challenge – Page 4

Pick your cause

February 7, 2013 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

The college where I work is a great place filled with great people. The campus is beautiful, the professors excellent, and the staff both accommodating and friendly.

But it is still a college. And as it is such, my work environment harbors the sort of modern, liberal predilections that a more traditional person like me can’t seem to understand sometimes. Some days, many days, I am both generally exasperated and specifically confused by what I see.

A few weeks ago the college held what is annually billed as Pick Your Cause Week. Each day brought exhibits, lectures, and a wealth of information concerning a particular organization or subject. This year children of alcoholics, muscular dystrophy, women’s cancers, domestic violence, and the poor were chosen.

Though there are some things here at work that I find questionable and a few I find just plain strange, I like this. I like it a lot. We should all have a Pick Your Cause Week.

I find it sadly ironic that in this age of computers and satellite television, when the smallest event that happens in the smallest corner of the smallest country on the other side of the world can be instantly beamed right into our living rooms, we’ve really never been so separated from one another.

The media blitzes us with a constant barrage of suffering and need. We see footage of disaster and crime and hear stories of loss and despair. And though we try every day to nourish whatever hope we have and coax it to grow, there is the daily reminder that our world seems to be teetering on the edge of a very dark abyss and there is nothing that can pull it back onto solid ground.

It all can be just a little too much to bear. For me, anyway.

So I do what a good Christian should. I pray. But I’ve found that I often use prayer as an excuse, a poor example of doing something. As much as I pray for this world and all the people in it, I find that I do little else about it. And while those prayers are vital, they shouldn’t be the final solution. Asking God to help the world and asking Him to equip me to help the world are two different things. I don’t often get that.

I have a tendency to shrink the world. Shrink it so its dimensions extend no further than the small part I happen to occupy. Shrink it to only that which affects me. My world is my family and my town and my work. Whatever else that happens outside of my world that is sad and regrettable and unfortunate affects me emotionally. But it is also none of my business. I try to ignore it. I don’t hope it will go away because I don’t think it ever will, I just try to stay out of its way and hope it doesn’t find me or the ones I care about.

All of that is of course the silliest thing any Christian should ever believe, and yet I do. And so do a lot of us. We all at some point fall for the great lie that there is nothing we can do about the state of things, and in doing so we risk developing a mindset that is perhaps as unchristian as we can get:

We don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to us.

That is why a Cause is so important. We are all called to spend our time and energy toward something that will continue on long after we leave this world. It is our purpose, our mission. No matter who we are or what we do or where our talents lie, we are all here for the same reason: to make things better.

To heal the wounded. Clothe the naked. Feed the poor. To offer help to the helpless and hope to the hopeless.

And the light of God to the darkness.

After the storm

November 1, 2012 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

Now comes the hard part. At least, that’s how I see it from where I sit. Granted, where I sit is a warm home with a fire blazing. We have power, we have food, we have gas in the truck. Yes, we’re fortunate. Unlike the five million or so others who still have no power.

We all knew Sandy was coming, and I believe we’re all the better for it. My grandparents once said there were no extended weather forecasts in their day. Meteorology counted for little more than a telegraph from the next town over, or that old adage about red sky in the morning, sailor take warning. Storms back then were worse, they told me, because you didn’t really know what was coming. I think that’s true. Nowadays, at least we can set ourselves before the punch is thrown at our jaw.

Probably like you, I watched it all from the comfort of my living room. Listened as the weathermen and weatherwomen spoke of nothing like this ever happening before and how whole stretches of land would be swallowed and how many things would never be the same. And just as in every instance of oncoming doom, there was a curios sort of excitement mixed with fascination that made some do pretty stupid things. And when Sandy finally came she came just as it had been predicted, washing away and blowing away and prompting us to remember that we really aren’t the ones in charge at all, that there are bigger monsters than the ones who hide under our beds, ones more real.

And when it blew and poured we all spoke of the devastation and the fear and the utter sadness, and just after there came the stories of those who saved lives and property out of sheer heroism—the first responders, the national guardsmen, the ordinary people who were made great by extraordinary circumstances. If there is a silver lining in times such as these, I think it is the reminder that there resides in us better people than what we normally are.

Here in the mountains there was rain and wind and snow but little else. For that, we are all thankful. But my thoughts turn to my Yankee neighbors. Because as I said, now comes the hard part.

They’ve taken the punch, you see. Taken it square. And that sense of determination and the will to pick up and move on is kindling. Such a sentiment is unique to humanity and speaks of the holiness that dwells in us—we will not be beaten. We will rise again. We will be better than we were. It’s a desire that can carry us through horrible times and build bridges between ourselves and others were only chasms once were. Few things unite us more than disaster. I suppose that could be seen as both a supreme blessing and a great sadness.

The storm may be over—broken up over western New York, perhaps, or tossed back out to sea to be swallowed by the Atlantic. But even now there are darker clouds and colder winds growing. I’ve read that food is growing scarce and gasoline scarcer. Power to many places won’t be back online for a week or more. And November in New England is more akin to January most everywhere else.

In that regard I suppose the storms we face in our lives are no different than the storms we face in our hearts. In the beginning we endure them through adrenaline and determination. In the aftermath, we endure them through faith and work. And though I would never answer for you, I will say from my own experience that the after is usually worse than the during.

That is why my prayers will be with them even more now.

Four rules

September 10, 2012 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

cal ripken — image courtesy of photobucket.com

I’m usually good for one awful, please-God-kill-me bout of sickness per year, but the last time I actually threw up was Christmas Eve 1995. I am of the opinion that there is no worse feeling in this life than when…that…happens. I’ve heard people say they’re not feeling well and wished they would just go ahead and do it, as if the after would be worth the during. They lie. Throwing up helps no one.

I remember that last time because of the irony involved. Christmas has always been my favorite time of year—of joyful blessing and peace on earth and Hosanna in the Highest—and yet there I was in the bathroom with my head against the porcelain god saying “This can’t be happening this can’tbe happening thiscan’tbehappen—”

And then it did.

Just so you know, it was horrible. Merry Christmas to me.

That was the day I vowed to never throw up again. I didn’t know exactly how much of a say I had in that, but I thought I’d give it a shot. It’s been tough a few times. I’ve had flu and strep and colds and infections and viruses. I’ve had moments of thiscan’tbehappen—. But I am proud to say that as of today, my streak is unbroken.

I’m proud of that. I’m the Cal Ripken of not puking.

Just in case you’re interested, I’ll tell you how such an impressive feat is accomplished. It certainly isn’t something as mundane as a proper diet (my breakfast this morning? Deer jerky, a bowl of Frankenberry, and coffee). No, I’ve kept my streak through more esoteric measures.

Not puking is a mental thing. A mindset. But it’s also following a few commonsense steps when things go from good to uh-oh.

Like step one: pay attention. Be mindful of that little flutter in your gut. Stop what you’re doing and take stock. It may be a fluke, yes. But it may be something more, also. I’m convinced the vast majority of puking happens when people fail to heed the warning signs and only act when it’s too late.

If it isn’t a fluke and it really may be something more, then it’s on to step two: breathe. Nice, deep, even breaths into and then out the nose. Never through the mouth. I cannot emphasize this point enough. The last thing you want to be doing at that moment is opening your mouth.

Once your breathing is under control, you can move to your thoughts. That’s step three. The mind is an amazing creation, and whatever goes on in there affects the rest of you. Start thinking about peaceful things—mountains and flowers people laughing. Don’t think about oceans, though—too wavy. And for the love of all that is holy and good, don’t think about what might happen. That will ruin everything.

If you’re at step three and still feeling like the wave is building and the end is nigh, it’s time for step four: pray. Pray hard. Steps one through three have failed me through the years, but step four never has. God has always been my Pepto-Bismol.

I say all this because I was sick last week. Not please-God-kill-me sick, but more like you’d-better-slow-down sick. And even though things didn’t progress into a downward spiral of almost-yarking, I decided to follow the above guidelines anyway.

And you know what? It worked.

I’m thinking now of expanding those four rules and including them on the days I feel fine, too. No use to waste them when I’m sick.

I’m going to pay attention more. And when things start going from good to uh-oh, I’m going to stop and breathe.

I’m going to keep the good in my thoughts and not dwell on the bad.

And I’m going to pray. More and always.

When the monsters reached out

September 10, 2012 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

I was a pretty good kid, more or less. Aside from breaking my arm by falling out of a tree when I was eight and thus ruining our family vacation to Busch Gardens, I only once heard my parents utter anything resembling What are we going to do with that boy?

That one time wasn’t when I fell out of the tree, though. It was when I decided to finally do something about my monster.

My monster was twelve feet tall and covered with green slimy skin. Four sharp horns, three gray and one black, jutted out from its forehead (I can’t tell you how many times those horns nearly impaled me). But it was its breath that was the worst—fiery and pungent, as if it had neither eaten nor brushed its teeth in a very long time. That was where I came in. I just didn’t know whether it wanted to eat me or use me as a monster toothbrush.

It lived in the dark recesses beneath my bed, which made sleep impossible. At night I could hear it moving around down there, stalking me. All attempts at prayer seemed useless. So did my attempts to get my parents to look for it. Parents can never see anything.

So in a fit of sleepless desperation, I took matters into my own hands one night and tucked my cap gun under my pillow. Sometime around midnight—breakfast time for my monster—it began stirring. I counted to a hundred and prayed, then leaped down onto the floor and fired off six shots beneath the bed.

I didn’t know if I’d managed to wound it or, even better, kill it outright. But I did succeed in scaring my parents half to death.

They came running (staggering, really, since it was the middle of the night). After threats of everything from grounding to eternal damnation, they finally looked under the bed. Didn’t see anything, of course. But I thought I spotted monster blood in the carpet.

Whether I had winged it or killed it or simply scared it away, my monster left me alone after that. All the monsters did, really (there was one in my closet and one in the crawlspace of the house, too). I found out what those monsters were really—a clump of toys, clothes that I didn’t hang up, the rumblings of an old furnace. Knowledge goes a long way in battling monsters.

That small but important fact proved itself true over and over again as I grew. There were no monsters, just reasons.

Today, September 10, marks the eleventh anniversary of the last day I believed that. Because the next day was September 11, 2001. The day I learned the truth.

There really were monsters in this world.

They didn’t have slimy skin or horns or fiery, pungent breath. But they wanted to kill me just as much.

Maybe more.

I sat on the edge of my bed that day for seven straight hours. Watched as the towers fell and the Pentagon burned. Watched as a plane when down in a Pennsylvania field. And I remember looking down at my hands sometime that afternoon and finding a picture of my first child’s sonogram in them. I’m still not sure how it got there, but I still know what I was thinking. I was thinking about the world my daughter was about to be born into, one that had just turned a darker shade of black.

That was one day I swore to myself I would never forget. Not just what happened, but what I felt while it was happening. And I haven’t. I remember it all.

It was a horrible day. And I guess like most horrible days, the temptation is to move on. To let the past be the past and look to the future.

I suppose that sort of thinking accounts for a lot of what’s going on nowadays. I won’t get into that. All you have to do is turn on the news. It’s everywhere.

But me, I still choose to remember. I’ll let the past be the past. I’ll look to the future. But I’ll still cast a wayward glance behind me while I’m walking on. I’ll still remember that day. Because that’s the day the monsters reached out and grabbed us all.

And that’s the day I vowed that my children wouldn’t just be raised to believe in them, but to fight them as well.

Jump

November 16, 2011 by Billy Coffey 7 Comments

(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.

Changing the world

November 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey 12 Comments

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.

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