Billy Coffey

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The Father’s Love

image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com
My grandfather gave me my first Bible. I was four. He called me into the small office he had just off the kitchen and sat me down like I’d done something wrong (which I had, in fact—many, many somethings, and I didn’t know which one I’d been caught doing or how), then removed a small, wrapped rectangle from his desk drawer. “Yours,” he told me. “I want you to have it.”

It was one of those small New Testaments with the Psalms and Proverbs in the back, the kind you still see passed out by the Gideons, of which my grandfather was one. I remember carrying that bible around with me everywhere. I’d sit and leaf through the pages, run my fingers over the words. I even underlined a few verses here and there, like I’d seen my grandmother do in her worn King James. I couldn’t read a word of it, of course. But I liked to pretend I could, and I couldn’t wait until I could for real.

I still have that old Bible. The back cover is gone and the pages are thinning and yellowed, but you can still see my name in pencil on the first page and “Love, Granddaddy” written beneath. I don’t use it anymore. It stays atop one of my bookcases, there more as a relic to admire than something to take down and handle. The one I use daily and haul back and forth to church is not unlike the one my grandmother owned, old and worn. I like it, though. Someone once told me a Bible in tatters is indicative of a life that is not.

Still like to write in my Bible, too. And underline. Leaf through the pages of mine and you’ll find marks and notes many years old, all of which form a kind of spiritual timeline for my life. I’ll read a note scrawled in the margin or find a circled verse, and I can tell you exactly what was happening in my life at the time. I can tell you what I was going through or wrestling with. I can tell you if I was stumbling or flying.

I have one verse that’s been highlighted and underlined and noted more than any other. So much, in fact, that I now have to squint and raise the page close to be able to read it.

Romans 8: 38-39:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In the thirty years I’ve owned that Bible, I’ve circled and commented on nearly every one of those forty-nine words. Because I needed them, you see. There was a time when I needed to know that nothing could separate me from God’s love. There was another time when I needed to know it didn’t matter how high I was or how low, another when I needed to know I didn’t need to mourn my past, fear my present. Not even death was an end—there was a time when I needed to know that as well.

It’s the one verse I’ve gone to again and again. It has sustained me. It sustains me still.

I came across that verse this morning and paused to read it again. And I noticed something that had escaped me all this while, something I believe only time and experience has allowed me to see. One word in those two verses had been left unmarked, almost as if I’d never needed it or really understood why it was there.

That word was “life.”

Life can’t keep me from God’s love, either.

I’d never really considered that, never really understood what it meant. Until this morning, at any rate. Like I said—time and experience.

I’d presume you and I aren’t all that different. We’ve both been around enough. Done enough. Lived enough. We know to a certain degree what’s waiting when we get up every morning—the slog to work, the slog back home, the bills waiting in the mail and the people screaming on the TV that the world’s going to hell and we’d all better hang on. There are kids to worry about and retirement, and there’s that bum knee or the lump we feel or the arthritis settling in that lets us know we’re fast approaching the downward slope of life. There’s busted pipes and the clunking sound in the car and the dog to take to the vet. There’s dreams we once had and maybe still do, and there’s a sense of guilt and anger that maybe—maybe—what we are now is all we’ll ever be.

There’s life.

And you know what? All that stuff I just wrote can be as tiring and stressful and soul-crushing as any tragedy. I know people who have lost their faith through war or divorce or the death of a loved one. I know far more who have lost their faith by simply living day after day and year after year, trudging through the muck and the mire of life.

I underlined that word in my Bible this morning. Drew a box around it. To me, it’s the most important part of that verse now. Because God is determined not to keep death and the past and the future between Him and me. He won’t let life do it, either.

Writing stuff that matters

Devil Walks Update-1She walked up to me at the end of church last Sunday, one wrinkled hand stretched out in search of my own. Her woolen coat was already cinched and her hat pulled down tight, leaving only a wisp of white curls jutting out the sides. She smiled, and I noticed her teeth were too straight and too white to be her own.

“I’ve just read your latest novel,” she said, and then she patted my hand.

I grinned. “Really? Well, thank you, ma’am.”

“Don’t thank me.” Still smiling. “I didn’t like it at all.”

She kept her hand in mine and squeezed, wanting to reassure me that all was still right in the world.

“I see.” It was all I could think to say. “I’ll have to try better next time.”

“I read your first book. Snow Day. That was wonderful.”

“Thank you.”

“Such a nice story. Almost like a Hallmark movie. Have you ever thought of doing a Hallmark movie?”

“I don’t think that’s up to me,” I said.

“But this last one…” She made a face. It was all sadness and misery. But it hid her teeth, and for that I was grateful. “I just don’t know what’s happened. This last book? Awful. Too much heartache. And the characters? The bad ones were good and the good ones bad, and I never knew who was right and who was wrong. And the deaths. Awful, awful stuff. How could you write something like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just kind of came to me, I guess.”

“You were always such a good boy. I’ll pray for you.”

“Can always use that, ma’am.”

“Good. Now you go write something like Snow Day. What a lovely book. There was no blood.”

She walked on, tackling the last button on her coat as she did, then tucking her Bible under her arm as she shook the preacher’s hand and then walked into the cold outside. I stood there alone and grabbed my own Bible, trying to find my family and my thoughts.

She was right, you know. There was no blood in my first novel. There was some in my second. A bit more in my third. I suppose I could have told her my next book will be out in March and is called The Devil Walks in Mattingly, but I think that would have only decreased her respect and increased her prayers. I wondered if that kind old lady would read that book. I hoped so and kind of didn’t.

When my first novel came out in 2010, I felt as though I had reached a distinct midpoint in my life. The same world that so often had played out in front of me full of disappointment and despair brightened in the sharp light of hope. I had crawled through the valley. Climbed the mountain.

I felt born again, again.

That feeling hasn’t lessened. Every novel I write is to me a miracle, evidence that God isn’t quite done with me yet. It still sometimes feels like I’m crawling through a valley and climbing a mountain. The only difference is that at the top of that mountain there is always another, higher one, and another, deeper valley. But that’s life for all of us. Those joys we feel, the days of contentment and peace? Those things are merely the peaks upon which we stand and rest before continuing on our long journey to a land we cannot see but can only feel.

After standing on so many of those peaks, I suppose a part of me changed. My writing certainly did. I am a product of my environment, of a small town and blue mountains and dark hollers and folktales of ghosts and angels, brimstone and grace. Between you and me? I sort of ran from that at first. I wanted books that were easy and inspiring. No pain. No hurt. No loss.

Not anymore, though. And ironically enough, it was church that convinced me otherwise. It was my faith. It was that kind old woman’s faith. It was faith in a book we believe is the very Word of God, a book of stories about a serpent bringing ruin; a baby left to float down the Nile in a basket; a lowly shepherd boy facing a giant. A book about a righteous man suffering much for no reason and a prophet being swallowed alive by a whale. Of cities destroyed and countries enslaved. A savior hung to die on a cross. Heartache and blood.

Not easy stuff to read. But real stuff. Stuff that matters a great deal.

Next time, I’ll tell her that.

My favorite miracle

image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com

Quick, tell me your favorite miracle.

Isn’t easy, is it? The Bible is full of them, after all—those sixty-six books of God’s revelation. It is history and theology, philosophy and poetry. From a strictly literary perspective, it’s some of the finest ever produced. And yet the Bible is especially a long collection of miracles, one strung after the other, spanning thousands of years.

So, which is your favorite?

Creation itself, perhaps. The parting of the Red Sea. Jesus feeding the five thousand. Lazarus raised.

Those are only a few, of course. The miracle that came to my mind was Christ’s first (or first recorded, at any rate), while attending a wedding at Cana. It isn’t my personal favorite, though I’ll say His turning water into wine holds a certain significance to me. I’ve felt felt that particular miracle was a bit different than all the others that came after. To me, this one was simply a son wanting to do something for his mother. There is a deep sense of humanity in that small but great act.

Here’s the thing about that miracle: it wasn’t simply that water was changed to wine, it was that something less was made into something more. That seems the general rule. So far as I can tell, miracles follow that pattern of less to greater.

Consider the examples I mentioned earlier. For all its mystery and grandeur, the miracle of creation can be boiled down to the “less” of nothing being transformed into the “more” of everything.

The parting of the Red Sea? Danger to safety.

It was hunger changed to fullness when Christ fed the five thousand.

It was death made into life when Lazarus walked out of his tomb.

That’s the way all miracles are. All but one.

We celebrate this time of year because it commemorates the birth of Christ. It is, to every Christian, a miracle. Think of that miracle in the most rational of terms—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—and you’ll find that within that miracle are many more.

Who was born? The Savior of the world.

What happened? An angel appeared to a group of shepherds, some of the poorest people in the world, who became the first witnesses of what had just occurred.

When? According to Paul, God sent forth his son “in the fullness of time.” A wonderful phrase, that. Meaning that it happened just when God meant it to happen, just as with all things.

Where? Bethlehem, so fulfilling a prophecy made centuries before.

Why? So death could become for us not an end, but a door.

How?

Ah, how.

How did all of this happen? I suppose it could only be best described as the miracle of miracles. Because in all the other times before and all the times since, something less was made more. But in this instance, something more was made less. God Himself became man. The all-powerful was changed to pink-skinned and frail.

Amazing, isn’t it? And yet I can think of no truer expression of love than that of a God so big squeezing Himself into a world so small. Of living alongside us and understanding the joys and pains of our short existence. Of dying so that we all may live.

That, friend, is why the birth of Christ is my favorite miracle.

And that is how I can wish you the most happiest of Christmases.

Don’t need it? Leave it here.

Screen shot 2013-09-26 at 5.05.47 PMOne more New Orleans story:

The great part about taking a trip is that you get to see things you’ve never seen before. The bad part about taking a trip is that very same thing. Tucked away here in the mountains, I know most every hill and holler and person. The things I look at every day are ones I’ve looked at for the last forty-one years. There’s an old expression about home being wherever you are. I don’t think that’s true. For me there’s only one place in the world worthy of that designation, and that’s a small town in Virginia.

That said, a city like New Orleans is about as 180 degrees from my town as any place could be. It’s big and busy and strangely ominous in a way you can feel but not describe. It’s a beautiful place full of wonderful people.

Also? They have the best trashcans in the world.

I’m thinking of one just outside of Louis Armstrong International Airport. Big, industrial trash can. Dented and cracked and chipped, with a thin layer of filth ringing a metal lid marked PUSH. I was in a hurry, juggling a bag and a hat and a phone and an empty coffee cup. I stopped there to rid myself of the latter, very nearly threw my phone away instead, then caught myself long enough to realize what I was doing. That small mental mistake was enough for me to slow down and pay attention to what I was doing. That’s when I saw the faded letters that had been stenciled onto the front:

DON’T NEED IT? LEAVE IT HERE

Looking back, I can only imagine how ridiculous I looked at that moment—one dunderheaded redneck gawping outside of a busy airport, looking like he couldn’t quite figure out how the fancy trash can worked. A part of me understood even then that was not one of my finer moments, at least on the outside.

On the inside, though? Well, that’s a completely different story.

Maybe it was that I was tired and in a strange place at 5:30 in the morning, but something about those six words got my mind reeling. I stood there, my hand stretched out to feed my cup to the can. Staring. Thinking, Wouldn’t it be great if there were places where we could leave all the stuff we don’t need?

Not just garbage like empty coffee cups and food containers (I could see poking out from the PUSH sign a piece of paper with a red heart drawn on it and an old lottery ticket). I’m talking about real garbage. The stuff we carry around with us constantly. The things we stuff our hearts and minds with rather than our pockets.

Shattered dreams. Broken hearts. Doubts. Anger. Despair. Jealousy.

DON’T NEED IT? LEAVE IT HERE

Wouldn’t it be great, doing that? Standing there and emptying yourself of all those things (I would imagine there would be no lid with PUSH on the front, just a wide opening so you could toss it all without fearing you’d miss), feeling yourself lightened as you walked away. Feeling yourself freed.

I wonder sometimes how much of what’s wrong with this world is because we’re all just so tired of carrying so much stuff around inside us, of having to cram in more and more garbage because we don’t have anywhere to leave it. That’s what I thought about, standing there at the trashcan outside of Louis Armstrong Airport on a rainy Saturday morning.

Still thinking about it when I boarded my flight home, too. Sitting there as the jet taxied from the gate, eyes closed to a gray sky. Offering a silent prayer for safe travels, feeling the worries and frustrations of the job and bills waiting back at home. That’s when I heard it—that small voice rising from a deep place in us all that feels like a bridge spanning one world and the next. Telling me Who’s in charge and Who’s watching over me—over us. Telling me to go on and give thanks, yes, and to pray for whatever I need, but also to hand over all of my garbage. He’d take it. He’d take it all and I wouldn’t have to carry any of it anymore.

Saying if I didn’t need it, I could leave it there.

Right at the foot of the cross.

Lesser prayers

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

The prayer request portion of Sunday school class is the reason why we never seem to get much Sunday schooling done. And that’s not a knock against me or anyone else there. We have a fine class, a fine teacher, and a fine time probing the depths of the Good Book. Secretly, though, I suspect many of us spend most of that first half hour of class fidgeting and sighing so we can get to the good part. The part that, whether stated or not, means a little more.

A few Sundays ago the teacher wrapped up his lesson early, allowing those so inclined a full twenty minutes to spill their guts and tell everyone the happenings in the days of their lives.

“Prayer requests?” he asked.

Hands shot up. The teacher would call a name or nod to a person, going one by one through the room and taking notes, which would be distributed the next week on our official prayer request sheets.

Yes. We take this seriously.

Our space was then transformed from classroom to confessional as secret pains and worries were flung out into the light to be prodded and prayed over.

The lady two seats down from me was the first to raise her hand but not to be chosen. She lowered her hand and waited her turn. The one chosen began to speak on soft and muffled words of the tests she was to get in the coming week that would reveal whether she had cancer or not.

A couple near the front had just learned they were going to be parents. It was their fourth try, they said. The first three pregnancies had resulted in miscarriages.

One man was losing his job.

Another man was still looking for one.

One woman said her teenage son came home drunk two nights before and threatened her. She’d been staying with her sister since, afraid to go home.

A mother and father had a son who’d just been given his traveling orders for Afghanistan. “Pray he shoots straight and ducks,” the father said.

Another couple had a friend who’s son had just come home from Iraq. The funeral would be the next day.

A car accident had taken the life of a seventeen-year-old son of a preacher in the next town.

A woman buckled under the grief of a marriage in tatters.

And on. And on.

And through it all, the woman two seats down would raise her hand and wait her turn, lowering it when the Sunday school teacher had called upon someone else, scribbling both name and note on the paper.

After ten minutes, her hand went into the air slower and with a little more hesitation. After fifteen, her hand wasn’t raised at all.

I found her in the hallway afterward and said hello. Then I mentioned the lack of time and the abundance of prayer requests in class, and that it was a shame she never got to share hers.

“If you’d like,” I said, “you can tell me what it was. My family and I will pray.”

She looked at me and offered a small smile.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I guess it’s not that important. I lost my necklace, you see. It’s just one of those cheap silver crosses that you can pick up at the Christian bookstore for about five dollars, but it meant the world to me. My son gave it to me for my birthday last year. Saved up his allowance for almost a whole month.” She paused and than added, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do if I don’t find it.”

I nodded.

“It seemed so important at the time,” she said. “But then came all those other things people needed praying for, cancer and war and death. So many are hurting now. My problems just didn’t seem that great after that.”

I nodded again. I understood, I really did. But she was wrong.

She was called away before I could tell her what I was thinking. What I thought she really needed to hear.

She’s right, of course. There are so many hurting now, and for so many reasons. But I for one believe that doesn’t mean one person’s problems are greater than another’s. Not to God.

To God, at that moment the only thing in the universe that mattered was that she had lost her necklace. Just like the only thing in the universe that mattered was one son going to war and another coming home, and a family dissolving, and a car accident, and a threatened mother.

Humility is an important thing to feel. We need to know the world doesn’t revolve around us.

But the love of God is an important thing to feel, too. And we also need to know that.

Weep with those who weep

Image courtesy of Google Images, photo by Sue Ogrocki, AP
Image courtesy of Google Images, photo by Sue Ogrocki, AP

It’s the father I think of most, his picture I still see in my head. Sitting on that faded lawn chair in the midst of all that rubble, head buried in two shaking, dirt-stained hands. Sobbing. Waiting for his young son to answer.

He’d been there for hours, combing through what the tornado had left behind. Shouting his son’s name, calling him home. What remained of the elementary school in Moore, Oklahoma, was little more than piles of twisted wood and steel. Still, he believed his son would be found. Other children had been pulled from the wreckage, why not his?

But as the hours drew on and the shouts dwindled, what hope he had began to fade. His son was still somewhere in there. His boy. That thought—the sheer, horrible knowing—was enough to hollow out what was left of his heart. As I sat there in the comfort of my living room, surrounded not only by a whole house but a whole family as well, I watched the tearful reporter say this man would not leave until his son was found. Alive or dead.

We cannot escape these stories. We hear them on the news and read them in the paper. We see accounts of the dead and the survivors online. The news is everywhere now, as close as the phone in your pocket. Maybe that’s why I’m still thinking of that father some three days later. Or maybe it’s simply because I have a son as well.

He’s gone now, I suppose. The last I heard was that everyone had been found and all the bodies recovered. Twenty-four people died in Moore, ten of them children. I suppose his son was among them.

But I still see that father there, sobbing in that chair.

Pray for them. That’s what I’ve heard, and from everywhere. It’s what the governor of Oklahoma said—“We need prayers.” They do. We all do. And in the days and weeks to come, what will happen in Moore is what happens so often in this country in times of need and catastrophe. Friends and strangers will open their hearts and their pocketbooks. Streets will flood with volunteers. The rebuilding will begin.

Ask that broken father, he’ll probably agree with all of that. Then he’ll probably say it’s much easier to rebuild a town than to rebuild a life.

Pray for Oklahoma. I’ve said those words myself. I’ve read the thoughts of many with regards to what that tornado meant and where God was and why He allowed it. Me, I’ve written nothing. A part of me feels like no one else should have, either. We don’t know where God was. We don’t know what He was thinking. And honestly? If that were me sitting in a lawn chair, screaming for my son? If all those pontificators would have come to me and said it was all for some greater purpose? That God won’t give me more than I can handle? I would’ve strangled each and every one of them.

I saw this Facebook comment in a recent article: “If prayer works, there wouldn’t be a disaster in the first place. So please keep your religion to yourself.”

Not true, of course. Prayer is a mystery designed to change us more than our circumstances, and we accomplish nothing by denying that God is sovereign over all. But I understood the sentiment. A part of me was even tempted to share it. But keeping my religion to myself? No.

We don’t need less of God now. Now, we need Him more.

I wouldn’t have told any of this to that father. I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it myself. Not then. What I would have done was just sit. I would have called out his son’s name and I would have wept along with him, because we need to weep with those who weep. That requires no answers and no empty platitudes, only a heart willing to be broken so that on one far day it may be filled once more with hope.

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