The Why and the What
November 30, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 1 Comment
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If you’ve been around here for very long, chances are you’ve caught me discussing my daughter’s diabetes. Talking about it, wrestling with it, trying to find the reasons behind it or trying to find out if there’s a reason at all. It’s one of those things that can be tough to figure out if you subscribe to the idea of a loving God.
To say my daughter’s disease is a part of His will leaves a bad taste in my mouth (it’s metallic, that taste, like having pennies in your cheeks).
To say that it’s meant as a blessing tastes even worse. Come stay with her for a couple days and see if you can say that. You might still be able to, but I bet you won’t be able to look me in the eye.
But to say that there isn’t a reason at all, that it’s just one of those things because life just kind of sucks sometimes, doesn’t really sit well either. That just makes me think that it all either caught God by surprise or He just didn’t care enough to do anything about it. And as jaded as her diabetes can make me sometimes, I’m not willing to abide by either of those theories.
So I usually just keep quiet about it. I focus on making sure her sugar is the best it can be. Make sure she eats the right things and exercises and gets the proper dose of insulin. I tell myself that the Why doesn’t matter because that’s something I can’t control, that it’s the What I’m supposed to worry myself with because I can somewhat control that.
Still, that Why has a way of sneaking up. It preys on my mind. I’m sure you understand. We all have our own Whys.
It was preying on my mind last night at three o’clock in the morning. The Witching Hour, some call it. That time of night when the darkness is the darkest and supposedly the veil between the worlds of the seen and unseen thin enough that they intermingle. Her sugar had bottomed out. I was trying to keep her awake enough to drink some juice and not doing a very good job. She kept nodding off, and I’d have to shake her. That’s when the Why came again.
“I’m sorry you have to do this,” I whispered to her.
She nodded—she always nods at three in the morning, that’s all she can do—and felt for the straw in her cup.
“I wish I could make it go away.”
Nod and slurp, and I figured that if she wasn’t asleep yet she would be soon, which meant I’d have to shake her awake again so she could finish. And then I’ll have to wake her again fifteen minutes later to make sure her sugar was going in the right direction.
“I know it’s not fair.”
But not a nod that time. That time, it was, “It’s okay. We love each other through it.”
She finished her juice and curled up under the blankets again. I sat there watching her, trying to figure out if what she said was just her sleep or herself. I figured that didn’t matter.
I also figured that if there really was a reason, maybe that was it. Maybe that’s why God allows so much suffering. Because through suffering we learn not just to love, but to love more.
And if this world needs anything, it is that.
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Future Billy
November 28, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 7 Comments
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It seemed an easy enough thing—fill up the gas tank on Friday afternoon so I wouldn’t have to do it on Monday morning. And in all honesty that’s exactly what I meant to do. But as I was nearing the gas station in town, my favorite song came on the radio. I was so busy singing it that I drove right past.
I could have turned around—the Food Lion was right up ahead—but I didn’t do that, either. The song was still on, for one, and so I was still singing. And for another, I’d decided by then that none of it really mattered anyway. I had enough gas to get home and enough to get back out again, and I wouldn’t be driving my truck all weekend. Besides, it was Friday afternoon. Weekend time. I’d fill up later.
Later came this morning. Monday morning. Monday morning at 6:30. Monday morning at 6:30 in near total darkness and pouring rain. And as I stood there wet and shivering watching the dollars and gallons tick away, I discovered two things. One was that the very last thing anyone should have to do on a Monday morning is stop and get gas. The other was that Past Me had screwed Present Me yet again.
The sad thing is it wasn’t the first time that had happened. In fact, it happens quite a bit. Call it what I will—being an adult, not putting off for tomorrow what I could do today—it all sounds good in theory but tends to fall apart in practice. Because when it comes right down to it, I’m pretty much living for the now. That’s not a bad thing, really; most of the advice we get on how to live says the present is all that matters. The past is gone, so there’s nothing we can do about that. The future isn’t here, so there’s no use worrying about that. All we have then, and all we need, is this moment. This now.
So that’s what I’ve tried to do most of my life—live for this now. Be in the present. And you know, it often doesn’t work very well. I’ve also tried living in my past. That works even less.
This morning, in the middle of pumping gas and shivering and yawning, I realized what I’d been doing wrong all this time. Living in the present kind of sucks. Not right now, maybe. Not usually. But later. And most of the time.
Because none of us are really only one person, we’re actually three—there’s the person we were earlier, the person we are now, and the person who comes later. Where I screw up is that I tend to think more often about Present Me and not nearly often enough about Future Me. Which, to really confuse you, often makes Present Me really not like Past Me very much at all.
It’s confusing, carrying three people inside you. And yet that’s what we all do. No wonder we seem so tired and stressed all the time.
I’m big on the idea that the simpler we make our lives, the better off we’ll be. If we don’t have too much and don’t do too much and don’t want too much, chances are we’ll be much happier. I really believe that.
That’s why I’m going to think more of Future Billy. I’m going to try and do more now so he won’t have to do so much later. And I’m going to be more willing to put up with a little discomfort so he’ll be able to smile.
It’s perhaps the sincerest purpose we can have in this life—to live today with the intent of making tomorrow better.
Giving thanks
November 23, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 4 Comments
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On December 4, 1619, thirty-eight English settlers arrived on the north bank of the James River, approximately twenty miles from the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The group’s charter required that the day of arrival be observed yearly as a “day of thanksgiving” to God. The group’s charter stated, “We ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.” Captain John Woodlief officiated that first service, two years before the Pilgrims at Plymouth got the same idea.
Three years later the local Indians had enough of the English and decided that the only way to get rid of them was to go to war. The result was about a third of the colonial population of Virginia was killed. Tough times settled in—hunger, war, death, cold winters and unbearable summers. The New World that once held the promise of a new life had become a hell.
I’ll be honest and say I didn’t know much of that. I learned in school about the Indian wars and the hardships faced by the settlers, of Pocahontas and John Rolfe and all the rest. But not the thanksgiving part.
And not this part either—even during those dark days of war and hunger and death, the settlers still paused each year to give thanks.
To me, that’s amazing. I know there have been more than a couple Thanksgivings in my own life when the mood of our country was so hurt and so soured that the last thing on our minds was to say thanks to God. I think of the Thanksgiving just after 9/11. I think of ones in just the past few years, when recession and job loss made a feeling of appreciation next to impossible. And maybe for you, this year is particularly tough.
Sometimes we don’t want to thank God. Sometimes we’d rather yell or cuss or plead, but never to get down on our knees and count our blessings.
Thing is, that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do. Good times, bad times, in-between times, sunshine or rain, laughter or tears, hope or hopelessness.
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
That’s what I’m thinking about this Thanksgiving—how it’s so easy to say thank you when times are good and so difficult to say it when times are not. But today, give thanks. Give thanks even if you don’t feel thankful.
But I know this: God has built an oasis of beauty in even the ugliest of times. He has placed a blessing into every harm and pain. He has planted the seeds of joy in every tear.
And that is why we are called to give thanks in all things even if we cannot give thanks for them.
Getting what we’re owed
November 21, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 15 Comments
image courtesy of globalpost.com
“Hmph” is all he says, and barely that.
Just a bit of air expelled through two tautened lips. He could say more—wants to, I’m sure—but the presence of two grandchildren in the room prevents any further commentary. That’s a shame. You’ve never fully appreciated the news until you’ve watched it alongside my father’s commentary.
The pictures on the television are the sort that’s been played and replayed for a while now—tents and marches and protest, people with microphones shouting down with this and up with that. It’s all a little too much, especially with the grandkids sitting there (right now they’re working on the Play-Doh, but I know they’re watching the screen).
I ask him if I should turn the channel. He works the chaw of Beechnut in his cheek and shakes his head. “Wanna see who won the race,” he says.
So I watch the screen and I watch him and I watch my kids and I know that I am in the middle. I’m the bridge between him and them. I’m the link to hold the chain. And I realize that it really wasn’t that long ago—if you can call twenty years long—that I was sure my father had no idea what the world was all about.
I think your teenage years are proof that the more you think you know, the dumber you really are.
My kids—his grandkids—are watching now. They’re showing a policeman pepper-spraying a young man with long hair. Dad watches, too. I’m wondering what they’re all thinking and if what they’re thinking is pretty much the same. I think so. I think when you get right down to it, crazy looks crazy no matter what age you are.
In the end (and as it should), Play-Doh wins out over the news. The kids don’t care what’s happening a thousand miles away in some city. Their world’s here in the mountains, where things are quiet and life makes more sense. But Dad, he keeps watching and working that chaw, turning it around in his mouth, thinking.
He’s been in a good mood lately. Not that he isn’t usually, just more so now. After thirty-five years of work, he has only three days left. Appropriately enough, Thanksgiving Day will be his first day of retirement.
It hasn’t been easy, those thirty-five years. The ones before it weren’t easy, either. He took the job for the same reason that many husbands and fathers do—because it paid well and offered a better life for his family. Certainly it wasn’t because he enjoyed it—who would enjoy driving a rig up and down the Southeast, being separated from family, living off greasy truck stop food?
But he did it anyway. Day in, day out, through blizzards and tornados and hurricanes and floods. As a child I would pray every night for his safety. I still do. And God’s watched over him—Dad’s driven over three million miles without an accident. Back in ’98, he had a stroke just outside of Fredericksburg. The doctors couldn’t understand how he managed to drive his rig into the terminal and back it up to the dock before falling out of the cab. I could. It was his job, simple as that.
His formal education ended at the eighth grade. He grew up in poverty and hustled pool, but the Army straightened him out. And when it came time to marry and start a family, he swore he would give his kids a better life than he had.
That’s exactly what he did.
On the television, one of the protesters says he’s there because he wants a free education. He’s owed that, he says, though he doesn’t really say why. Dad doesn’t say what he thinks of that, and I’m thankful. If he did, I’d have to write it with a lot of ampersands and exclamation points.
Because Dad and his eight-grade education knows more about the world than the people on television and their college degrees. Because he knows that no one is owed anything, and the sooner you realize that the better off you’ll be. Because you have to work and scrape and save and drive the truck.
He won’t say that only those who have stood up to work should have the right to sit down and protest. The grandkids are in the room.
So I’ll just say it for him. Because after thirty-five years, I think he’s earned it.
Jump
November 16, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 7 Comments
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(Originally published 8/18/2010)
Lately I’ve taken my lunch at the park, enjoying a bit of the country in the middle of the city. I’ll park my truck by the baseball field, climb a small hill to sit on a smaller bench, and stare across the street. Just to see if it’ll happen, finally happen, today.
The facelifted but tired house is home to a family I’ve never met and a young man I’ve come to know only from a distance. Ten or so from the looks of him. All boy. Grass-stained Levi’s, alternating Transformer and John Deere T-shirts, and a filthy baseball cap. Always the cap. Homeschooled too, I suppose, since he’s home every day and I’ve yet to see a truancy officer.
For about a week I sat and watched him take scraps of plywood and two-by-fours from behind his father’s shed, gather the pile in the middle of the driveway, and proceed to hammer and nail every boy’s first serious attempt at engineering—a ramp. It started small, not much more than a pine speed bump. But either his ambitions or an innate love for hammering and nailing got the better of him, and that bump got bigger. Much bigger. So much so that the upper part of the curve on the finished product nearly came to the bill of his cap.
This was someone not merely content to give a gentle tug at gravity’s suppressive bonds. No, he wanted to break them with impunity. To fly.
He hammered the last nail a week ago and then pulled a muddy bike out of the shed, backed it up a good twenty feet, and climbed on. And then climbed off. A practice run, I supposed. The next day he actually pedaled halfway to the ramp. Halfway and half-hearted. And like any act undertaken with half a heart, it was doomed to fail. He squeezed the handlebars just as the front tire went from pavement to plywood.
And that’s how it’s been since. Every day I come here for my lunch, and every day he inches closer to that ramp but never quite close enough. And right now he’s there again, sitting on his bike and staring.
I know why.
From where I’m sitting I can look to my right at a tight circle of iron tracks. The train runs at the park during the warmer months and is quite the attraction, both for the kids and the parents who once were kids.
As a child I was terrified of the train, convinced the tunnel on the far side was in fact a door to the underworld that swung only one way. Boarding it would mean the end of me. I would race through the tunnel and be swallowed by it, lost in the darkness forever. When I turned eight, I knew it was time to put up or shut up. I rode the train. I jumped. And to my unbridled delight I found that not only did the tunnel have an entrance, it had an exit as well.
And I can look to my left and see the spot where as a teenager I parked one Saturday night and listened as my girlfriend serenaded me with Poison’s “I Won’t Forget You,” promising to never-ever-ever if I just fell in love with her. I liked the sound of that, so I jumped. She forgot about me three months later.
Which is why I understand the boy’s apprehension. It’s tough to jump. Tough to gather the nerve. Because you never know what’s going to happen after. You never know if you’ll land or crash, laugh or cry. And so we all sit and stare and wonder whether the chance to fly is worth the risk to fall. The good things in life are like that. They cost much but are worth more.
I look out over the park and see him tug on the bill of his cap. He rubs his hands and adjusts the pedals, positioning them just so for the right amount of initial oomph. And just as I think he’s about to squeeze the handlebars again, he doesn’t. He pushes harder. His eyes open wide.
And he jumps.
Who is your angel?
November 9, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 40 Comments
Today is the official pub date for Paper Angels, my second novel published by the good folks at FaithWords. Feel free to mosey on over to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore for a copy. And if you’re around Twitter today, come say hi during our Twitter party. We will be using the hash tag #PaperAngels.
There will be book giveaways, trivia, interviews and reviews by @faithwords, @katdish, @amysorrells, @cathylynnl and @gyoung9751.
I’m also giving away three signed copies right here. I’ll take your thoughts through Saturday, at which point three winners will be randomly chosen (and by random, I mean the kids will pull out three names from my cowboy hat). All you have to do is leave a comment below that answers this question—
Who or what has been an angel in your life?
Changing the world
November 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
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My daughter wants to change the world.
She’s nine, only a couple months removed from ten—that age when the world reveals itself to be a bit darker and more foreboding than once imagined, but it still retains a hue of rainbows and promise.
She’s studied history and knows about things like wars and slavery. She catches snippets of the news and sees the hunger and the hate. She knows what rape means. A few weeks ago, someone in her classroom was caught selling weed.
“Marijuana is bad, Daddy,” she told me. I told her yes, it was.
Much of me says it’s too early for any of this. I didn’t know what marijuana was until I was well into my teens, and my childhood was largely spent pondering the hitch in my baseball swing than the socio-economic ills of modern society. But these are different times, I suppose. Everything seems to be happening so fast. You try to let your kids be kids, but the world gets in the way.
My daughter, she doesn’t hide from any of this. Sometime in the last few years the thin veil that hangs over the world slipped away and revealed its true face to her, and she did not look away in horror. She was not afraid. She simply saw that something was broken and knew she was the one to fix it.
I can understand this. From the time I was eighteen until almost thirty, I felt the same way. I was going to be the one to fix the world. I was going to be the one to make a difference. And I acted as such in my own warped, disillusioned way until the day I realized just how tiny and powerless I was.
My daughter will learn that one day, too. I suppose I could try and soften that blow now, gently tell her that she isn’t all she thinks herself to be, but I won’t. There are things best learned while standing and things you can only learn after a fall. That lesson is of the latter. Most of the important ones are.
But on the other side of that she will learn one of the more valuable lessons in life, and that is that none of us can change the world. It is too big. We are too small. It has always been that way, and it always will.
That’s no cause for surrender, though. That’s what I’ll tell my daughter. That’s what I discovered for myself. Because even if we can’t change the whole world, we can change tiny pieces of it. We can change the small part of the universe around us. We may not be able to save millions, but we may be able to save one.
It’s the small scale that counts—doing the little things in a big way. Maybe one day my daughter will cure cancer or end hunger and make it rain in the desert. Maybe she will fight for peace where there is war and teach people to replace hate with love. But in the meantime, she can smile at a stranger and say hello. She can plant a flower where there is only muddy soil. She can choose to believe and not doubt.
In the end, that’s all we can do.
The last thing I’d ever write
November 2, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 105 Comments
The note above was penned by an eighty-five-year-old man named Robert. One day last month, he drove his car down a steep rural road to look at a pond. When he tried to drive back the way he came, the car rolled off the path and became mired in a ravine.
Robert was unable to walk out of his situation due to back problems that left him only able to get around with the help of a walker. He had no food. The only water he had barely filled an 8 ounce bottle. He honked his horn until the car battery was depleted.
Robert sat there, alone in his car, for two days.
With no food, little water, and temperatures in the upper 90s, he realized things didn’t look good. So he grabbed a pen and began writing on the car’s armrest.
Look closely and you can make a bit of it out. The first—and Robert said the most important—was that he make sure everyone knew it was an accident. Robert didn’t want anyone thinking he committed suicide. He wrote that the car’s wheels spun out. He asked that his family give him a closed casket.
About forty hours later, Robert was found. Turns out that final note wasn’t needed after all. As you can imagine, the whole ordeal changed him. Robert has a new outlook on life. He understands its delicateness. He knows every moment is precious.
It’s a good story with a happy ending. But me, I can’t stop thinking about that note.
What would I tell my family? What would I tell you? What would I say if I could never say anything more? Those questions have preyed on my mind since reading Robert’s story. I figured the only way I could start thinking about something else is to go ahead and write my letter.
So here it is, the last thing I’d ever write:
Dear All,
I don’t know how I managed to get myself in this mess. I think a lot of times you can’t see the trouble that’s coming until it’s on you. This is probably one of those times. I guess I should hurry. I never used to think much about time. Suddenly, time seems pretty important.
To my family, I want to say that the very last thing I want to do is leave you behind. You need to know that as much as I’m ready for heaven, I’m thinking the angels will have to drag me there. But don’t worry, I’ll find me a bench somewhere near the gate and wait for each of you.
To my wife, I’m sorry I was never the man I wanted to be. I’m thankful you overlooked that. Take care of the kids. Raise them to believe like you and fight like me.
To my son, there are few things more difficult in life than knowing how to be a man. I’ll give you a quick summary—work hard, laugh much, pray often. Love dignity rather than money. Face your darkness. Let your word be your bond. You’ll do well in life if you cling to those things. Know that I will always be proud of you.
To my daughter, you’ve taught me more about faith than anyone I’ve ever known. Remember this: we seldom have any choice as to the wars we must fight, we can only elect to face them with honor or cowardice.
To my friends, I know it may appear at times that I prefer silence to speech and solitude to company, but you mended the gashes I had rent into my own heart. Whatever goodness is in me was fostered by you.
I ask that you dispose of my remains as you see fit. I have no preference. Whatever flesh and bone is left behind is not me, it is merely an empty house that God has deemed I’ve outgrown.
Do not mourn, laugh.
Do not look back, look forward.
Live intently.
And last, know that all that separates the two of us is but one stroke of heaven’s eternal clock. Life is but a dream. Death is simply when we wake.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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