Aftermath

I still have a hard time believing that Texas got its ass kicked by some guy named Harvey. It isn't a tough enough name to bring down a state like Texas. It should have been Hurricane Clint or Hurricane Deathstar. That just needed to be said.

Once I finally had a moment to actually sit and think yesterday, I began to process the last week or so. That spilled over to the the last year, eighteen months, two years. In the last two years, we went through a citywide devastating flood in Columbia, SC. Then we moved across the country. Then my mom died. Then my Rheumatoid Arthritis flared out of control. All through that I battled severe depression. And now a region wide devastating flood in Houston. That is all in addition to the normal financial, psychological, and emotional stress involved in raising two teenagers and an active elementary kiddo - as well as watching a never-ending string of incidents making me believe the world has spun out of control. It has been a tumultuous, trying, and exhausting two years.

As I've tried to maneuver through this season, I have found it increasingly difficult to carry on. For the first time in my life, I have found myself asking questions that are quite uncomfortable. I have never been shy about my Christian faith. I have worked on church staff and am an ordained minister - although one who is not currently serving in that capacity. Throughout my life, I have lived synonymously with my faith. It is not something that I do weekly; it is woven into who I am. I have never resorted to prayer only in the toughest of moments. Attending church was not something done only as my world spiraled out of control. Yes, I allowed myself to drift in my ferocity of faith and I allowed things to enter my life that were against a Godly pursuit. But it was impossible to explain who I was to someone - to have them truly know me - without faith being a primary characteristic.

That faith has been tested and refined over the years. There were moments where I felt confused and abandoned. There were moments of startling clarity as I realized something I had been taught actually ran counter to the Bible. There were moments of intense anger over judgmental, hypocritical, legalistic people and their comments and behaviors. Through all of that, I could still separate the people from the faith. People are mean and stupid and selfish and misguided. They are going to misrepresent, misinterpret, and miscommunicate things. As long as I personally was in the right place, all that didn't matter.

The last two years have tested that. Yes, I have felt betrayed and abandoned by God's people. I have felt distant from church, hesitant to lower an ever-increasing barrier between me and others. But, more than that, I have felt betrayed and abandoned by God Himself. With each passing disaster, it became harder and harder to cling to my faith. Watching the already financially struggling city of Columbia suffer the blow of a devastating flood pained me. Hearing tales of vans plowing through crowds, gunmen shooting up clubs (in my beloved Orlando, no less), and bombers murdering innocent children sickened me.  Seeing my mom - this woman of faith - slowly deteriorate from unbeatable cancer silenced me. Crying out in pain and loneliness and hearing only a hollow echo instead of comforting words crippled me. A few mere months ago, I was a shell of myself. I literally sat weeping uncontrollably in a closet  I felt alone and worthless, ignored by friends and neglected by the God I served my whole life.

When it came to the time of me having to see that same destruction Columbia faced come to an even larger Texas region?  Instead of it knocking me further into a hole, it somehow emboldened me. I found my voice again.  I know that the series of posts I put up on Facebook consisted of silliness and jokes laced throughout the serious information. But that was a big step for me. I hadn't been able to produce anything even on that scale for so long. So what does that have to do with anything?

I am a story teller. I am the product of two storytellers. It is a part of me as much as my O+ blood, my black hair, and my light sheen from donut grease seeping up through my pores. It is something God gifted me with, and something that thrives the most when I am the most at ease with Him. It is little wonder than my voice fell silent so much in the last two years.  It still flashed when I was teaching for Kaplan or working on an event for my church (one of the rare times I dragged myself there). But mostly it felt like a fire that couldn't stay burning. It would spark and sputter and smoke and then fizzle. But during this last challenge, I found myself finally understanding that silence is not the same as abandonment. A lack of contact doesn't equal a lack of concern. And I could not be further away from being unloved.

Time and again, we found ourselves escaping tragedy without realizing it.  We came to recognize that the house we chose last May was the only house we looked at that remained (largely) unaffected by Harvey. We started getting supplies three days before the storm arrived, so we had everything we needed during those initial waves of rain and tornado warnings. When we had to evacuate on Monday, we could not reach the first place we headed. Each road we turned onto was rapidly filling with water - Heather would sometimes realize it mere feet in front of her and swing a U-Turn away from danger. That hotel and the area surrounding it ended up being flooded and isolated - and still is. The next hotel we headed to was full. It also ended up flooded. We landed at a crappy Crossland hotel and managed to wrangle their last room with two beds. We found supplies to supplement the ones we brought from home. And then we went out the next day and got other supplies to flesh out our anticipated long stay. Instead, we were able to map an escape to our friends Andrew and Natalie. As we were packing, I asked the family next door if they could use some of our food we had bought. They were a family with five kids who had evacuated from a flooded out region near Katy. When we realized that, we gave them all the food we had bought and most of what we had brought. We gave them the comforters we purchased, the snacks (their kids cheered), and even the Blu-Ray player we had gotten. Being able to help someone else while we were escaping our own challenges?  That was something special. We made it to our new place of refuge and experienced such generosity and love. And we also realized that the hotel we escaped was now isolated and blocked due to flooding - which was shocking, since it was fine when we left.

In addition, we were flooded (pun intended) by people offering us shelter, checking on us, trying to find out if we needed help. Twenty people offered us houses to stay in. TWENTY!  One day, between my phone and Heather's, the text notification chimes were ringing nearly non stop. As if Andrew and Natalie weren't generous enough by letting us disrupt their lives, they wouldn't let us help with groceries or a pizza payment. People from literally every era of my life contacted me at some point to check on us. My coworkers at Kaplan were incredible in covering for me and checking on me and doing everything they could to help from far away. You probably don't realize how healing this was. I have been so crippled by feeling alone. I felt like I only mattered to people when I could do something for them. Day after day I felt like I was slipping away and no one cared. I felt invisible. All I was good for was to drive kids places and do a lousy job keeping up with household chores - and virtually show up for work. If I disappeared, no one outside of my house would even care. I was completely floored to see that was not close to true. Each point of contact strengthened me. Every time someone sought me out to check on me or offer help, it further pushed away the dark.

All of that combined to pull me out of the dark shroud I had enveloped myself with. I recognized I had hardly been alone or abandoned. I cannot express how incredible it is to awake to this reality. I am not saying that the tragedy around me is better or that "it was all worth it for me to..." This is awful and sickening - the mark of a broken and twisted world crying out. But on a personal front, which really is all I can speak on, this event was renewing for me. That will allow me to start looking outward again, seeing where I can make a difference. Instead of being the death knell for my faith, it served to awaken it and rekindle it. I am not the man I was two years ago. My voice has been restored and I have a message to send. I have a hint of what it will be, and it thrills and frightens me. I have been both softened by trial and hardened as well. I am gentler and angrier. I am ready to fight for what is right, to oppose injustice and rage against wrongdoers. A different storm has broken inside.

I'm Retiring

At church today, the Pastor started a new series on the book of John.  Being a big fan of the Gospels, I appreciate that book.  However, I can honestly say that I have never done an in depth study on John.  I know that it is the "weirdest" of the Gospel books.  The first three are very straightforward narratives; John is more of a poetic emotional journey.  Pastor James pointed out some of the curious differences between John and the other Gospels: John has no exorcism stories, John has no parables, John never mentions the Apostle John by name.  This last point is one of the more interesting elements of the book.  Whenever it comes to a point in the story where John should appear, the author instead mentions "the Disciple who Jesus loved."

I have always found that strange.  Not strange like inappropriate or anything.  Just strange.  We know from the other Gospels that John was one of the closest circle of Jesus' Disciples.  There were several instances where Jesus took just Peter, James, and John with Him.  Jesus entrusted His mother to John at the crucifixion.  So John was closer to Jesus than most people, even more than the average Disciple.  But, still, it seemed like a weird way to identify yourself.  If John didn't want to call himself John, why didn't he say "me" or "I" instead.  (I doubt it was because he wasn't sure which pronoun case to use.  He did, after all, get the tricky who/whom thing figured out.)  Why go with a phrase like "the Disciple who Jesus loved?"  And wasn't that insulting to the other Disciples?  I mean, if I was Bartholomew, wouldn't it get tiresome to be constantly reminded that John was more special than me?  And don't give me that whole line of reasoning that these guys were the Disciples and they didn't have immature thoughts like that.  I think there are more than enough stories in the Gospels that refute that.  They get busted for arguing over who will be the greatest in Heaven.  James and John had their mom go and ask Jesus to put them in a special place in Heaven.  They chase kids away from spending time with Jesus.  They don't believe Jesus rose again.  They make a ton of boneheaded decisions.

So Pastor James addressed that very issue today.  And his explanation (cobbled together from his own thoughts and other sources I don't remember) follows thusly.  When we look in the other Gospels, we see John identified with a different nickname.  He and his brother, James, were tagged with "Sons of Thunder."  Now, if you were a wrestling tag team, that may not be so bad.  But if you are supposed to be a follower of a rabbi who is claiming to be the Messiah, that probably isn't the cred you hoped to attain.  What do you think of if someone is called a "Son of Thunder?"  What comes to my mind first of all is Thor, naturally.  At least in his early incarnations, Thor is brash and loud and impetuous and arrogant.  In the movie, he gets thrown down to Earth because of his hardheadedness.  He can be fun and he certainly is loyal.  But he doesn't think before he acts.  We see this even in the new line of comic books by Marvel where Thor gets stripped of his title and is basically left as some big dude wandering the Earth, trying to figure out what to do now.

So that's John.  Loud, temperamental, arrogant.  Is that an uncomfortable picture to paint of good ole St. John?  I mean, he's the guy lounging next to Jesus in The Last Supper.  He is all sissified and emasculated.  Hardly the kind of guy who would be labelled a troublemaker.  Again, how quickly we forget.  This is the same guy who wanted to rain down fire on an unbelieving community.  He wanted to get the choicest spot in Heaven so badly he had his mom ask Jesus for it.  And, later on in church history, he gets imprisoned, beaten up, and exiled to a deserted island.  (If you want to believe extra-biblical history, he may also have been burned with boiling oil.)  He may not have always been a boisterous talker.  Maybe he was quiet a lot, but when he got pushed to the limits he exploded like thunder.  Either way, his reputation was that he was not someone to be trifled with.

So, how did this person become the same guy who wrote John and the beautiful passages about love in 1 John?  That's exactly the reason that John chooses to identify himself the way he does in his book.  It is like he is constantly amazed at the transformation he underwent.  Instead of being known as a "son of thunder," he was now known as "the Disciple who Jesus loved."  He retired the former name and took on the new one.  He wanted everyone to understand that he was no longer the man he used to be.  That brash, explosive, angry young man was now completely changed by the love of Jesus.  When you look at it that way, it is not nearly so weird.  It isn't bragging.  It isn't boasting.  John was relating a similar opinion to that of Paul.  "If someone like this can change, then anyone can change."

All of this hit me in a profound way this morning because of a conversation I was having with my wife last night.  Heather had two days off back to back.  This rarely happens, mind you.  Rather than lounging around all day and taking a break, she spent most of the day organizing and purging our kitchen pantry.  When 10:30pm rolled around, she didn't feel like doing anything else and was sitting on the couch.  But she was still feeling a bit guilty about being lazy.  I disagreed with her assessment.  I said to her, "As a lazy person, I can definitely tell you that you are not lazy."  But then I took a pause.

For much of my life, I have been saddled with the label "lazy."  Sometimes other people would say it.  Many times I would say it.  I can honestly say that I have battled a lazy streak for much of my life.  I saw it manifest itself in my academics, where I did the least amount of work possible to get the grade I wanted.  It surfaced in my piano playing, where I played as long as it was easy and quit when it got hard.  I've seen it in jobs, in house upkeep, in tasks, in relationships, in diet.  Laziness has been a major struggle for me.  In much the same way, I have been labelled an "angry" person for much of my life.  Again, others would say this of me.  And I would say it of myself.  Another label I got tagged with was negative.  I was a human Eeyore.  I had several people (including a youth pastor) tell me I was the most negative person they had ever known.  All of those things were so accurate, I felt, that I pretty much saw myself that way.  I was an angry, lazy, negative person.  Those were not the only words I attributed to my life, but they certainly were ones that stood out the most.

I have spent a lot of time working on these things.  I know for a fact that for two years now, I have been making a concentrated effort on all of those struggles.  When we still lived in Orlando, I went to counseling with a wonderful man named Cary who helped me a great deal with those issues.  I remember talking to him one day and sharing a story.  In the middle of the story I said something like, "I'm an angry guy."  He stopped me right there and said, "Wait.  I want to dealt with what you just said."  He went on to say that he had counseled a lot of angry men.  And he never once thought of me as an angry man.  He said I was a guy that when I was pushed to my limits or was backed into a corner, I would explode to try to gain control of the situation.  (Sounds like the Sons of Thunder.)  But I was hardly an "angry man."  He pointed out that in all of our sessions, I had never raised my voice to him - even when I was upset with him.  He said that he actually thought of me as kind of quiet.  I had never heard anyone say that to me.

So, last night, I caught myself calling myself lazy.  Then I thought about it for a minute.  Let me share a series of numbers with you.  36.25, 36, 74.75, 71.50, 21, 50, 45.  Those are the hours I have worked over the last seven weeks at my "part time" job with Kaplan.  That doesn't count all of the hours I have to drive to get to tutoring clients.  It averages out to 47.7 hours a week.  That isn't lazy.  I am doing that while also trying to be the at-home parent, keep up with laundry, clean the house, cook dinner for my family and any other people who wander into our house.  I am training through three different curricula for Kaplan.  I have six tutoring clients.  At one point I had 46 classroom students between two classes.  That isn't lazy.  I barely watch television any more.  I have video games that haven't been touched in months.  I read books, but mostly while I am proctoring tests or waiting to pick up the kids.  That isn't lazy.

Lazy had become such a familiar label that I didn't even think about the fact it didn't even apply any more.  Then I looked at "angry."  Cary already had put a giant crack in that belief.  But assessing myself now, I know that I have largely shook that label.  I may still get upset or heated up at things.  But I don't explode anymore.  I don't yell.  In fact, today my daughter actually accused me of whispering to her during a disciplinary moment.  She was getting louder and louder.  I told her to stop yelling and she said, "I'm not going to whisper like you're doing."  Are you kidding me?  As this argument revved up, my kid actually thought I was being TOO QUIET.  That's not angry.

How about negative?  I am a melancholy personality.  I'm never going to be a super-outgoing guy.  But I know for a fact that I have a pretty positive outlook on life.  I don't look for the worst.  I don't expect the other shoe to drop all the time.  In fact, I try to encourage others as best I can.  My students have pointed this out time and again.  They are worried about their eventual test score and I keep on trying to lift them up. My evaluations reflect this.  The classes think I'm funny and fun.  That's not negative.  My wife gave me a super cool anniversary present.  She had fourteen individually wrapped presents (one for each year).  They each had a card saying why I got that item.  Several of them talked about how hard I worked (not lazy), how I made everyone laugh (not negative), how I encouraged her (not negative), and how I kept everyone's stress low (not angry, not negative).

Basically, between all of that stuff and the sermon today, I realized that I needed to retire some things.  Like the Apostle John, I need to hang up those terms that used to define me.  Through the transforming restorative power of Jesus Christ, I am not those things any more.  I am no longer Lazy.  I am no longer Angry.  I am no longer Negative.  I will not refer to myself that way.  And I will not accept it if anyone chooses to lay those charges on me.  I am a different man now.  I work hard, serve my family, love the people around me, and try each day to do better than the day before.  Those names are no longer accurate.  I am now "the man who Jesus loves."  And that is a name I will forever cherish.

40

Today I turn 40. 

I have been pretty vocal with people that this is not a happy occasion. I have no idea why, but I have a mental glitch that makes 40 seems very old. I have said that it feels like I am heading down the back side of the mountain of life. You can't even pretend to be in touch and cool when you are 40.  It has always been that way in my mind. 40 equals old. 

It has been worse for me lately. I really was down about turning 40. Sure, there are all of the usually qualifiers. "It's better than the alternative." "I've got my health, so that's great." And of course my older friends have chirped in with the, "You are young compared to me so shut up." I didn't say they were kind friends. 

I think part of my problem is that there are certain milestones that naturally lead to reflection. New Year's Day. Class reunions. Birthdays and anniversaries that end in 5 or 0. Frankly, I haven't liked what this reflection has shown. I am 40. What have I done? I don't have a career to speak of. I stay home with my kids. I haven't built anything - either physically or economically. It can be kind of disheartening. So 40 hasn't been much of a super happy fun thought. 

This past week the whole family was off. The kids had spring break, Heather was on vacation, and I was ... Um ... the usual. We decided to go to Orlando for the break. We had not been back since we moved to South Carolina in June. The original plan was to have a big 40th birthday bash one night. But living seven hours away makes it difficult to handle logistics. So instead we decided to see as many people as we could and do a bunch of stuff we had missed since we moved. 

So we went to a bunch of restaurants we used to frequent. We hit 4 Rivers Smokehouse and Flippers Pizza and Tijuana Flats. We went to Summit Church for Palm Sunday. We spent a day at Downtown Disney. We even got to try The Coop - the new restaurant by the 4 Rivers crew. All of that was awesome to experience. 

But what really made the week memorable was the time we got to spend with our friends. We didn't get to see everyone we wanted to see, but we did get to spend quality time with a bunch of people. By the time we wrapped up our roster of visits on Friday night, something had begun to dawn on me. I wake up as a very blessed 40 year old man. 

I like to poke fun at how often people use #blessed on their twitter and Facebook posts. But it really is the truest word I feel right now. I am blessed beyond belief. 

- I have a brilliant, beautiful, amazing wife who loves and supports me. She is pursuing her dream, and providing financially for our family through that. She is an example and model for her fellow residents - as well as medical students following in her path. She pushes me to be better and trusts me. 

- I have three incredible, gorgeous children. They are funny and talented and wonderful. I have the unbelievable honor of not only being their dad, but also spending every day with them. Yes, there are days where that honor feels more like a cruel punishment. And there are days I wish there were still bands of wandering gypsies I could sell them to. But, all in all, I cannot believe how lucky I am to have the time and relationship I have with them. 

- I have family who loves me beyond words. That is not limited to the family I was born with. It also includes my parents in-law, brothers and sisters in-law, cousins, uncles and aunts. As I grew into an adult, I was sad about how little I knew my extended family. But now I have such an abundance of extended family that it is impossible to keep up with all of them. My children have cousins who adore them and can't wait to see them - beautiful kids that will be lifelong friends. It is so wonderful. 

- I have friends, such sweet and faithful friends, that have been a part of my life for decades. It really struck me this week that I have multiple friendships of the intensity that some people will never find in their lives. These are people I would not hesitate to leave my children with. And they would trust me with their kids. I know that if something catastrophic happened and I called these people, they would be in a car driving to assist before I hung up. (Of course they would have to wade through about three levels of family who also responded.) They have kids that love my kids like brothers and sisters. As a dad, I cannot adequately express how much these kids and parents mean to me. 

- Most importantly I have a God who loves me to such a ridiculous, illogical, unfathomable level that he sent his Son to rescue me from a life of hopelessness, emptiness, and frustration. He loved me no matter how unlovely, hateful, irresponsible, lazy, and unfaithful I was. I find it quite appropriate that my 40th birthday falls on Easter this year. I get to celebrate my special day on the most special day. I don't have to fear getting older because of what happened on Easter. I don't ever have to feel alone or unloved because of Easter. And I can realize just how silly it is to be down about turning 40 because of Easter. 

So happy birthday to me. I truly believe I am the most blessed man around. Thank you all for the gift you have given me by being a part of my life. 

A Cry in the Night

We are all there from time to time. We may try to deny that fact. It may be because we see it as a weakness or a lack of faith. Maybe we believe we need more vitamins or sunlight or a vacation. So we do our best to ignore it. We stuff it down deep and keep on playing a role that we think the world wants us to play. We go into our jobs and nod at our coworkers. At church we act super holy and smile, or super penitent and solemn.  Modern social media presents us with another opportunity to put on an act.  We either hide our true feelings beneath a flurry of meaningless status updates and Buzzfeed links or we flood our friends with a neverending deluge of griping and moaning.  

I'm referring to the blues, depression, feeling down.  It seems that there are cycles that the average person goes through, happiness and sadness.  But this feeling I'm talking about is more than that.  It is that soul-crushing emptiness and despair that doesn't get fixed with chocolate or a collection of cute animal pictures.  I would wager everyone knows what that feels like.  You can be super religious or not even believe in God.  There are times when something seems to go wrong in our brains and we just take up residence in the darker places.  

We have seen this throughout history.  The prophet Elijah was so depressed at one point (when most people thought he should have been the happiest) that he wanted to die.  Israel's king Saul would go into deep funks.  The Apostle Paul certainly seemed to battle gloominess.  Abraham Lincoln supposedly suffered from two major depressive breakdowns.  In short, it isn't uncommon.  In Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan had his characters traverse the Slough of Despond (Despair).  It was pictured as a virtually impassible dark, wet, marshy area.  What a wonderful picture of despair! (And another argument for why books rock.)  You literally get bogged down and can't break loose.

To me, that bog has a vortex at the bottom that sucks me further into the darkness.  It becomes harder to escape and easier to believe the voices that echo in the gloom.  Oh yes, the voices.  How could I forget those?  They are the ones that we are able to block out most of the time with television and music and iPhone apps.  But they come out with a vengeance in the dark.  They are hateful and destructive.  They remind us of our failures and minimize our successes.  They rip and shred and bruise.  It seems so wrong that something so hateful could exist in our own heads.  (Hateful self-talk should be the biggest argument against the theory that humankind does anything possible to survive.)  These accusing tones live deep in the bog and feed on darkness.  And they become louder and louder.

To anyone who can honestly say that they have never battled depression, first say a silent prayer of thanks.  You are a fortunate soul.  Next, know that there things you can do to help those who are struggling.  Don't judge them.  It isn't as if they went looking for this.  Second, don't try to give them advice on how to shake it.  Trust me, they have thought of everything you could offer.  They already are beating themselves up for struggling.  They already are wondering why thinking happy thoughts, listening to uplifting music, and praying isn't curing the problem.  They already are convinced they are doing something horribly wrong.  So your suggestions, no matter how well intentioned they are, will come across as judgment.  Third, try to understand that this is not just being in a bad mood or being down.  It is something that the person cannot shake, no matter how hard they try.

Picture it this way.  Imagine you fall into a deep well.  It is dark and gloomy inside - darker than you can believe.  The further you slip down into the well, the darker it gets.  How can the darkness get darker?  Yet it does.  It is completely black.  The darkness actually feels like it has weight, crushing you.  The voices get louder and the way out seems further and further away.  Hardly a pretty picture.  How can one climb out when they cannot see where they are going?  In that much darkness, climbing out and climbing deeper seem the same.

The worst part about depression, despair, the blues is the lack of hope.  Hope is such an unbelievably powerful concept.  I don't think we actually think about just how strong hope is.  One of the themes of The Hunger Games trilogy is the value of hope.  There are some great discussions with President Snow (the evil despot) about hope in regards to Katniss Everdeen (the reluctant hero).  He talks at first about how hope is valuable, even to a dastardly villain.  "Hope is the only thing stronger than fear."  He recognizes that his subjugated people need hope or they will lose the will to live.  The threat of death would be meaningless to a person who has no life worth living.  "A spark is fine, as long as it is contained."  It is almost how adding a little salt to a chocolate dish enhances the flavor.  A little hope makes the fear more real.  However, he recognizes that the hope he offered is getting out of control by the second book/film.  Instead of being a spark, she has become a beacon.  "Fear does not work as long as there is hope."

This is where I believe our role lies when helping a person in these sloughs.  We are to offer them hope.  Going back to that dark well I was describing earlier.  Imagine if you were to fire a flaming Hawkeye-style arrow into the wall of that pit.  What happens?  Does it provide a way out?  Nope.  Does it fix the problem?  Not at all.  Does it remove all the darkness?  Negatory, good buddy.  But it offers light.  It offers hope.  It points the way up and out.  It gives a little brightness to their world.  The truth it, you never know just how important your words can be to someone.  You don't know what they are going through, what they are struggling with.  It could be that your words are just what they needed to hear.

The other day, I was in the middle of one of these painful patches.  I struggle from time to time with depression.  I am a melancholy personality type, so I drift in that direction anyway.  But I have been battling for a while.  For almost two years, I have been on an anti-depression/anti-anxiety pill.  It has made a world of difference.  But there are still breakthrough moments that defy even the best chemistry can offer.  Last Friday, I went on a field trip with Gabe's class to the local park.  We hiked through the woods and then did a scavenger hunt.  That was followed up by the Daddy/Daughter Dance the same night, and then coaching Gabe's soccer team on Saturday morning.  To a normal person, this would be a reasonable amount of activity.  But, for a person suffering with rheumatoid arthritis, it was the definition of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point theory.  I had been battling with allergies and minor illnesses for a couple of weeks.  The Friday/Saturday combo pushed me over the edge into a full-fledged RA flareup.  RA is a weird thing.  It isn't strictly swollen joints.  It is your immune system trying to destroy your joints.  It does crazy awful things to your body.  Medication for it actually destroys your immune system to stop this destruction.  This leaves you vulnerable to other things - like infections, illnesses, etc.  Mix all of that up, and I was down for the count.  I was exhausted.  I was down.  Sunday, I slept in until 11:30am - over 12 hours.  To anyone who knows me, this is unheard of.  Monday, I woke up, dropped the kids off at school, came home and went back to bed until almost noon.  Yesterday the same thing happened.

Fatigue, pain, illness, flare-up.  I was in a bad state.  And last week I started getting very dark in my mind.  I was doing all the right things to control it.  I was fighting my hardest.  I wasn't letting thoughts take root.  I was fighting the voices.  But it felt like I was getting pulled under the waves and was helpless to escape.  Finally on Monday night, I was laying in bed and trying to sleep with the voices pounding in my head.  Heather was laying there, falling asleep.  I spoke up and told her just how dark things were getting.  I had told her about the struggle of the past week and a half, then about the pain I was wrestling.  She had been a very supportive wife and friend - doing all the things she should do in this situation.  But in that moment, I was crying (literally) for a rescue.  I told her how the voices were continually telling me I was worthless and pointless.  I was explaining how when I am at my best, I am out there with people and teaching and investing in young people.  The opportunities here are limited for that.  My latest Kaplan class had just ended (a correlation I had not recognized until just that moment).  So I was feeling alone and isolated and worthless.  That sends me into my default mode of pulling further and further away into my dark hole.

After listening to these things, she responded.  "David, you are the glue that holds this family together.  Without you, I don't even know how we would function.  The only reason I am able to do what I do is because I never worry about things getting taken care of because I know you are doing them.  Your kids love you to pieces.  I love you.  You are anything but useless."  It was as if she had selected the multi-flaming-arrow move from Hawkeye and launched them all into the wall of my pit.  The darkness exploded with light.  Those words were so incredible and important to hear.  If you have read this blog for a length of time, you know that I have shared my efforts to become a better man, a more reliable husband, a more tender and loving father.  To have my wife say those things to me in my deepest moment of need?  They demonstrated just how far I had come.  They didn't erase the last ten days.  They didn't fix everything.  But they offered me light and love, and so importantly hope.

The last couple of days, I have grabbed onto those words and used them to gain footholds out of my well.  I have used them as weapons to fight off the accusing tones in my head.  And I find myself slowly emerging from the darkness.  More and more, I am realizing just how important we are to each other.  The words we say, the actions we take.  We don't have to be doctors to heal.  Our pastor back in Orlando used to say, "We were not meant to live this life alone."  I am fully convinced that those words are true.  (Sadly, he forgot those words - something that still breaks my heart every time I think of him.)  We were not meant to live alone.  The seminal television show Lost had as its mantra, "Live together; die alone." (Although, some of the most heartbreaking deaths occurred when they were together.)  We never know when a person near us is on the verge of losing it.  We never know how our words may be just what someone needs to hear - or what someone WILL need to hear later.  There are things that people have said to me in my past that still serve as flaming arrows and anchors for me.  It could be Charles Wise saying, "You're a good man, David.  You're a good man." Or it could be Cary Smith tenderly commenting, "You are not an angry man.  I have seen angry men.  You are not angry.  You are a man who lashes out when he feels out of control.  But you are definitely not an angry man."  (That was the first time anyone had said that to me - countering an assessment that had been all too frequent in my life.)  Those words will last my life.  The ones my wife said the other day will go into that treasure chest.  They are words of life and hope.

The same time that I was dealing with all of this, a friend of mine, Adel, from my Apple days posted on his Facebook a story about his life.  He was in a dark place too and something that could be seen as completely random and minor helped to shine new light on his situation.  It really drove home the reminder that we need to be there for each other.  I appreciated his transparency.  And, truthfully, it is what led me to write this.  To anyone striving to be a writer, you know how hard it can be to write.  The negative self-talk rings loud when a writer sits down at his computer, squelching many a good effort.  So imagine writing about depression.  It is a minor miracle that this post ever got finished, and it is a testimony to how important I think it is.  I have often joked that I only hope my life can serve as a warning sign to others.  I truthfully do hope that my failures and weaknesses can help others escape or avoid those.  (Shoot, I would guess ninety percent of the arguments I have with Josiah is trying to keep him from repeating my mistakes and his insistence that he won't, as he does.)  Today, I doubly hope this is true.

For those of you struggling, let me offer you hope.  You are not alone.  You have great worth and value.  There are people all around you that love you and think the world of you.  For those of you not struggling, love those around you.  Don't give up an opportunity to speak words of encouragement to those people you love.  You may think they will tire of hearing you love them, respect them, need them.  But your words may be salvation to them.  And to all of us, take this as a challenge to embrace the chance to change someone's life.  It is so easy to slip into sarcasm and negativity and criticism.  We see that all the time on Facebook and Twitter and the Interwebs.  For once, put that aside and be genuine and truthful and love on someone around you.  Tell them how important they are.  Tell them how talented and beautiful they are.  Give them hope.  Richard DeVos owns a really crappy basketball team, in the Orlando Magic.  But he once said, "Few things in the world are more powerful than a positive push. A smile. A world of optimism and hope. A 'you can do it' when things are tough."  Those are true words.  Go spread some light in the dark.

15 Things A Relocated Floridian Appreciates About "The North"

I was thinking this morning that I really have enjoyed our relocation to Columbia, SC.  If you take out the facts that I hardly have any friends up here, that just about all our family lives a major drive away, that I'm stuck with coverage of USC sports instead of UCF, and that we all really miss our friends in Florida, things are awesome.  Living "up north" isn't so bad.  I've found many things that I actually prefer living in the northern reaches of our country.

[Ed. Note: We realize that South Carolina is not "up north" by any stretch of the imagination.  But, take into consideration that it is eight hours north of where the writer grew up.  Moving eight hours north of Columbia puts you in Cleveland.  Think about that.]

1. You can leave cold food from the grocery store or chocolate in your car for a few minutes to run another errand without worrying that you will come out to a pool of nastiness in your trunk.
2. You can make it all day without the ice in your cup of soda or tea melting.
3. Hot drinks are extra good because they warm you up when it is cold instead of adding to the already severe case of heat stroke you've developed in the middle of January.
4. You don't have to mow your grass for months when it is dead due to the many random freezes.  And it apparently comes back as grass - not weeds.
5. Speaking of grass, you can roll around in the grass without itching all over or worrying you will get a "grass cut" (similar to a paper cut, but with a grass blade).
6. No lizards. 
7. It SNOWS!  Everyone up here said that it "hardly ever snows" in Columbia.  Yes, but by definition, that means it DOES snow at some point.  Growing up in Florida, in NEVER ever snows in Florida.  And don't try to tell me that just because a couple of flakes fell in Pensacola or Tallahassee and were on your car windshield for six hours that it snowed.  Unless it covers everything, it isn't snow. We've already had it snow twice here - one "Florida" snow and one real one that stuck around for five days.
8. SNOW AGAIN!  People north of us hate snow because it never goes away.  But having it come a few times a year is pretty cool.  The fact that the South is completely unprepared to handle any level of snow also means that you get to have entire days off to play in the snow.  That rocks.
9. No Halloween Horror Nights commercials.  
10. No Morgan and Morgan: For the People commercials or billboards.
11. Elevation.  The land is not flat.  This is cool to me.  I never liked the fact that the highest point within fifty miles of me was a dump.
12. Teenagers answer me by saying, "Yes sir."  Every school I've taught at with Kaplan, that has been consistent.  Politeness is underrated in America.  (Could I have sounded more elderly there?)
13. Gas expenses are much lower.  One, the gas is cheaper.  Two, things aren't so far away that a thirty minute drive is a normal expectation.  Thirty minutes here gets us to the other side of the city.  An hour almost gets us to Charlotte.  It takes me five to ten minutes to get 90% of where I need to go.
14. History.  There are Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields all over the state.  Sure, there are a lot of people that don't like the way the first one of those turned out.  But as a history buff, I like to experience areas that existed before Walt Disney built a theme park.
15. South Carolina has a cool logo.  I'm not talking about the university (although they also have a cool logo and great colors).  The state itself has the palmetto tree with half moon logo that is everywhere.  At first, I was confused.  I asked our realtor why South Carolina had a logo that looked like a Muslim symbol.  His snarky reply was, "It was designed by a Muslim."  Then he laughed because that was so ridiculous.  Or because I was so dumb that I even thought that in the first place.  Eventually, though, the logo grows on you.  It is everywhere - usually in blue and white.  And it looks really cool.  Florida doesn't have a cool logo.  What would Florida even use?  An orange? A sun? An aligator? A bag of cocaine?

Yes, there are many things I don't enjoy about South Carolina.  I hate mustard based BBQ sauces. The taxes on cars, restaurants, income. Racists.  And there are many things that seem identical to Florida - terrible drivers, massive potholes in the road, bugs.  But there is also a lot to enjoy in the Palmetto State.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sit in carline and not melt.  OOOO, there's another thing...

Out of the Box: Friends

I'm sitting here waiting for the movers and thinking about leaving my home.  I'm not talking about this house.  After living at 19 different addresses in the last 20 years, I have gotten over mourning a move.  I'm talking about leaving Orlando.  Ever since I fled South Florida (the region, not the university) for UCF back in 1992, I have seen Orlando as my home.  In my adult life, I have lived in Tampa for four years, Tallahassee for two, Jacksonville for one, and Orlando for fourteen.  I love this city.  I love the vicious afternoon storms that have numbed me to the fear of a "real" tropical storm.  I love the close proximity to a major university, a decent downtown, and even a tourist mecca.  I love being within reasonable driving distance to ever city in the state I would need to go to.  I even love that our unofficial city mascot is a cartoon mouse, even though I think said mouse would get his tail kicked in a fight with Bugs Bunny.

The point is, Orlando is awesome.  We have loved it.  We have had to move before, but there was always the expectation that we would be back very soon.  This time is different.  This feels final.  We know that there really is no way to move back for at least seven years.  Residency is three years and Heather's fellowship is another four - something they don't even have available in Orlando.  At that point, Josiah will have graduated from high school, Natalie will be in high school, and Gabe will be entering middle school.  (Did you just have a panic attack at that?  Me too.)  The even bigger thing to consider is that Heather is entering a specialized field of pediatrics.  She is going to be a pediatric pulmonolgist who works with kids with cystic fibrosis, severe asthma, and premie babies.  There are entire states without a single doctor of that type working there.  Orlando has several practices located here.  Isn't there some responsibility to go where people need the physician instead of just where the physician wants to live?  We think so.  That means that this move is most likely NOT going to have a return relocation. Sure, we will be back to Orlando.  But not as frequently as we would like.  Heather has limited vacation.  My mom is moving back to West Palm Beach.  Heather's parents like outside Jacksonville.  If we are coming to Florida to visit, those two cities are the most likely landing points.  We recognize all of this and have accepted it.  But that is why this has been so hard.

I spend a lot of time talking about restaurants and churches and stuff like that.  Yes, I will miss the ability to go to Four Rivers BBQ any time I want (except Sundays - unless they cater a church event on Sunday).  I will miss Tijuana Flats and Tenders and Jeremiah's Italian Ice.  I will definitely miss our church.  I will miss being close to THREE Apple stores.  But, that's not the real reason it is hard to leave Orlando.  I had planned on writing about jobs I had here and churches we attended here.  But the thing that kept popping up was the collection of friends we made over the years.  I have some truly amazing friends that I love dearly.  Leaving them stinks.  I know we all have Facebook (except for Aaron, who is reading this thanks to the link on Google+).  And I've had people helpfully offer, "You'll make new friends."  That's what I tell my kids to make them feel better.  But it never works on them either.  I don't WANT to make new friends.  I WANT to pack all my friends up in this truck in my driveway and take them with me.  But I don't want to be negative or sad.  So I am going to celebrate my friends instead.

I feel like I have had several different eras in Orlando.  First, there was the overarching UCF experience.  Within that, there were actually two distinct experiences.  There were the first two years when I was in Student Government.  Then there were the second two years when I was in the BSU/BCM/BSM/BCU/Baptist Group and attended FBC Oviedo as a student.  Totally different groups of people.  I still keep up with some of the SG guys, mainly through Facebook.  But the BCM people have been my friends for nearly two decades.

• Matt and Sarah Sharp - I have known Matt since Kindergarten.  Literally.  We were good friends at King's Academy together.  I used to go hang out at his house and play with his Star Wars toys when I wasn't allowed to watch the movies.  He left TKA after 2nd Grade.  But we still would see each other at various academic competitions ("Nerd Games").  Then we went to 9th grade together.  We ran into each other visiting UCF in our junior years.  And we roomed together in our freshman year of college.  We were in honors classes together and he invited me to BCM.  He was in my wedding.  We have been friends for almost 35 years.  He is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met.  He is hilarious and always good for a discussion on sports or movies or comic books.  And his wife Sarah is very giving and kind.  She had done our family photo shoots for years.  She brings us clothes for Gabe when her son outgrows them.  She has done tons of special things for us and our kids over the years.  Great friends.
• Allen and Candy Turner - I became good friends with Allen during my junior year in college and  roomed with him my senior year.  Way before they started dating, Candy used to be part of the cadre of BCM students who would come to our house to watch Magic games on our big tv.  Allen has been one of my very best friends over the years.  I was in his wedding; he was in mine.  He was my co-best man.  The funny thing is that over the years, Candy became one of my wife's best friends.  They got close when we attended church together about seven years ago.  We watched their son all day when their daughter was born.  We have babysat each other's kids.  We would hang out together ever New Year's Eve.  We would play Dutch Blitz together.  Their kids went to the same preschool as ours.  I cannot even list all of the ways they are special to us without tearing up.  Their family is one of the five hardest things to leave about Orlando.  I must move on.  It's getting dusty in here.
• There are other BCM friends that I still see around town like Byron and Bern Kirkpatrick, Mark Dao, Jeff Kipi and his family, and Jamie Waters.  That is one of the really neat things about having decades of history in a city.  You go to Target, go to Publix, go to church and run into people you know.  We have common friends.  If we ended up at a party with any of these people, I could spend hours talking to them.  That familiarity is hard to match.  

After I graduated from UCF, I moved to Tampa and then Jacksonville.  After about five years, we moved back to Orlando where I worked at First Baptist Oviedo for over four years.  There were some overlaps with my BCM crew at this point.  But I also forged dozens of new friendships from that staff experience.  It is actually hard to believe how many people I know from this time of my life.  This is the Target crew or Mall crew.  I go to Target on a Wednesday afternoon to kill time in between getting the kids and run into someone from FBC Oviedo.  It happens about twice a month.  They may be from First Years Preschool, from the staff, or a church member who I knew from a project or event.  These are people like Ron and Dana McKay, Shannon Chambley, Marlene Olsen, Diane Strathdee, Jim Wadley, Cheryl Pavuk, Debbie Ellison or Schmidt, Randy and Donna Moore and family, Jill Myers, the Mannas.  I also taught college Sunday School for years there.  I had tons of students that came through those classes that have now gotten married and had kids.  I watched them start as freshmen and blossom into brilliant and tremendous adults, workers, parents.  Some of them have ended up as teachers in the area, some are ministers, some are counselors.  I have had kids in preschool with their kids.  One of my favorite things as a teacher is to see the end result of a student.  It isn't the frustration you have when they are learning.  It is seeing that person as an adult out there and changing the world.  That is such an amazing feeling.  I also became very good friends with Tiffany and Erik Wieder.  I worked with Tiffany at the church.  I remember when she first started there.  Her life had been so tumultuous and she seemed shell-shocked.  It was a friendship of mutual teaching, though.  I would talk to her about some things, and she would talk to me about others. She helped me to understand how wrong my worldview was when it came to issues of compassion and social awareness.  I helped her to realize meat was worth eating and there was hope for a better future.  Once she and Erik got together, I had the pleasure of watching that relationship blossom.  I did their premarital counseling and performed their wedding.  I remember having a broken heart when their first child nearly died after being born early.  Heather and I were in Jacksonville for Christmas and just desperately wanted to drive to Orlando just to hug them.  To see this boy now, you would never know he was ill.  He is thriving and rambunctious.  They have a beautiful baby girl, in addition to Tiffany's stellar teenaged daughter.  We love their whole family.  We can easily kill hours and hours talking.  I'm almost disappointed to go to a movie with them because we miss out on talking.  

Thanks to FBC Oviedo, I became friends with Charles Wise.  I remember the very first time I sat down with him was when he took all of the secretaries out to lunch.  (What?  I was a secretary.  Want to fight about it?)  I heard about his counseling ministry and was blown away.  I went home after work and told Heather, "I met this guy today who run a counseling ministry.  He was awesome.  I know it is strange to say this, but I really want to work with him at some point."  At first, I did some freelance graphic design work for him.  As years went on, we talked more and more.  In 2006, we ended up starting Defender Ministries together.  For the next seven years, we have ministered together and grown to be very deep friends.  I can't count the number of lunches we have had together. (But I can count the number I have paid four.  Five.)  We have traveled all over the place to speak at Defender events, run seminars and breakout sessions, and scout locations for future projects.  There is very little that we don't share with each other.  I don't know if I have ever had a deeper friendship.  He knows almost everything about me and I know tons and tons about him.  He encouraged me so much to develop my skills in writing and design and speaking.  We have worked together for over seven years and we have never had a fight.  We have had maybe two disagreements.  We don't always see eye to eye.  But I believe there is such a mutual respect that we still value what the other person says even if they are wrong.  Through the Defender experience, I became much closer friends with Brad Crawford, the BCM Director at UCF.  We would drive the vans for him to National Student Week.  Brad had me come and speak once a year at BCM.  He would make me pulled pork, although not as frequently as he should have.  I also further cemented my friendship with Aaron and Jill Morrison.  I knew Aaron as a student in BCM and worked with Aaron at FBC Oviedo.  We became good friends through our time working together.  But our friendship got deeper after those years while I was working at Defender.  It was probably because we didn't "have to" see each other and "chose to."  I ended up performing Aaron and Jill's wedding.  When they started going to Summit with us, we again intensified our friendship.  They came over twice to help us pack, just because.  They went to Islands of Adventure with us just to help us have a better (and cheaper) time. Two of the most giving people I have ever met.  

The last four years we spent in Orlando seem like an entirely different era.  We had this huge history with FBC Oviedo, BCM, Defender which all blended together because they pulled from the same pool.  Then things shifted.  We stopped going to FBC Oviedo and ended up at a church plant.  I had to get other jobs to subsidize my income from Defender.  I started working at International Community School and Apple Retail.   Heather was preparing to go to medical school, which meant we were "on a clock" of sorts.  Our church still had some familiar faces - the Kirkpatricks, the Turners, the Sharps, and Randy and Susan Gillis who we were familiar with, but not super close to.  It turned out to be a wonderful shift of experience.  Our friendships with the Turners, Kirkpatricks, and Sharps got a jolt and developed a new dimension, with Heather getting to know all the principles better. We got to realize the Gillis family was a blessing sent from God.  And I got to make a whole new group of friends that had nothing to do with my college years.  Apple was a wonderful experience.  It ranks as one of my favorite jobs ever.  I still would go back and work there part time if I could.  I loved just about every day there.  Plus, I got to meet people like Neil Otto, Chris Anenome, and Veronica Fish.  ICS was a great place for me.  I got to teach and invest in the students there.  I also got to know the teachers and become friends with them - Carrie Baker, Wendy Bowerman, Shelly Uner, William and Jessica Eggleston.  I also spent time with the parents like Wendy and Steve Kreidt.  And I met Greg Willson, the most bizarre example of "It's a Small World" of them all.

When I got hired to teach Bible, the class originally was all taught by "Mr Willson" who I assumed was an old man who would hate me.  The kids were all hacked to get split up.  The administration decided to have half of the class with Greg, and half with me.  The half with me was mad.  I figured I would be walking into a landmine.  When I met Greg, I realized I had guessed severely wrong.  He was younger and awesome.  I loved getting to school early for my class just to talk and joke with him.  He was a part-time minister and a musician and an Apple fan.  I kept telling Heather how much I liked Mr Willson.  One day, she picked me up from school and he was walking by.  I said, "There goes Mr Willson."  She looked up and said, "Wait.  What is his first name?"  I told her it was Greg.  She asked if he was from Middleburg.  I said that quite frankly I didn't know.  He had indicated Jacksonville.  She told me she was in band with him.  Uh, what?  I walked over and got him to come to the car.  It was true.  They had gone to high school together and been in band!  Their moms had been friends.  His wife had been in high school with my brother-in-law Mike.  Bizarre.  After our year at ICS, I moved to Tallahassee.  But I always managed to have lunch with Greg when I was in town.  We kept close when I moved back, mostly by eating at Four Rivers or Chipotle.  He was on church staff and he told me that they were planning on relocating to a church in Columbia, SC.  Then we ended up matching in Columbia.  So we are both moving up there at the same time.  Our counselor also turned out to be one of Greg's best friends.  It truly is a small world after all.

Upon our return from Tallahassee, we again were in a new place.  We had med school friends that came back with us.  Even though they were mostly Heather's friends at first, they became my friends too.  It was hard to say goodbye to these people at graduation, knowing Facebook was going to be the main contact point with them since we scattered all over the country.  Zach and Jasmeet are headed to Michigan.  Katrina is going to Louisiana.  Sheallah is staying in Orlando.  Even our dinner club - a group of couples that ate at ethnic restaurants monthly - have splintered.  Mark and Shannon are staying in Orlando.  We are going to South Carolina.  Richard and Meagan and their soon-arriving baby are going to Baltimore.  We also ended up at Summit Church for our final stretch here.  It was unlike any church experience we had ever had.  I got to serve by writing, something that is extremely rare at a church - to have a lay person writing.  I also made some tremendous friends like Michael Murray, John Parker, OJ Aldrich, and Brian Hogan.  One of the best things about Summit was the Gillis family.  They have always been a part of my Orlando story, but it seemed in a "close call" way.  Randy was in the UCF BCM, but he graduated right before I started going and went to seminary.  Then he was a college minister in Gainesville when I was a college minister in Tampa.  We went to the same conferences frequently and became familiar with each other.  They moved back to Orlando just after we did.  Their oldest daughter is the same age as our oldest son.  At a birthday party for Allen Turner, they showed up with their infant second daughter, who was a week older than Natalie.  They enrolled their kids at First Years just like us.  We went to church with them at the church plant and Randy and I were on staff together there.  They had a third daughter by that point.  We started to get close as a family during that time.  What really solidified things, though, when they had their fourth child and first boy less than a month after Gabe was born.  Those two have been friends since birth and now are best friends.  They play together all the time.  In fact, our families both play together all the time.  The kids are all matched up in ages.  Randy and I play the same computer games.  Being at Summit together gave us even more opportunities to share experiences, which was awesome.  Randy and I wrote together for the kids' service.  Since Gabe and their youngest were at First Years together, I saw Susan all the time.  We would pick up each other's kids, watch the kids for each other.  During some family events for the Gillis family, we had all their kids spend the night.  We even shared a babysitter!  All four adults are all friends with each other.  It has been a truly amazing family friendship.  It also is one of the five hardest thing to leave in Orlando - if not the hardest.  I know my kids shed many tears about leaving the Gillis kids.  It was heartbreaking to see Gabe broken up about losing his first best friend.  I've got to move on again.  Stupid dust.

All in all, I count myself supremely blessed to have had the friends I have.  They have refined me and defined me.  They have helped me to grow into the man I am and have had patience with me as I did.  They have encouraged me and lifted me up.  And each one of them holds a treasured place in my heart.  In response to the answer to finding new friends, I may be able to find new ones.  But they can never replace the crop I have now.  They are gifts from God.  I firmly believe that.  And I thank God that I had them for whatever time I did.  So thank you all.  You can never know what you meant to me.  I love you guys.  

Out of the Box: FYPK

Today our youngest child graduates from preschool. Obviously this is a big deal to us - watching our baby become a big kid. But it also is very difficult for another reason. This is the last day that we will have a child enrolled at First Years Preschool and Kindergarten of Oviedo. For the last nine years, we have had a child attending FYPK every year except the two we were living in Tallahassee, and we would have had Gabe enrolled those two years. I will say without a doubt that First Years is the finest preschool I have ever interacted with. And it has had an immeasurable and eternal impact on all three of our kids.

I have been taught many times that everything rises and falls with leadership. If that is true, that explains why First Years is such an amazing place. Shannon Chambley has been the director for as long as I can remember. She is an incredibly gifted educator, speaker, and encourager.  She knows every child's name.  I mean, like literally knows every name.  By the second week of school she is standing at the door welcoming each child by name.  Today at graduation, she introduced each child as they came up on stage.  There was no list, no teleprompter.  The kids weren't holding little cards.  She just knew them all.  She has a heart for every one of those little guys and girls.  She wants to see them learn and grow up to be good godly men and women.  She is compassionate and loving, but also firm and just.  I've been around educational facilities a lot in my life, between being an education major, a parent, and working with schools for my ministry.  But I would be hard pressed to find too many school administrators that are half as good as Shannon.  It was fitting that the last person we saw on the way out the door of the church was Shannon.  I teared up when she hugged us goodbye.  She has been an unfair standard for every subsequent principal our children have had.  And it makes me expect more from my schools.  So, Shannon, thank you for your years of leadership, prayers, and love for us.

But Shannon is not just a figurehead without a support network.  The teachers at First Years are all incredible.  There have been times that we started a year off with a teacher and wondered if this was going to work out.  They seemed to be the opposite of the kind of person our kid needed.  But by the end of the school year, we were sad to have our child move up to the next grade.  They loved our kids. They were tough of them when they needed it (Gabe, looking at you). And they cuddled them when they needed it.  They would recognize areas where my kids were gifted and encouraged them. I remember one of Josiah's teachers identifying his obsession and bizarre comprehension of space.  So she started to use space in her illustrations of other things.  Natalie has always had an aptitude for language.  Gabe has intense creativity and beautiful handwriting.  Each time, the teacher would grab hold of that and use it as an anchor to improve other things.

There have been times my kids were challenging.  (Shut up.)  I am aware of this.  Well, not Natalie.  Apparently Natalie never did anything wrong.  One year, her teacher would move their names from green apples to yellow apples to red apples for behavior warnings.  She got moved to yellow twice all year.  The teachers loved her.  They snuggled her and told her how beautiful she was.  They praised her artwork and encouraged her to explore her music and gymnastics.  She still remembers most of her teachers there and special things they said to her.

My boys were not nearly so easy.  Josiah set the standard.  He got into minor trouble frequently - but nothing major.  He loved to touch people's arms and hair.  Especially Emily's hair.  She had very curly black hair and Josiah LOVED to pat it, stroke it, play with it.  She did not enjoy this.  We would pick him up and hear, "Josiah had a hard time keeping his hands to himself today."  Emily was also the source of another Josiah problem.  One day we heard that he had said that Emily looked like a potato.  I thought this was a strange insult, so I asked what he meant by that.  He said plainly that he had said her SKIN looked like the same color as a potato because she had a little bit darker skin.  Josiah was misunderstood from time to time, apparently.  There also was the time when we went through carline and Josiah's teacher was waiting to put him in the car.  She didn't seem happy.  When she got to the van, she said, "I need to talk to you. Josiah today told some boy he was going to blow his brains out."  We were a bit stunned, since that was not something he should have heard before.  On the way home, we talked to him about it and realized that he had said that something was going to blow the kid's brain, but he meant "blow his mind."  BIG difference.

At a conference with that teacher, we finally addressed some of Josiah's behavior stuff.  For most of his time at First Years, Josiah had done the green/yellow/red apple/frog system.  And he would come home almost every day with yellow apple or sometimes red apple.  But never green apple.  I had grown tired fo hearing this, so I asked just what went into this process.  Did the kid get into trouble and immediately get yellow apple?  The teacher calmly explained that, no, the child got two warnings and then a mark on the board, then two more warnings and then another mark, then two more and then the yellow apple, and then another couple before the red.  I suddenly realized that Josiah was getting corrected eight times a day for the same thing.  I also suddenly had a great deal of sympathy for those teachers.  Know what the funny thing is?  By the middle of first grade, Josiah never got into trouble at school.  He actually has gotten straight A's in behavior (until a couple of questionable choices at the end of this year that will appear in a much later post when I think it is funny - not yet, obviously).

Gabe also was a challenge.  He is a bundle of energy and never seems to tire.  I remember one of Gabe's teachers last year used to greet the parents with, "We had a busy day!  They're going to be tired when they get home."  Then she looked over at me and said, "Well except Gabe.  He never gets tired." I wearily nodded.  This year, it got to be a daily occurrence that he would lose both of his stickers due to behavior issues.  Sometimes they were minor (to me) like not sitting or paying attention to instructions.  These were punctuated, though, with stuff like "Gabe hit Asher in the face with a truck" or "Gabe threw mulch at Kort" or "Gabe threw his lunch today."  I even got to the point where I was convinced the teacher hated Gabe for his many shortcomings.  Here was another chance for Shannon to step in, as she met with me and the teacher separately to make sure things were all fine.  She reassured me and told me that the teacher loved Gabe for his energy and creativity.  I found this out personally through his conferences, where the teacher raved about his journal and his mastery of benchmarks without ever even mentioning behavior issues.  By the end of year, I sat there crying as I watched him in the front row of his graduation ceremony singing with the class and doing every single hand motion perfectly.  No stupid faces.  No swinging his arms around.  No staring into space.  He desperately wanted to do the right thing and couldn't wait to show us the music.  My heart was so full, watching just how much those teachers had helped my baby become a big boy.

So, thank you to all of the teachers and aides we have had through the years.  I am going to do my best to remember them all.  If list of names bore you, just skip to the next paragraph.  Thank you Geina Creviston, Suzy Bortles (twice), Alicia Gyger, Nancy Oxendine (thrice), Mrs Plitt, Carmen Felix (twice), Mrs Nieves (twice), Rachael Hall, Mrs Mattan, Melissa Mayse (twice), Lois Dearolf, Miss Roxie, Mrs Pike, Lu Stasak, Heather Graves, and - of course - Miss Blanca.  Thank you for investing in our babies and for helping them become great kids.

Beyond even the teachers, the office staff was top notch.  They cared about our whole family.  They loved our kids.  But they also followed Heather's journey through medical school and asked her how she was doing every time she came.  They gave us extensions on tuition when they knew things were tight.  They bend over backwards to help us meet deadlines when we weren't sure about where school would take us.  And they also were willing to spend a few minutes chatting with me when I dropped off the kids or picked them up - even though they probably had better things to do.  When we started at First Years, I was working at the church there.  So they knew me as a co-worker.  I would help them run off copies, make powerpoints, and scan drawings.  Later, after I left the church to work for Defender Ministries, they kept up with me.  They asked how the ministry was doing and encouraged me through the ups and downs.  Finally, the knew me as the stay-at-home dad.  It wasn't always easy to be one of just a few guys doing the preschool runs.  I felt like an outsider.  But the staff never made me feel that way.  In fact, it seemed they offered me a special measure of grace.  They probably didn't even realize just how much it meant to me.  So thank you to Sharon Hill, Donnalea Hutchinson, and Melissa Mayse for all you did to make First Years a wonderful place and community.

Academically, First Years gave my kids an advantage.  They already were familiar with most kindergarten benchmarks by the time they finished preschool.  They knew shapes and colors and numbers and letters and were far ahead of reading requirements.  They had gained social skills and behavioral skills.  They had a positive outlook about school and teachers.  But, the biggest thing, is that all three of my kids learned about Jesus while at First Years.  He was a part of their curriculum.  He was talked about during chapel and at Christmas and at Easter and at end-of-the-year assemblies.  They learned songs about God and heard Bible stories.  They learned WHY it was important to make good choices.  And all three of my kids gained a personal relationship with Jesus while at First Years.  That is an eternal impact that I will never be able to put a price on.

So, as I promised, I am not going to bemoan what I will miss about First Years.  Instead, I will just say how thankful and blessed I am that we had the opportunity to have our children there.  Today, Dr Mercer, the pastor of FBC Oviedo, said that First Years is the best preschool in Orlando.  I would agree.  It has been an incredible place for our family.  It put our kids on the right path.  And it ministered to us in so many ways.  All I can really say is thank you.

Out Of the Box: Introduction

When Josiah was a little guy, preschool television had not completely exploded into the mega-billion dollar industry it is now.  There had been some major hits like Bob the Builder, Blue's Clues, and Barney.  But there also was a lot of stuff that fell into two major categories: Canadian Kids Television and Crap.  Nickelodeon had not launched Noggin (which later became Nick Junior).  Disney had not come up with Preschool Disney.  Entities like Baby Einstein and The Wiggles were just coming onto the scene. So for those early morning hours after the big kids went to school and before preschools got out, these stations tried to fill the hours with shows they purchased from other groups.  That is where Canadian Kids Television came into play.  For some reason, there was more groups in the Great White North that funded kids tv.  So they had developed more shows.  It was always amusing to hear all of these shows with their Canuck accents and our children learning words, sounding like young hockey players.  (The same thing happened with The Wiggles, except with all of our kids sounding like extras on Crocodile Dundee.)  Disney and Nick snapped up rebroadcast rights to these shows and filled their lineup (PB&J Otter, Franklin, Little Bear).  Unfortunately, they also purchased a lot of shows that fell into the Crap pile.  Sometimes these were also Canadian shows, but more like Quebec (technically, it is Canadian, but they like to remind us that - like a divorced couple - that province has TWO parents and one is France.)  This explained shows like Doodlebops, because there really wasn't any other possible explanation for that monstrosity.

Before long, Disney and Nick realized that creating their own shows was far more profitable than buying existing shows.  So they slowly replaced all of the imports and created their own shows with infinite merchandising rights.  Brilliant financial move.  But for anyone who had children in the first few years of the new millenium, we will always remember those other shows.  One such shows that landed squarely in the Crap pile was Out of the Box.  It was so dumb.  Absolutely ridiculous.  They had the "clubhouse" like Barney.  They had the two super-earnest hosts like Blues Clues.  And they had, well, not much else.  Oh, wait, they also had this horrible theme song set off by terrible puns.



Whenever I hear the phrase "out of the box," this is what pops to mind.  It has made me hate the phrase even more than most people who are encouraged to think outside of the box.  This past Sunday, we had a guest preacher at Summit Church.  He talked about living outside of our box.  I held in my usual aversion to that line to listen.  He was talking about how we can have extremely busy lives and still be unbelievably bored.  We get into a monotonous routine and get stuck in a rut.  As a result, we start to make choices that are easy and comfortable to stay in our box.  He challenged the church to start to be willing to move out of their box (or comfort zone or hedgehog or whatever catch phrase you happen to embrace).

I looked at Heather and we both said the same thing.  We already got out of our box.  Back in February, when we had to turn in our Match List for Match Day, we knew we faced a tough decision.  There was Orlando - the place we called home and loved dearly and had lived the majority of our married lives together.  It had our church, our friends, our kids' schools.  It was close to both of our parents.  It had doctors that Heather had spent two years with and residents who were wanting her to work with them.  Then there was Columbia.  On the surface, there was no reason to pick Columbia.  I had been there three times - once in high school for a yearbook conference, once to take the kids to the children's museum while visiting family in Rock Hill, and once for a wedding.  It was the place we turned North when traveling to Rock Hill.  It had Steve Spurrier and team fans who found it hilarious to only use part of their mascot name to sound obscene.  But we had this gut feeling we were supposed to go there.  Heather's interview there had been amazing.  She felt drawn there and felt like they wanted her.  I really only had her word to go on.  But we both were willing to make the jump.  So we listed it first and ended up matching there.  In that moment, we were out of the box.  If we had stayed in Orlando, that would have been the easy and comfortable and rut-increasing choice.  Leaving for Columbia was the right choice.

We will be leaving in just a few weeks.  In the words of Ron Burgundy, I am a swirling ball of emotions as we prepare to go.  Normally, my response is to blog about stuff like this.  For some reason, I have hesitated to do that this time.  But I feel that I would be robbing myself of a positive outlet for me to think through this process.  And I feel that I would be robbing others from knowing the impact they made on my life.  Between now and our move in June, I plan on writing a good number of posts that will be in the "Out of the Box" series.  Some of them will be looking back at the last four years of medical school.  Some of them will be looking ahead.  And a great majority of them will be trying to explain why I have grown to call a tourist trap my home.  Instead of listing all the things I will miss about Orlando, I will write about the things I am thankful that I got to experience in Orlando.  Some of you may find yourself splayed across this site in those articles.  For that, I apologize in advance.  Some of you will not.  For that, I apologize in advance.  I know that this is the Internet we are talking about - the haven of the disgruntled, wronged and cynical.  But if I don't include you in a post and you felt that I should have, please do not take offense.  I mean no slight.  After thirteen years of living in the City Moderately Beautiful, I have to trim things down.  And if it really bothers you, let me know and I'll write something special just for you.

The first in this series (well, actually the second, since this technically is the first - although this is more of a prologue or forward and shouldn't count towards pagination) will look back at Florida State University's College of Medicine.  It will post sooner than you think.  I hope you will join me on my journey of self-reflection as we move out of our box.  Out of the box. OUT of the box.  Take one box...

Father's Day 2012

Father's Day is such a weird day.  When I was getting ready for church today, I noticed that one of the DJs on the local Christian station had posted something about the day.  It said that this is a day with so many emotions for so many people, so they would be playing songs of encouragement this morning.  I thought about it for a while.  Father's Day is not greeted with the same excitement as Mother's Day.  I was reading an article the other day that talked about how there is not a major uptick in retail sales around Father's Day.  In May, there is a huge bump.  Restaurants see a boom in attendance.  Churches enjoy one of their biggest Sundays.  But in June, there is no noticeable difference.  The day in and of itself was not even made a holiday for decades after Mother's Day.

I can understand all of this.  Father's Day is a hard holiday for me.  I loved my dad.  But he was a hard man and there are many very negative memories and emotions tied up in thinking about him.  It was always a big struggle to find a card on Father's Day that wasn't a lie and wasn't just cold hearted.  So I completely get the fact that there are mixed emotions.  As a father now, I get to have my kids get excited about getting me stuff (I got Legos and chocolate this year).  I explained how this is a tough day for a lot of people.  They sweetly told me how I was a great dad.  Inside, I just desperately hoped they would feel that way when they were in their 30s.

There is an epidemic of lousy fathering out there.  I recently developed a men's conference for Defender Ministries.  We put it on at three different churches.  At each one, I would ask the men there how many of them would say they had an absentee father or one they wished was absent - someone who was abusive, neglectful, harsh, unloving.  Among the three conferences, about forty percent of all the men raised their hands!  A lot of the younger guys out there don't know how to be a dad.  They haven't seen it modeled and they are just doing their best to figure it all out.  There are many older guys who also have had to transition through massive societal changes - including challenges that their parents never had to face and that they were never trained for.  Time and again when I teach at events, I have dads come up to me - begging for advice on how to deal with technology, media, easier access to sexually explicit materials.  They never expected to have to deal with that.  Shoot, I have gone from growing up when the predominant sport for kids was baseball, to seeing football usurp that, to now seeing football being identified as a dangerous choice.  Things change so quickly and dads are struggling to keep up.

It is easy to get discouraged by the picture.  As a dad, I know that I am worried about my kids.  Am I making the right choices?  Am I teaching them the right things?  Am I passing on my weaknesses and mistakes to them?  I don't know too many parents who don't stress about that stuff.  I hope that I am doing the best things for them - and I hope God is merciful enough to help them overcome where I fail (which, trust me, is a LOT).  I don't want them just to make it through - barely.  I want them to develop all the skills and talents that God has blessed them with and then change their world.  I want them to make a difference.  I want to equip my sons to become the dads they should be.  I want my daughter to be confidant and strong enough to choose a man who will be a good father and husband.  It is tough.

However, I am encouraged today.  Over the last sixteen years, I have had the pleasure to work with some fantastic people in various churches and groups.  Most of these have been college students.  And there have been a large number of guys who I have worked closely with, watching them grow from annoying freshmen to (somewhat) mature seniors.  [Face it, guys.  Many of you were very VERY annoying.]  Then I have had the great joy of keeping up with them as they got married and had kids.  I also have been thrilled to see them become extraordinary fathers and husbands.  In fact, many times I feel very inferior as I watch them parenting the children God given them.

They were not my children, but I felt that I had some investment in their lives.  I am not arrogant enough to believe I had anything to do with their becoming these wonderful men.  That doesn't change how much I have loved watching it happen.  This is where my encouragement comes from.  Some of these guys had great male role models, but some of them didn't.  Some of them fought an uphill battle in the process of becoming a man.  I am beyond proud of them.

As I learned from my recent graduation post, making a list is a dangerous thing because you will ALWAYS forget someone.  That is not going to stop me, though.  This is to the members of Chi Rho from FBC Temple Terrace, the USF BCM, the college department at FBC Oviedo and FBC Orange Park, and the many college speaking engagements I've had.  I want to wish those guys a happy Father's Day.  You are doing an AMAZING job!  It has been a pleasure to be a part of your lives.  And I have loved watching you and learning from you.  [If I forget your name, that doesn't mean I have forgotten you.]

So to Toney Sauls, Michael Carter, Joel Fauntleroy, Josh Saliba, Wayne Johnson, Tony Whitley, Ryan Biggs, Melvin McColloch, Jason Gray, Jeff Ramer, Benji Stultz, Joe Pardo, John Scanlon, Jon Peters, Patrick Bailey, Mike Cale, Carey Bonham, Jon Wood, Shaun Gyger, Chad Heinrich, Michael Howell, Ryan Bell, and anyone I forgot.  Happy Father's Day, guys.  You bring me hope for the future.

Defending My Absence

Well, it is quite apparent that I have fallen down on my blogging responsibilities.  Over the past month, there have been numerous things that normally generated a post.  But I have failed you, o faithful half dozen readers.  I didn't post my annual bemoaning of the Oscar nominations, ceremony, and demonstration of how Oscar voters hate the American moviegoing public.  Not a peep was heard when Star Wars: Episode I - George Lucas is a Menace came out in 3D.  And I have let several Hunger Games and Avengers trailers come out without my highly insightful comments.  What is wrong with me?  Have I given up writing?  Am I living in a cave?  Have "they" finally dragged me away and placed me in my much-deserved padded room.  Nope.  I could toss up the standard excuse of "I was busy" and leave it at that.  But, instead, I am going to make my excuse into an entire post.  Doesn't that sound exciting?  I bet the tingling of anticipation is nearly too much for you to handle.

In March of 2005, I was fortunate enough to be presented the opportunity to help launch a ministry with my friend, Charles Wise, and a couple of our other friends.  That ministry became Defender Ministries.  I had little idea what exactly that would entail.  But it was exciting and I knew it was the right place for me.  Over the last seven years, we have been on what could be called a roller coaster with Defender.  There have been moments of great victory.  And there have been moments of intense pain and betrayal.  Through it all, we just keep plugging along and try to do the right thing.  There are times we have made mistakes and overstretched our abilities or calling.  But, for the most part, we have done our best to help people.  And it has been amazing to see how our little ministry has been a part in changing hundreds of lives.

Originally, our ministry was founded to address the topic of internet pornography.  But it has expanded over time.  Building awareness wasn't enough.  Parents wanted to know how to fight the encroachment of this entity on their families.  So we started teaching on technology.  And then it expanded to cover issues of media, entertainment, purity, dating, brain chemistry.  It has been very strange to see the path we've taken.  Years ago, I remember sitting with Heather in our dingy little apartment and talking with some friends of ours.  They asked what I would be doing if I could do anything in the world without worry about money.  I said that I would develop curriculum and resources for families and churches.  (That was years before Defender ever started.)  So what do I do for Defender?  Well, I develop curriculum and resources for families, churches, and schools.

Along this path, I have been able to create a full curriculum for teenagers.  I built the complete structure for a line of curriculum for elementary students on tech safety.  And I've written about two dozen booklets on different topics in our arsenal.  It is always humbling and strange to see something that you've created in the hands of other people - or to know that a church in Nebraska or Missouri is running its youth weekend using your materials.  I love what I do.  It is challenging and trying.  There are times when we haven wondered if it was time to shutter the whole thing and move on.  But we never feel free to do that.  So we keep plugging along.

In May of 2009, my family moved up to Tallahassee so Heather could attend medical school at FSU.  I became a full-time stay at home dad.  And things for Defender went into what I call "stasis mode."  We hardly did anything for those two years.  There were a couple of school experiences, a few internet orders.  But the ministry didn't advance much.  It was difficult to see that.  I could see others of our sister ministries moving forward.  At times I got jealous and other times I got angry.  And there were many times I feared everything was done - that we had run our course.  Not to minimize what a person goes through, but it felt like watching someone I love in a coma.  It was still there, but it wasn't doing anything.  And I really didn't know if it was going to come back.

There were moments of hope in those two years.  One of the tough things about running a ministry is that you are dependent on other people.  You need people to spread the word of what you are doing, you need people to help you organize things, you need people to book you, you need people to support you financially.  Over the years, we have had people promise us the moon.  They believed in what we were doing.  They got on board.  They got excited.  We got excited and started planning based on that person's promises.  And then they disappeared.  This hasn't happened once or twice.  Honestly, we are probably up near twenty times this has occurred.  Each time, it is like getting your heart broken.  And each time you have to pick up the pieces and figure out how to get back on track.  Sometimes we have incurred expenses we would never have undertaken without assurances of support.  And then we are left with the bills and no help.  You start to get a little jaded.  And it is hard to trust people.

We have had people donate money for months and then quit.  There have been board members who got us to run an event and then stood there and watched it blow up in our face.  We have had supporters who left and basically stole what we were doing to start their own efforts.  During that two year time of stasis, we had a very painful experience with a person who funded us for months and promised us the world.  And then he just left.  It damaged the ministry deeply.  With each one of those, there is a time of examination where you wonder what you did wrong or what should have been different.  This time, it could have killed the ministry.  I had just moved back to Orlando and was able to give more time to working on things.  But the ministry was very weak at the time.  It was a dangerous time and the damage done really hurt.  I almost came to a place where I was sure the ministry was over.

In the last seven years, it has been very strange watching how the ministry grew.  It made no sense.  You would think that going to conferences and having displays or placing ads would be the greatest impetus for growth.  But it hasn't been that way.  Almost every time we saw the ministry have a jolt of opportunities or a growth of vision it has been because one person opened one tiny door.  On the other side there was a huge field of blessings waiting.  Connie Ricks was one of those people.  She opened the door for us to do college events - which became the majority of our events in the early years.   Then there was Eulie Brookins, who said, "Hey, you guys should develop a youth curriculum."  I still remember sitting with Charles at the (now defunct) O'Boys BBQ in Winter Park and creating the entire structure for what would be Operation Isaiah in an hour and a half.  Terri Alderman was another person who opened the door to working with schools, specifically International Community School.  That led us to design a ton of school based materials.

All of that was said to set the stage for this past fall.  The ministry was struggling to get back on its feet.  I was working on how to get things revved up, while helping with some other aspects of our parent ministry.  I got an email from Stuart Goudy from Little Rock, Arkansas.  He was the men's minister at Geyer Springs First Baptist Church.  The senior pastor there and I had worked together in Tampa about fifteen years ago.  Stuart wanted to know if we could do a men's conference for them that dealt with some of our pet issues - pornography, technology - and other aspects of being a man.  I went to our default answer when talking to people, "Never say no."  So I told him that we could.  Little did I know what exactly was going to come from that.

Over the next six month, we created a new event - Rewriting the Man Code.  It was a men's conference that was unlike anything we had done.  We've done conference type events before, but not one like this.  We incorporated videos and humorous stories and a more structured format.  And we took some of the ancient Knight Codes and brought them into the modern vernacular.  It was a good looking event - from the development perspective.  We thought it would be good for men.  But we had never even been able to test it at all.  Normally when we have taught conferences, we took lessons we have already taught and combined them into a full event.  This was the first time we started from the ground floor and intentionally created a conference - writing the lessons as the conference was built.  Yes, it included elements from what we had taught previously.  But it was all being rebuilt.

I was terrified.  A lot of the success of the events rested on my ability to be funny on demand.  I can be funny.  But a lot of it is accidental.  I've always been nervous about choreographed humor.  It is a hard thing to pull off.  You want it to sound organic.  Humor can be too rehearsed.  I have a reputation for being a funny speaker.  Being completely honest, some of the biggest laughs were from things I never even planned to say.  They just flowed from the lesson.  So I was very nervous about the execution of the whole thing.  And just to amp the stakes up, we had other churches hear about what we were crafting.  So they went ahead and booked us.  We were scheduled to do three of these weekends in a row.  We had Arkansas booked for February 17-19.  Then one Orlando church had us come to their men's retreat February 25-26 at a local camp setting.  Lastly we had another Orlando church schedule us for March 2-3.  If we failed, it would be in triplicate.

I felt crushed by the weight of what was being expected.  A lot of it I put on myself.  We had a very positive board meeting with our new board a few weeks before the conferences.  They seemed to be ready to help in any way possible.  But some of the hope was based on the men's conference.  In my own mind, the fate of the ministry hung on this.  We didn't have any other events booked.  If this succeeded, it could open the doors to a lot of things.  If it didn't, all the momentum would be gone.  I had trouble sleeping.  I was short tempered with everyone.  And I was constantly stressed.  I had to write the booklet, design the presentation, edit videos, organize the whole shebang.  Charles and I would create the lessons together, but I was the one who had to put it together.  Things fell into place and everything looked good.  But there still was the event itself.

We got out to Arkansas and spent a whole day rehearsing the stuff.  And as we worked on everything my voice started to give out.  I hadn't taught much in the last couple years.  The change in weather, the flight, the hours of talking all wore me out.  In getting ready to speak, I tore my throat up.  When Friday rolled around, I was rasping and my throat was killing me.  I tried to keep quiet in the interim and drink tons of water.  I was scared.  When it finally came time to start things, I stepped up on stage and started.  The guys didn't respond right away.  They were a little hesitant.  Then we kicked it to the worship band and they played.  It was supposed to be a fifteen minute set and it became a 45 minute one.  It was great, but it cut into the schedule we had established - one that we already felt was very constrictive.  When I stepped back up on stage, I was a wreck.

But the guys started to defrost. The singing had helped.  And when I started in with my intro to the conference, I saw the first cracks appear.  The thawing continued until the guys were completely invested by the beginning of the second session.  The rest of the weekend was great.  My voice was horrible at best.  But everything worked out well.  The feedback was incredible.  The guys were so encouraging and we saw some great stuff happen with these men.  We got home and tried to recuperate before the next weekend.  My voice still was pretty bad rolling into the second event.  Charles lost his voice completely during that one, partly due to the fact he had been carrying some of my load when my voice was out.  The event was marred by technical issues, but it ended up just as positive as the first weekend.  Then the third weekend happened.  By then, both of our voices were back and strong.  The church was a very conservative one - different from the first two in tone and approach.  The guys there, though, were the most invested from the outset.  And it ended up being the best overall of them all.

So that is what I've been up to in the last month.  Now we are sitting here, figuring out the next steps.  We have some very high quality things to offer - things for the whole family.  The men's conference was a raging success at all three places with three different types of settings and churches.  We already have other churches wanting to book us for them.  We have also booked a youth weekend for later this Spring. The throat issues have been resolved, but they also were a reminder of the fact we need some sort of backup system of speakers.  That means training some people and expanding the ministry - which we have never done in seven years.  It is all a little hard to grasp.  A few months ago I felt things were about to shut down and now we are talking about hiring other staff.  A lot of it is due to an event that we hadn't even conceived that was brought up by a guy we had never met seven months ago.  And it doesn't stop there.  Every one of those churches wanted to know if we could come up with a follow up conference - one that was for both spouses.  They have asked if we could develop a Bible study that will follow the conference - one that would take place over the next year.  There is so much work to do.

The thing that I can't even begin to wrap my mind around is that I'm even involved in this.  I know myself.  To steal from Isaac Hunter, our pastor at Summit Church, "I know myself.  I know my mind and my heart.  I know what I'm thinking when no one can see me.  I have NO business being involved in this in any way."  I shouldn't be teaching anyone about being a dad or a husband.  If you've read this blog at all, you should be vigorously nodding your head right now.  In fact, most of the sessions in the conference begin with me telling a humorous story about how I've failed as a father and a husband.  The Apostle Paul says that we should follow his example.  I say to see what I'm doing and do the opposite.  Again stealing, this time from demotivators.com, my life exists to serve as a warning sign to others.  But this ministry works.  Most of my contribution is showing all the dumb stuff I do, all my failures.  Why in the world should anyone listen to that?  For some reason, God thinks I should be involved in this.  And it is just so surreal to see things happening other places because of that.  Over the last three weeks, I watched around 300 men examine how they were measuring up as dads and husbands and friends.  I saw some guys take extreme steps in repairing those relationships.  It is just so cool to see that.

So I hope to get back on track with my leisure writing.  I've missed it.  And I think it is important for me to be able to share the cool things (and the stupid things) going on.  We all need reminders from other people about important stuff.  God is still moving.  Sometimes things have to get really dark before the good stuff happens.  No matter how dimensions Episode I is released in, it is still going to stink.  God can use you, even if you are the dullest and most idiotic tool in the box.  I know I've needed those reminders and appreciate it when others share their struggles and victories.  So I hope this can be that kind of inspiration for you.  See?  I told you.  Longest. Excuse. Ever.