve unloaded about their anger.

I remember the anger.  I had lots of it immediately after my dad’s massive stroke, the one that eventually led to his death six years later.  I remember getting into a violent screaming match with my pregnant sister at our parents’ house the night after it happened, at three in the morning, which ended with her screeching off into the Houston night in Dad’s car and me screaming and punching the sofa.  I remember laying into one of my dad’s friends, a very nice guy, a preacher, just because he’d dared to try and visit dad in the ICU after normal visiting hours.  I screamed at the guy right there at the nurse’s station, like a crazy man.  I remember getting a speech therapist fired because we weren’t happy with how she was handling Dad’s case.  That’s right, I got someone fired.

Because I was pissed off, and I didn’t know what else to do.

What made the situation feel so much worse was that I didn’t have a clear target for my anger.  It wasn’t anybody’s fault that my dad’s heart went into arrhythmia and threw a massive clot to his brain, killing half of it and rendering him unable to walk, speak, or take care of himself for the rest of his life.  He was instantly disabled, unemployed, and humiliated.  My mother was immediately forced to become his around-the-clock nurse.  Everything was turned into horrible upside-down nonsense in a brief moment, and nobody was to blame.

So I blamed my sister, and that preacher, and that therapist, and dozens of other unfortunates who happened into my path.  I screamed and banged steering wheels and slammed doors and insulted friends.  I’m sure there are some lingering scars out there that are my fault, of which I have no memory.  I hope those people have forgiven me by now, even if they never got an apology.

I’m sorry I acted that way.  I’m sorry I hurt some people.

But I’m not completely ashamed of it, on a personal level.  Because how can you be ashamed of something that’s so human, so intrinsic to your makeup?

Anger has a purpose in our lives, it’s been bred into us by our evolution.  Or created in us by God, whichever you choose to believe.  Either way, it’s there, and it’s important.

It’s important because it’s how we protect our own borders.  Anger doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from feeling threatened.  It comes from fear.  Someone pushes too far into our literal or figurative space and we lash out, we fight back.  If we don’t, we might lose something we really need to survive.  And then we might not survive.

Anger is sometimes perfectly appropriate even in our modern lives.  It motivates us to take action when we see an injustice.  It informs us when we’ve hurt a friend deeply, or gives us the language to emphatically demonstrate our own hurt.  It reminds us of boundaries we ought not cross.  It’s good to have at least the capacity to feel anger.

The trouble with anger is it takes over.  When we see red it’s nearly impossible to get on top of it, to get any healthy or rational perspective on what’s happening.  Neither the giver nor receiver of the anger, in that flash-bang moment, can effectively stand back and ponder the situation.  Evolution takes over, and we either run or bare our canines.  And that’s when people get hurt.

The other problem with anger is we very often can’t see where it’s coming from, or control where it goes.  In other words, when we lose control of our temper, most often what we think we’re mad about is not really what’s driving it.  The energy for the rage is coming from somewhere else, some pain or fear that we’d rather not look at head on.  It arrives in a snap, and we release it just as quickly, often without the ability to discern whether we’re even aiming at the right target.

Of course I wasn’t really mad at my sister, or that minister, or that therapist.  I was mad at the situation, or at fate, or at God, however you want to put it.  But those targets were too vague and unreachable, I couldn’t look them in the eye and hurt them back.  So I took punches at whomever was nearby.

I see all that now.

I also now see that anger is like a wild river after a flood.  If you dam it up it’s eventually going to overflow or explode catastrophically.  And on the contrary, if you let it run whenever and wherever it wants to go, it will probably do tremendous damage to some very valuable property.  But if you channel it properly and let it flow, it will eventually find its way out to sea and dissipate. And with no evident damage in its wake, you might not even remember it was there.

One the signs of maturity is the ability to “control one’s anger.”  When grownups use this language in reference to children, they normally mean squelching it completely, stuffing it down.  ”If you don’t control that anger right now young lady your phone is mine for a week!,” I hear myself saying, um, almost every day.

Maybe a better way to think about controlling anger is directing it in a healthy way.  Letting it flow out, but at the right target.  Maybe maturity is not the ability to take a breath and swallow the feeling, but the ability to pause and discern where it should go, and how.

In my case, back then, after I’d done about as much damage as I could do to the people around me, and after I’d had time to reflect on what a shitty way that was to act, I still had a lot of anger to get rid of.  That’s when a funny thing happened.

I started yelling at God.  Why is that funny?  Because before any of this happened, I didn’t really believe in God.  I had zero relationship at all.  I’d left my faith a few years earlier (if you’re keeping score that’s twice now) and never, ever talked to or thought about God.  Ever.  But that anger had to go somewhere, so I pointed it up.

I told God he was a total shithead for what he’d done to my dad, to our family.  He could have stopped it, but he didn’t.  I hated him deeply for what had happened, for taking this sweet humble man who had lived his whole life in service to him and repaying him with utter humiliation.  Not humility, humiliation.  

Christmas Eve Mass with the in laws that year found me sitting in a pew, seething with scorn at the wooden crucifix above the priest’s head.  Silently cussing at the image with every word I could think of, even inventing a few.  I felt an enormous urge to receive communion so I could then spit it out on the altar.  (I didn’t follow that urge, thankfully.)

Parallel with this this rage was another river, a steady stream of people from our church visiting with covered dishes and afternoons off, wanting to help however they could.  They’d feed us, sit with Dad while we went out, listen to us grieve the man we’d lost.

And I don’t remember exactly when it happened, or how long it took, but eventually the River of Anger just ran dry on its own, while the River of Love just kept flowing.  And I was left with a very strong sense of God’s presence, the first I’d felt in many years.

For some people, anger may be the way back to God.  It was for me, at least then.  I needed a target, and God in all his grace offered himself.  Some of the spit on that crucifix was mine.

I’ve struggle with my faith since then, as you may know.  I don’t think I ever won’t.

But I know beyond any doubt that in those days God, whoever or whatever God is, lovingly absorbed my rage, protected those around me from any more damage, maybe even wept with me, until the last tear was out.  God healed me.

And then all that was left was Love.

I think that’s where most of our anger should go for the bad things that happen.  Up.  Because God can take it, without taking it personally.  I don’t know why this works but it does, over time.  At least it did for me.

Photo by Julia Love

Here’s a good indication that your priorities have gone off the rails, at least temporarily: You find yourself angry at little kids.

Which I did last Saturday.

Several of our closest friends from Austin drove out to Wimberley (where we live) to be part of the annual Butterfly Festival (read all about it here), about a fifty minute trip.  Joyce and Judy had come up with a beautiful plan to honor the memory our sweet friend Alicia, whom we lost in a tragic accident on March 10th.  They had taken a small cage full of unhatched butterflies to her classroom last month (Alicia was a school teacher) so the children could watch them open, then they brought them to the EmilyAnn theater on Butterfly Day so we could ceremoniously release them together.  The perfect tribute to this beautiful soul.

We didn’t really have a plan for the release, but that didn’t stop me from having at least a vague vision for how that moment might go.  I imagined the cage being set on a tall rock or table, the 25 or 30 of us gathering around in a circle.  Somebody — perhaps Alicia’s husband Steve or someone else — would say something profound and touching.  Her two little boys would then open the door and the butterflies would burst into the blue sky, our gasps bidding them happy voyage.  Hugs and smiles and tears all around.

But um, that’s not what happened.  Not really.  The meadow where all the cages get opened, as it turned out, was a crowded mess of little sticky kids staggering around holding out slices of cantaloupe (the festival sells them to be used as bait for butterflies to land, which sometimes works).  There were many dozens of cages stacked together under a tent, and a steady stream of weary-looking volunteers carrying them out, setting them down, and walking away.

Our crew was loosely spread about the crowd when someone noticed that Alicia’s cage was coming out in the hands of an elderly gentleman.  He tiptoed through the crowd, set it on the ground between two rocks (which also had cages on them), opened the hatch, and left.  Only a couple of us even knew the moment was happening.  Suddenly hoardes of unknown toddlers rushed the cage and jammed their cantaloupes inside, trying to coax the butterflies to hop on so they could pull them out.  Neither they nor their parents had any idea who Alicia was, or what this cage had meant to those of us now gathered around the edges, trying to get at least a glimpse.

I was unhappy.  No, I was upset.  Maybe even pissed.  And the slightest bit embarrassed. This was my home town, I had encouraged and supported this idea, and I really wanted our moment to go differently.

I knew I would look like a supreme jackass if I reached in and grabbed a couple of these nameless drooling little sprouts and pulled them out and sent them away.  Which is the only reason I didn’t.  But God, I wanted to.  And had I known which of the bored faces standing around were their parents’, I’d have offered a few sharp words.  Their kids had glommed on to our cage and ruined our moment.  They needed to be more considerate.

Eventually Steve and the boys made their way in and were able to get a couple of the monarchs for themselves before they flew away.

Back in the car a little while later I apologized to Steve.  ”I’m sorry,” I said, “that’s not at all how it was supposed to go.”

He gently lifted his left arm, still healing from the accident, and waved it emphatically.  ”No!,” he said.  ”That was perfect.  That’s exactly how she would have wanted it.  Little kids all around, excited, learning, enjoying.  She would have loved that!”

“I guess so,” I mumbled.  Steve has the annoying tendency to find the good in everything.  But I was disappointed, albeit now quietly.

Later that night, after cleaning our house from the post-butterfly-release party, I lay in bed thinking about the day, about the moment of release, about my disappointment and annoyance.  I felt a strange, vague sense of deja vu about the whole thing.  There was something familiar.

Then it hit me.  I’d become a character in a Bible story, one that I’d heard all my life.

Jesus was teaching one day and suddenly a bunch of little kids rushed him and hugged him with their sticky fingers, interrupting whatever he was saying.  Totally ruining the moment.  His handlers quickly grabbed them and pulled them off and shooed them away.  ”No!” he said. “Let them come to me.  I’m all about little kids.  The kingdom of Heaven is all about little kids.”

I bet Alicia loved that story.

And I bet Steve’s right.  It was just perfect.

Twenty years ago today we all watched as the Branch Davidian compound in Waco burned.  We remember it like it was yesterday.

The coincidence of this anniversary with the tragedy near Waco this week with the vote on gun control somehow mixed together in my mind and birthed a new thought (a rare thing for me) that I want to offer.  So here it is:

The second amendment is outdated.  

Pause for a moment while my more conservative friends take a deep breath and let it out slowly.  Just hang in there with me, I really am not trying to take your guns away.  I have a gun, and I want to keep it.  So try and hear my point.

The second amendment was written over two centuries ago, and it reflects a time when private citizens could own weapons that stood the chance of fighting off a government that was overstepping its bounds with regards to their freedom.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

It other words, as I understand it, because a country needs an army to protect itself from foreign invaders, the potential is there for a government to turn that army on its own citizens and take away their freedoms.  So we should allow those citizens the tools to protect themselves.  This will make the government think twice before trying anything stupid.

Absolutely.  History has proven this time and again.  Governments almost always eventually overstep their bounds and infringe on the rights of their own people.  So right up front we need to make rules to keep that from happening.  Citizens should be armed against this possibility.

Yes yes yes.

But.  Have you noticed what’s happened in the last two hundred years, military-technology-wise speaking?  They’ve sortof, um, outpaced us a bit.  They’ve got helicopters and bazookas and planes and even nukes, and now drones.  All in the name of protecting our interests abroad and our freedoms here from foreigners who would take those things away.

We, on the other hand, have at best automatic rifles.  The most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the least powerful weapon in theirs.  We no longer match our own army musket for musket.  Things have changed.

In the current gun control debate, the more enthusiastic advocates of our second amendment rights often allude to an imagined scenario where the government lays siege on its own citizens.  The argument goes that if those citizens don’t have the most powerful guns available, nothing will stop the government from doing that whenever they want.

Well, guess what.  We really don’t have to imagine that scenario, because it happened twenty years ago today.  The federal government raided a religious community made up (mostly) of American citizens who were well armed with automatic weapons.  The citizens defended themselves on the first day, when the feds came at them with basically the same military technology as theirs.  But then, of course, modernity showed up in the form of government tanks and helicopters, and that was that.  It was never even a question of who would eventually win, and we all knew it.  American citizens are no longer a match for the American military.  Of course.

But here’s the question I want you to consider.  What held the federal government off for 51 days?  After the initial gunfight with the ATF, in which four agents and six Davidians died, why did the feds not level the place the next day?

It wasn’t because the Davidians had guns.

It was because the reporters had cameras.

It was because we were all watching.

Since the second amendment was penned, two absolutely huge areas of technological advancement have changed everything.  The aforementioned military advances, and advances in the way information is shared.  And in the twenty years since Waco, the latter has shifted dramatically yet again.  Imagine the Davidians with smart phones.

The spirit of the second amendment is absolutely right.  But I believe the most effective tools against an oppressive government today are not guns, but cameras and internet access.  Because when the world is watching, as it was not two centuries ago, governments tend to behave a whole lot better.

I have one gun.  I got it when we started raising chickens, to protect them from the oppressive possums and raccoons who wanted to take away their rights to exist.  But I would also use it in the awful event that I needed to protect my family from a bad guy.  I hate that this is a reality of the world we live in, but it is.  And there is no going back, not in this country.  So I do believe we should all be able to own guns if we feel we need to.

But not an automatic weapon.  Because an automatic weapon is way more than I would ever need against an intruder (or against a deer if I were a hunter), and way less that I’d ever need agains the U.S. government.  Please friends, let’s think long and hard about whether those things need to be legal.

And let’s think about the second amendment, how we might best preserve the spirit of it in light of new technology.  The country is an organization, let’s not forget, and if we had created an organization – let’s say a company – two hundred years ago and written rules and regulations for its operation back then, we would probably have revisited those things by now with an eye toward how things have shifted.  I don’t think the founding fathers wanted their guns first and foremost.  I think they wanted their freedoms.

So do I, and so do you.

So here’s my proposal for a new second amendment:

Article 2.1

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear smart phones, cameras, and internet access shall not be infringed.

Article 2.2

Because lots of bad guys (and girls) are running around in our country with guns and that’s no longer something we can do anything about, good guys (and girls) should have the right to own guns to protect themselves if they feel they need to.  But, the government should be allowed to have a say if some of those guns are way more lethal than necessary for this purpose.

Article 2.3

Guns for hunting are OK too.

Maybe my language needs a little work, but you get the idea.

OK, here’s where you all tell me how stupid I am.  I’ve provide the space below to make that easy for you.  Get to it.

when This became That

my heart shoved That out

but i pulled That back in

because That was part of me

when That was This.

but now That is That

and That won’t fit any more

because This became That

and will Forever be That.

no matter how much i wanted That to be This again

That is That.

And so

That is That.

a promise to myself

a thank you, Gracious angel

a prayer to a new heaven:

i let go of That

Forever.

.

and

say hello

to This

I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long

I discovered something new this morning.  There is a 5:30 AM on Sundays.  I always assumed there was, I’d just never seen it my own self.  Nor had my eleventeen year old daughter, Julia.  But today that all changed.

It was somewhere near the end of our dark fifty minute drive into Austin that my consciousness came online and I realized where I was, who I was, and what I was about to do.  That’s when we hit the traffic.  A bright red snake of lights, slithering through the dark for miles, straight into downtown Austin.

Over 17,000 people ran The Capitol 10 K this morning.  At least two of them had never done it before, or anything remotely like it, and had no idea what to expect.  That’s not to say we weren’t ready, somewhat.  Julia and I have been running together since the first of this year with an eye on April 7th.  But running on deserted Wimberley dirt roads is one thing; Austin cement, crowded with crazies, is quite another.

“Holy shit, look at all these people,” I said.  To myself, silently.  I wondered what I’d gotten my little girl into.  I envisioned her being trampled by the guy in the banana suit, Scooby Doo and Shaggy, and the group of six old women all wearing fluffy bunny ears.  All of whom I could see out my car window as I paid the seven dollars to park.  As we inched through the lot, people gushed around and past our car on their way to the starting line.  We were a big rock stuck in the middle of some mad stream.

We parked, fumbled nervously with our number bibs for a few minutes, gave each other one last look that said, “Why are we doing this again?,” and jumped into the flow.  We didn’t know it right then, but we wouldn’t actually be out of that flow until the moment we got back into the car, three hours later.

We soon folded into the enormous crowd stretching down South Congress to wait for the start.  Bored and a little nervous, I started looking around to see if I could tell who the other newbies were.  I thought I had it figured out; about a third of us were actually wearing our snazzy new Cap 10 K tee-shirts.  Yes, these must be the freshmen.  But the mystery was solved with certainty when the announcer yelled “Go!” and a few of us actually jogged a step or two, then stopped, realizing that nobody was going anywhere.  It would take a further sixteen minutes, to be exact, inching along in the tittering crowd, to actually reach the start line where we could begin running.  To her credit, and my relief, Julia did not die of embarrassment at our false start.  And next year we’ll know: play it cool.

Everything felt better once we got our feet moving.  Over the bridge and only a few blocks up Congress we spotted our fabulous friends Dave And Meg on the sidewalk.  ”It’s the LOVES!!!,” Meg sang happily, and we blew movie-star kisses back and forth.  I snuck a glance a Julia, she was smiling.

Speaking of Julia, she’s recently taken an interest in not talking to me when we’re in public, at all.  And she’s excelling at it.  So to keep myself entertained as we ran, I started eavesdropping around.

“Ever since I had the uterine ablation I don’t even get periods any more,” bragged the diminutive redhead in front of us.

“You’re so lucky Maryanne!”  The others all agreed.

A mother to our right lied to her about-seven-year-old boy, “Honey, come on, running is way easier than walking, I promise!”

And behind us, a guy with sleeve tattoos, everywhere-piercings, and very creative facial hair told his friend, “So once I get the coop built I can finally move them out of the house.”

I would need another passtime.

I started looking to the sidelines, past our co-runners, to the spectators who lined the route.  I wondered what compelled them to be there, to get up (almost) as early as we did just to come watch.

Of course there were the water people, teams of HEB or Whataburger or whatever employees, probably — hopefully — being paid to be there giving us cups of water and cheering us on.  There were families with signs: “You can do it Mimi!”  ”Run, Thomas, Run!”  They stood silently, peering intently at each of us as we passed, waiting for the one face they would recognize.  There were dozens of bands playing all sorts of music.  The odd homeless guy yelling about Jesus.  There were even a few snarks, hipsters who’d set up in their front yards with their ironic beards and skinny jeans to scoff clevernesses to their magenta-haired girlfriends.  I’m sure we provided them with lots of good material.

But then, just when I’d begun placing these people and their motives for being there neatly into categories, I saw a woman who didn’t fit into any of them.  Mid to late fifties, dressed in boots and jeans and sunglasses, standing completely alone.  The thing is, she was cheering.  Cheering everybody who passed by.  Everyone.  No sign, no searching-for-someone-in-particular look on her face, no Whataburger shirt.  Just cheering us on.  ”You can do it!!  Way to go!!  Don’t stop!!  You can do it!”  Top of her lungs.  I figured there must be more to the story, surely she didn’t just come out to cheer complete strangers?

Then there was another one, about a mile further on.  A woman, mid thirties, alone, cheering loudly.  I tried to conjure her story too, but couldn’t quite.

Another half mile, yet another unaffiliated cheerleader.  I reached for my phone, determined to take a picture of the next one I saw.  Which I did, a half mile later:

And then a mile or two later, another.  With a cowbell:

From what I can tell, these people just showed up to cheer.  Just like us, they drove downtown, they sat in traffic, they paid to park, they walked to a spot on the course.  And then they just stood there cheering.

Which leaves you with two choices, really.  Either they are completely insane, or they are possibly the best people on earth.

But they don’t look insane to me (not that that’s a reliable test, I realize).  Which leaves the second option.  Pondering Cowbell Lady as we neared the finish line, it suddenly occurred to me.  Maybe these women — and they were all women — are just broken, broken in the best possible way.  Which is to say, perhaps in the distant or near past, life broke them into pieces and then, with the help of a dear friend or two, they were able to put themselves back together.  I imagined divorces, addictions, losses, abuses, deaths. And then I imagined the friend who came alongside, sitting quietly or cheering loudly, which ever was needed in the moment.  Bringing food, texting love, meeting for coffee, sitting and listening, challenging and inspiring to action, hugging.  All the things amazing friends do.

You are going to get through this.  You are stronger than you think.  I know it sucks.  But you can do it.

And then I imagined Cowbell Lady and the others years on, today, healed and somewhat whole again.  One of them turned down an invitation to breakfast, another skipped church, yet another got up way earlier on a Sunday than she liked to.  Wanting only, somehow, to pass along the tremendous gift to someone else. Or 17,000 someone elses.

Standing in their spots, clanging cowbells and clapping hands and screaming at the top of their lungs and jumping up and down.  A prayer, an ecstatic celebration, a brief and blissful re-entry into the pure and perfect world of Encouragement.  Once ordinary mortals like you and me, now transformed into angels by the impossible grace they received through the words of their friends.

You can do this.  I know it’s hard.  But you’re almost there.  Do not give up!

I want to be one of them when I grow up.  If I grow up.  I’ve been broken, and I’ve been given tremendous encouragement by angels in my own world, and I’ve been healed a thousand times as a result.  So I can’t think of a more worthy ambition for my life than to become the sort of angel who gives up a morning to cheer on total strangers.

But for whatever reason, I haven’t yet sprouted those wings.  Maybe someday.

“Daddy?” Julia broke her silence just seconds before we reached the finish. “After we cross the line, can we go back around and cheer people on?”

Maybe it’s a girl thing.

I had to look it up.  The name of the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  I used to know it, but in the years since I stopped being a practicing Christian that memory space seems to have been written over.

Today is Holy Saturday.

I’m not impressed by that.  I think they should have thought a little harder.  Holy Saturday strikes me as lazy, phoned-in.  Some committee in The Dark Ages, completely spent from the unbelievable hard work of coming up with the names Ash Wednesday, Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, were gathering their things to leave when someone said, “Wait! Guys! We’re not done yet!  We still need a name for this day!”  Someone at the table waved a bored hand, “I dunno Frank, just call it Holy Saturday, who cares?”  Everyone moaned in agreement, and that was that.

I don’t think anybody really cares about Holy Saturday, because nothing happened on that day.  No death, no resurrection, no drama, just nothing.  But this year, today, I’m feeling Holy Saturday to my core.  Right now it’s that nothing that’s speaking to me.

The other day I watched a documentary about U2, focused on a specific period in their lives.  The band they had been was no longer working for any of them, and they had no clue what to do about it.  Months and years of trying to re-imagine themselves had failed.  No matter how hard they worked to get something, they had nothing.  Except depression, anxiety, and an increasing feeling that it was all about to be over for good.

Then one day, out of nowhere, the riff for “One” appeared. They all locked in on it, and the vision for Achtung, Baby instantly unfolded before all their eyes.  They were reborn, completely.

But here’s what struck me.  Bono said later, looking back on that desperate time, “In order to find what’s next you have to completely let go of what you once had.  Completely. And in between who you were and who you will be, in between what you had and what you will have, you’ve got nothing.  And that nothing is absolutely terrifying.”

Christians are bored with Holy Saturday because they forget that on that day, the disciples truly had nothing.  They weren’t dying eggs, they didn’t know that tomorrow was Easter.  They thought it was all over.  They had given their lives and their hearts to this man, this new ‘king,’ and he had died in shame and failure.  And on Saturday, as far as they knew, that was the end of the story.  Their identities, their plans, the futures, now gone.  Completely.

Nothing.

Peter and Andrew asked each other if they thought their dad still had the fishing boat or if he’d sold it yet.  Matthew wondered aloud if there were still openings at the agency.  Thomas doubted that there were.  John sat in the corner, quiet, tears running down his tired face.

Nothing.

No idea what’s coming next.  If anything.

Nothing Saturday is my holiday this year.  I’m renaming it.  I’ve got the right to.  Because right now I’m awash in Nothing.  Thursday night I sat on the porch with one of my very best friends as he cried desperate tears at the loss of his beautiful wife only three weeks ago, wondering what would come next for him and their two boys.  Yesterday I got an email from another old friend, describing in desperate detail his decision to leave his church and his faith and all the ways it’s left him lonely and confused (which, as you know if you’ve been reading my blog, is exactly my story as well).  Another very dear friend was laid off from a seemingly very stable job just two months ago, and now finds himself a fifty-something competing in a vicious job market with twenty-somethings.  A new friend, with whom I’ve quickly become very close, lost her 15 year old son in a drowning accident just last year and is now scrambling to figure out where to put all the love and energy and hope that once went into raising him.  And yet another friend has ended a romance of over three years because it had become toxic for both people involved, and now finds himself feeling very alone.

Nothing.

No idea what’s next.

That thing that once made me happy is gone.  That foundation I rested on, swept away.

So I’m gathering all these friends together in my heart today, on this Nothing Saturday, and we’re all sharing a big group hug.  You will forgive us if we didn’t shed many tears on Good Friday, we’re just sort of all cried out right now.  And we hope you understand if we don’t celebrate quite as loudly as you tomorrow, because for us there hasn’t yet been much of a resurrection.  Not yet.

So today is our day, sweet friends.  Nothing Saturday.  But we don’t have Nothing, not exactly.  We have each other, and we have the stories of countless others who have desperately flailed in Nothing, right up until the moment they finally found Something.

It will happen for us too.

We have hope.  We have stories.  We have each other.

And that is far from Nothing.

I don’t quite have my writing feet back under me yet, so I’m reposting my entry from Good Friday last year.  

For my friends.  One in particular.

M

We take big pieces of wood, cut them up into little pieces of wood, then glue them back together again to make big pieces.  That’s all there really is to making furniture.

I’ve always cherished these words, spoken to me by one of my mentors when I first visited his shop at age 23, a folksy bit of false humility thrown out there to help rescue this calling from all the lofty romantic rhetoric that usually engorges it.  There is nothing more charming than when a true master understates his art, like Lyle Lovett talking about “making up” his songs rather than writing them.

So it was a strange thing today suddenly to discover a deeper meaning to Louis Fry’s words.  But that’s what sometimes happens when you think while you work.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about loss lately.  A lot.  Today a good friend who knows this sent me this blog article by Julie Peters.  It begins on the floor, where we sometimes find ourselves broken and empty and completely undone by a tragic loss, lying in the rubble of what we thought we knew about our future, about what’s ours, about who we are and why we even matter.  All our instincts and all our friends tell us to get up, find the things that make you feel better, start building your house again.  Quickly.  Don’t wallow.

But Peters offers the griever something different, the image of a goddess from Hindu mythology called Akhilandeshvari, a name which translates as “Never Not Broken.”  The “Always Broken Goddess,” her very power derives from her brokenness, from her never ending willingness to tear herself apart and rearrange the pieces into something entirely new.  Every time she breaks she is free to imagine herself all over again, free of the ruts and routines that keep her from growing and changing and becoming ever greater.

We spend most of our lives terrified of unwanted change, of being broken, of losing what and who we have.  And still brokenness is thrust upon our unwilling stories, and we scramble in shame and panic to replace what we have lost, to glue the little pieces back together into something resembling what we had before.

But what if it’s true that the real power is simply in the willingness to be broken?  What if the only real opportunity to gain is through loss?  Would that change how we think, what we fear, how we live?

Today is Good Friday, when we are invited to meditate on the story of another god, one who became a man and allowed his human body to be broken and destroyed, though we are told that he could have stopped it at any time.  Those who believe in Jesus believe that he did not go alone into the grave, but that he took sin with him.  With the habits and routines of sin now dead, those who believe in him are now free, powerful, full of nothing but new possibilities.  Even as they lie on their backs, on the floor, in the rubble of their former lives.

No matter what you believe about Akhilandeshvari or Jesus, you have to acknowledge the wisdom in those stories.  There is nothing of any real value that we gain from going through life whole, strong, and always put together.  The stuff that matters, the really beautiful stuff like wisdom and patience and compassion and creativity and vulnerability and empathy and love and the list goes on and on, these things are only available to the broken.  They present themselves as new bricks for the one who is forced, or perhaps even chooses, to rebuild her life from a rubble strewn ground.

There is a pile of cherry wood on my shop floor as I write.  The boards are straight and massive and stunningly beautiful.  And I am about to take a saw to them.  To break them.

And later I will glue them back together, differently.  And I trust, because I have no choice but to trust, that what appears will be even more beautiful.