I spent the majority of my day eight years ago today sitting on the edge of my bed in my bathrobe and staring at the television.

I was alone that day; my wife was at work, and I had had planned on enjoying a quiet and uneventful day off. By ten o’clock, though, I knew I’d have neither.

I woke and turned on the television for the morning news, expecting the same old depressing stories of who did what to whom. What I saw instead was difficult to watch and impossible to process.

A plane crashing into a New York City building. And then another.

People hurtling hundreds of stories to the ground, choosing death by gravity rather than fire.

Another airliner crashes in a Pennsylvania field, killing everyone onboard.

And finally, another hits the Pentagon.

Voices of normally stoic newscasters crack with emotion. Facts mix with conjecture and serve only to add to the confusion. One tower of the World Trade Center collapses and then the other, killing scores of police officers, fire fighters, and EMTs.

As the hours pass, all thoughts of malfunction and accident are laid to rest. No, this is an act of intent. Of purpose.

Of war.

And as I sit on the edge of my bed staring as those images are repeated over and over again, a tiny thought manages to claw its way to the front of my mind:

Everything has changed.

I was right. Everything did change that day. Every generation has that moment when innocence is lost, when the veil of security is lifted to reveal the truth about this world—that it is a hard place, full of darkness and hate. For my grandparents, that moment was World War II. For my parents, Vietnam. And for my generation, it was 9/11.

Of all the images that day and the days thereafter, it’s the planes I remember most. Not the ones who served as instruments of death. The other ones.

At some point every day for thirty years I had cocked my neck and looked up to stare at a mechanical something flying overhead. The skies above the Shenandoah Valley serve as a highway for all manner of jets and helicopters. And I’ll be honest. I hated it.

I hated the noise they made and how they got in the way of the clouds. I hated their dirty contrails that streaked across my sunset and sunrise. I always thought things would be a little more peaceful around here without them.

But then that happened.

For three days after that September day, the skies above my home were the sole property of clouds and birds. The government had grounded all air traffic. The skies were both silent and empty, a reflection of what we were all feeling. For seventy-two hours there were no booming jet engines, no swooshing of rotor blades, no contrails that colored the evening sky.

And I missed them.

I missed them because it was proof that life had stopped proceeding as usual. We had been shaken to our very foundation.

As sad as that day eight years ago was, the saddest days came later, when a country that was brought together by a tragic act was torn apart by its equal—the politicization of that act. The righteous indignation that was warranted and even necessary was replaced by the need to blame ourselves and explain our attackers, as if three thousand innocent people could be held at fault and insanity could be explained.

But that’s not what I’m dwelling on right now.

I just walked outside to make sure the sun was still there. It was, along with four airliners, a helicopter, and one single-engine plane. Life is proceeding as usual now, and has for a while. There is a great deal of comfort in that. Too many of us long to break free of the status quo. Sometimes that’s the very thing that brings peace to our lives.

Americans are tough people. The toughest. We can be knocked down, but we’ll get up angry. We can suffer, but our suffering emboldens us. And we can despair, but that cannot kill our hope and our resolve. Our enemies found that out eight years ago.

I think we did, too.

(This column was published in the Staunton News Leader)

One of the tenets of redneck folklore is the belief that people die in threes. It’s a tenet so ingrained around here that there is an influx of patients to the doctor’s office whenever a longstanding member of the community passes on. No one knows who will be next, and they don’t want to take any chances.

I’m not sure how much truth there is in that conviction. People might die in twos or fours just as often as threes. But I do know this—light bulbs die in threes. At least in my house.

It began last week with the light in my son’s bedroom, which much have died a quiet and peaceful death sometime in the night. He rose out of bed the next morning, flipped the switch, and…nothing. A few days later it was the light above the kitchen sink, which yelped a pop! when my wife tried to turn it on.

Then last night I came upstairs to my computer and fumbled for the light switch behind the door. Just as I flicked the switch upward, blue and white sparks sprayed from the ceiling fan in a burst of violence that actually managed to shatter the light bulb itself. It was quite impressive.

What brought about this light bulb mass suicide is beyond me. Our home is not old and the wiring was expertly done. I can only surmise that everything has its life cycle. At some point the odds are in favor of more than one sputtering out at the same time.

The blown light bulb is an exercise in both physics and inevitability. The cause is fairly straightforward: a light bulb’s filament does not evaporate evenly, leaving it to develop spots over time that are thinner than others. Since the electrical current heats the filament evenly, the thin spots heat more quickly. The result is a pop! and then darkness.

What struck me as I stood there staring at the bulb was my reaction, which so happened to be the one my son and my wife had, too. Not anger or frustration. Not even disappointment.

Confusion.

Because a light is supposed to turn on when you flip the switch it’s connected to. I had a vast amount of experience to back that assertion. It was one of the few of my life’s givens, so much so that I’d perform the act without giving it a second thought. Flipping a light switch is faith at its purest, the embodiment of if-I-do-this-then-this-will-happen.

It’s easy to take such things for granted, though. I’ve spent my day keeping track of every light I turned on, from the bathroom light when I first got up to the light in my office nearly sixteen hours later. My total thus far? Thirty. I’ve turned thirty lights on today, and none of them has broken.

I’m already taking the light switch for granted again.

So maybe I needed the gentle reminder that all those everyday things I put my faith in are neither permanent nor flawless. Things that go well beyond light bulbs and into the very center of my life. The job I have today may go pop! tomorrow. The savings account to cushion a fall may be pulled from beneath me just before I land. And the very ones I love most may be the very ones who let me down the hardest.

That’s the nature of life, the consequence of living in a world that isn’t quite what it should have been. We’re all searching for something to hold onto, something that will give us a sense of security and knowing, and yet everything we have is like that light bulb—at some time and in some way, they will all fail in an impressive fashion and leave us standing in the darkness. Which is all the more reason to place more trust in God than man.

Our hearts are pocked with the scars of failed faith and broken trust. There’s nothing we can do about that. Disappointment is built into this world. But despite the fact that those light bulbs in our lives will shatter and explode from time to time, we still must flip their switches. We still must believe. That’s what life is. What Love is, too.

The syringes you see here constitute approximately three days worth of insulin injections for my seven-year-old daughter, who was diagnosed with Type I diabetes three years ago.

If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ve likely been party to my frustrations and anxieties over being powerless against the disease that takes a daily toll not only on her, but my entire family. For me, those frustrations and anxieties have upon more than one occasion carried over from the physical world to the spiritual one. For her, that’s never really been an issue.

Until the other day. Until she was told by a man of God that she suffered from her disease because she didn’t have enough faith for God to rid her of it.

To read about what happened, jump on over to Katdish’s blog. It was a tough story to write, but worth the effort.

The thing about wisdom is that it’s filled with contradictions.

It began like most problems do—small and sudden. One a drive down an empty two-lane road with windows open, stereo blaring, and me doing my best Kenny Chesney impersonation. Work was done, home was ahead, and I had raw meat, a hot grill, and a ballgame to look forward to. Yes, life was good.

But then a county police car rounded the curve ahead of me and I spotted the tell-tale radar jutting out from the driver’s side window. And whether you’re doing a hundred or twenty-five, your first reaction when you see such a sight is to slow down and check your speedometer. I did and did.

The good news was that I wasn’t speeding (much).

The bad news was that a red light was glowing on my dashboard.

CHECK ENGINE, it said.

I raised my sunglasses and squinted, hoping that the light was not a light at all. Maybe it was a reflection of the sun or a peculiar shadow. Maybe I was just seeing things.

But I wasn’t.

CHECK ENGINE.

I tapped the glass while keeping an eye on the road, but the light wouldn’t turn off. So I took the next logical step—I put my sunglasses back on, turned Kenny Chesney back up, and kept driving. Not simply so I could watch the road, but because I was trying to convince myself that if I wasn’t looking at the light, it wouldn’t be on.

Not so.

The modern motor vehicle is a technological wonder that can give you detailed information about a myriad of mechanical functions, but it cannot communicate more vaguely than CHECK ENGINE. Those two words of detached brevity can mean anything from a loose gas cap to a blown head gasket to nearly everything in between. So when I got home I paused to unscrew the gas cap, tighten it again, and restart my truck.

CHECK ENGINE.

I opened up a dusty filing cabinet in my head and ran through a list of possible causes: sticky EGR valve, pinched fuel injector, faulty oxygen sensor…

All of which required a trip to the local repair shop, about two hours of my time, and more than a few bucks to diagnose and fix. And even though the guys down at Eavers Tire are great to hang around and talk with, I could think of a few better ways to spend a Saturday morning.

So that’s where things stand as of now. I’m still driving my truck, and it will still clear it’s voice with a low chime and announce CHECK ENGINE every time I turn the ignition. And for the past two days it has even resorted to blinking at me. “Hellloo,” it mimes, “pay attention to me!”

But I don’t. Yesterday I resorted to covering that tiny part of my instrument panel with duct tape so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. That didn’t work, either. I couldn’t see the light but I still saw the duct tape, and I knew why it was there.

A part of me still thinks the light will go away if I ignore it long enough. I should know better, yes. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to battle warning lights, and not just with my truck. With my life, too.

Like when I find myself choosing to stand in the rain rather than go looking for some sun. Or when my gaze begins to wander down instead of up. When I go for a bit without smiling or a long time without laughing. That’s when I know something’s wrong with my engine.

CHECK HEART, my brain says.

And I should. Really. But I often don’t. That sort of thing would be much like taking my truck into the shop—it would cost too much and take too much time. So I stumble on ignoring the fact that something somewhere inside me has tripped an alarm.

When paying no heed to that warning turns CHECK HEART into CHECKHEARTCHECKHEART, I’ll use a little duct tape on my soul, too. I’ll start thinking that the cure for my blues could be as simple as a movie night or a pint of Starbucks ice cream. Sometimes both.

That never works, though. Because the duct tape I use to cover what’s wrong inside me is much like the duct tape I use to cover what’s wrong inside my truck.

Both peel off eventually.