Behold
December 19, 2011 by Billy Coffey · Leave a Comment
image courtesy of photobucket.com
So. Things have been a little tough around here lately, and for a variety of reasons. Seems to be that way for a lot of folks this year. Times are tough out there, no doubt about it.
I’ve never understood how anyone could be melancholy during Christmas. To feel a heaviness amidst such beauty seems impossible, and to possess a measure of fear while surrounded by so much joy seems tragic. Such people have always been alien to me. I understand them better now.
The Nativity story is a popular one in our house these days; the kids have fallen into the habit of reciting the first verses of Luke 2 each night before bed. One of my favorite parts of the Bible, Luke 2. It is a fantastic retelling of fact—of shepherds and angels and a big miracle in a tiny baby. Last night as I listened, heart heavy and sadness there, what struck me was the tenth verse:
“But the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people.’”
I imagined those shepherds—alone that night in darkness, guarding their flocks, trying to keep the wolves away. It was likely a tough time for them then, just as it is now for us. It was a life of work and of scraping by, of dealing with loss and hardship. And fear, especially fear. They were trying to keep the wolves away, after all. Maybe that’s why so many of us are afraid, too.
I think it’s fear that lies deep inside our troubles. Fear that the bad things will get worse, that the black hole we’re in will get deeper, and that whatever joy is left for us in this world will be carried away by a cold wind that will leave us shivering.
For a tiny group of shepherds one night long ago, help came in the form of an angel with Good News to tell. But before that News was given came four words that were even more needed, at least for that group of sheep herders in the Bethlehem countryside:
“Fear not; for behold…”
If there is a magic to all the Christmases that have followed that first one (and I have no doubt there is), then the secret to that magic lies in one word—behold.
My problem was that I was familiar with that word but didn’t really know what to behold something truly entailed. My dictionary put it this way:
“To perceive through use of the mental faculty; comprehend.”
In other words, to behold something means not merely to see it, but to ponder it. To seek to understand it.
Our worries and cares shrink not only our hearts and minds, but our vision as well. The more we look upon what we fear, the less we can see of what can comfort. I think that’s why beholding is so important. It involves interest. It requires attention. It demands participation. It means that for one moment we chance a small step outside of ourselves to gaze upon larger things.
So let us—you and I—do just that this Christmas. Let’s take a moment to ponder and wonder and try to comprehend. In that even our sadness will be coated with a sheen of joy, and the angels will proclaim even in our darkness. For the reason we celebrate this time, this Holy Child, is because by His presence the sadness we feel in this life was rendered temporary, and by Him we know that fairer lands await.
Do not be afraid. Behold.
The wandering wise man
December 5, 2011 by Billy Coffey · Leave a Comment
What you see to the right is the last remnants of the Coffey family’s most cherished Christmas tradition—the Wandering Wise Man. Dropped earlier this afternoon by two very excited hands and onto the ceramic tile of the bathroom floor. May he rest in pieces.
In order for me to fully explain the enormity of this event, I need to tell you about before. About three Christmases ago, when we were unpacking lights and ornaments and garland. And, most importantly, our manger scene.
My daughter was the self-appointed Nativity Setter-Upper, and it was a task she approached with the utmost holiness and care. Animals were positioned first, then shepherds and angels, Mary and Joseph, and then Baby Jesus. The wise men came last. Three of them usually.
But that year, there were only two.
We rooted through boxes and overturned ottomans and scoured the dark places beneath the television stand. Nothing. Which meant Daddy had to climb back into the attic with a flashlight and a prayer. Both worked. I found him upside down and backwards in a corner guarded by a hairy-looking spider. Problem solved.
But then a thought occurred to me. One about how we all seek Christ but sometimes get turned around and lost, and how it’s important to keep looking anyway. I put the wise man in my pocket, walked downstairs, and said nothing.
A while later my son happened to walk down the hallway and see the wise man in the middle of the floor along with a note—Have you seen Baby Jesus? By the time he ran back into the living room to summon the rest of the family, it had moved again. This time to my daughter’s bedroom.
“Guess he fell out of the box when we put the Nativity back in the attic last year,” I said. “Now he’s gotta find Jesus before Christmas.”
Thus the Wandering Wise Man was born.
He has miraculously emerged every year since in the weeks before Christmas, moving daily—often more than once—from room to room in search of the Savior. It is as far as I can tell the best idea I’ve ever had. The kids are so engrossed in his progress that come Christmas morning they head to the Nativity first and the tree second, just to make sure he’s reached his destination.
Earlier tonight the wise man appeared by the sink in the bathroom, where he was found by my daughter. In her excitement to spread the news, she knocked the figure to the floor. He shattered into a hundred pieces.
She did, too.
I found her on the bathroom floor cupping as many shards as she could find into her hand.
“I broke the wise man,” she sobbed. “I ruined everything!”
Uh-oh.
I gathered her off the floor and passed her to my wife, who took her to the living room for some rocking chair therapy. I snuck away long enough to swipe another wise man from the Nativity, scribble a new note, and place both at her bedside.
She found them a while later. Christmas was saved.
I checked in on her a bit ago before heading off to bed. Beside the wise man was a note written in seven-year-old scribble:
Dear 2nd wiseman thank you for showing up. I’m so sorry for hurting your friend.
I smiled. Both at the words and the little girl who wrote them. Then I took a pen from my pocket, turned the note over, and wrote a reply:
Please don’t be upset. Everyone makes mistakes. We’ll always love you, the wise men.
I’m pretty sure that note won’t mend her broken heart, but it might be enough to get the needle and thread going. Sometimes that’s all you can hope for.
Because the lessons that count the most also tend to hurt the most. Lessons like the one my daughter learned today. No matter how careful we are, we still break stuff. And not just wise men. Hearts, promises, trust, and dreams, too.
No matter how hard we try, we still make a mess sometimes. We still shatter the sacred and the special, leaving nothing but the shards of what was once whole that we’re forced to pick up through our tears.
Thankfully, the One whom the wise men seek doesn’t believe in everything being ruined. He’s in the business of putting together and making new.
And like my daughter’s wise men, He’ll always love us.
Changing the world
November 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
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.
A precipitous balancing act
August 29, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
This past weekend, I got the hammock out.
Strung it between two trees in the backyard under a warm August sun. Just me and the sky.
There’s a lot to be said for a good hammock. Back when I was a young and single man, the bedroom of my tiny apartment was graced with one. I had no bed, I had a hammock. And I rocked myself to sleep every night dreaming I was on some warm and secluded beach far away. When my girlfriend agreed to become my wife, she said the hammock had to go. It was just as well. Eventually, you have to put the old things aside in favor of the new.
But sometimes those old things come back, if only for an afternoon. It had been a long, difficult week. I needed a break. My sunny disposition had turned sullen, and I had a serious case of the Grouchies. I needed to rock myself and dream of warm beaches to chase the pessimism away.
The knots were good, the hammock threads still strong. I moved to one tree and set my leg in the middle.
Leaned over.
Lifted my other leg off the ground.
Fell.
And by that, I mean tumbled. Hard. I did a complete three-sixty in the air and landed on my neck. I couldn’t breathe for thirty seconds.
Tried it again—setlegleanoverliftleg. Fell. It was an even worse fall that time, so bad that I actually did see warm beaches and thought I’d died.
The third attempt almost never happened. By then I was reciting the old adage of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. To the best of my recollection, there was no fool me three times because no one in history had been so stupid to try it again.
But I did. I really wanted to chase that pessimism away, and I really wanted to do it in my old hammock.
I moved to one tree and set my leg in the middle.
Leaned over.
Lifted my other leg off the ground. Slow, nice and slow, and…there. I’d made it.
Wasn’t easy, though. I’d forgotten that the thing about sitting in a hammock was just how difficult it was. Whatever stability you may find won’t last long. A breeze will kick up or you’ll sneeze or you’ll scratch a sudden itch, and for the next moments you’ll be fighting both gravity and inevitability.
The trick isn’t just learning how to get into a hammock, the trick is learning how to stay there. How to keep your balance. And the way you do that is simple—realizing you can tumble at any moment. You can tumble and you can have no understanding of why.
The best way to handle that knowledge, to maintain that balance, is to accept it and tuck it into a corner of your mind. Because the only way you can keep yourself from falling is by understanding that falling is a perpetual possibility.
Sounds pessimistic, I know. But it’s true. I laid there in that hammock for three hours counting the clouds and never fell once, all because I kept in my head I was always one twitch away from doing so.
I dreamed of faraway beaches, places where stress was a foreign word and time didn’t matter, where the sun was always warm. And yet I was allowed to dream of all that optimism because of the cynicism that held me in place.
Which got me thinking. Maybe the sadness we feel can teach us just as much as the happiness we want. Maybe God at times uses our doubt more than our faith. Maybe the best will happen and maybe the worst, and maybe the best we can hope for in this life is a strange and mysterious mix of the two.
I suppose we’ll all find out in the by and by. But for now, I’m sticking with this—the best way to rock away a warm afternoon is to know it can all tumble down.
The penny man
August 18, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 3 Comments
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Walk with me for a moment. Won’t take long, I promise. I just want to show you something.
This street here? Leads to downtown. I’m not really a downtown sort of guy, for the past few months I’ve taken my workday lunch at the coffee shop just ahead. That one, with the steaming cup of cappuccino painted on the window and the tables outside. We’ll take a table. I know it’s hot out here, but you’ll be better able to see what I’m going to show you. And the iced coffee will keep you cool. My treat. In the words of the Penny Man, “It don’t suck.”
All these cars and people? Never seen them before. That’s the way it is in the city, right? So much randomness. But mingling around in all those people are some I see each time I come here. That little lady in the pink shorts walking her toy poodle? Every day like clock-work. And that something-year-old skateboarder looking fashionably apathetic by the lamppost in front of the antique store? He’s hung out there every day for the past four weeks. See? We all have our own routines and live in our own little worlds, but they overlap sometimes. We’re not as disconnected from one another as we think.
And then there is the Penny Man. See him? No, on the other side of the street. Nice-looking guy in the suit. Yep. Comes through about this time every day. Not sure what he does for a living. Probably a lawyer or something, since the courthouse is right around the corner there. He’s why I asked you to walk down here with me. He’s what I want to show you.
Why is he the Penny Man? Don’t get ahead of me. You’ll see, just watch him. There, see that? Missed it? Don’t worry. I don’t know how many times I watched him and missed it, too. He’s good, really good. See how his hand’s in his front pocket? Now wait.
There it is.
I’m guest posting today for Bonnie Gray over at Faith Barista, where you’ll find the rest of this post. Please stop on over and say hello.
Treasures found
June 27, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 22 Comments
A last vacation post…
One would think that in an environment filled with literally thousands of these:
a young boy’s attention would be sufficiently diverted from the fantasies that define him to the reality that surrounds him. Not so for my son. If a vacation allows for anything, it is that opportunity to become someone else for a small amount of time. For me, that someone else was a beach bum. For him, it was a treasure hunter.
And he was after treasure. Not the normal sort of treasure, either. Gold bullion and precious jewels weren’t enough, oh no. What he wanted—what he was determined to find—were the remains of Blackbeard’s ship.
He knew we were generally in the right place—in 1996, archaeologist’s discovered the remains of the Queen Anne’s Revenge just a few miles down the road—and he arrived with the proper equipment. The two plastic buckets would be enough to haul his findings, he said. The two corresponding plastic shovels would be enough to dig them. And the metal detector he borrowed from his grandfather would be enough to find them.
The plan was foolproof.
The remains of Blackbeard’s ship were nowhere to be found. Plastic buckets and shovels would be of limited use, but still more than a metal detector finding a wooden boat. Those were the facts, facts I kept concealed from him. Because as any child knows about finding treasure, facts have little value. He was determined, my son, and I was determined to help him.
We set out early each morning (“We gotta get out there before anyone else finds it,” he told me). Just the two of us along the lonely beach, he with the green pail and I with the pink, because, as he said, “Boys don’t carry pink stuff, but daddies can.” We roamed among the shells and the surf, watched the dolphins and the turtles, and watched for treasure.
It was slow going, as was intended. My son inherited both my looks and my impatience—two things that will no doubt curse him for life—but we learned tolerance together that week. We understood the value of taking our time and looking.
Each day we would return for breakfast with our pails full, though of shells rather than wood. Neither of us were disappointed in our failure; by then we’d learned that venturing out together, talking and laughing and dodging the waves, could be described as many things but never failure. And we told stories as men of the sea are inclined to tell, accounts of big fish that were really small and entire planks of Blackbeard’s wood that were snatched by the tides before we could snatch them. And each night at bedtime we would recount our day together and end it with the promise that the next day his treasure would be found.
For five mornings, we looked. Pails at our side, eyes cast downward, only to return with pails of conch shells and scallops.
His steadfast countenance was failing. We were leaving the sixth day, which meant only one more walk, and by then he’d figured out the metal detector would be useless. I told him not to worry, that treasure is one of those things that are usually found when one isn’t looking at all, but he didn’t believe me.
We searched long that last morning. Walked longer, too. To the very tip of the island, where the ocean met the sound in a mash of tides and waves. We’d agreed not to pick up any shells that day and focus our attention better. By the time we neared our temporary home, our pails were empty.
I was preparing the sort of disappointment-will-happen speech that fathers hate to give when he shot out to my left and picked up something from the sand. He yelled (“Here it is! I found it!”) and ran back to my side. Then he showed me this:
A piece of driftwood. Utterly plain and worthless. Those are the facts, facts I kept concealed from him. Because as any child knows about finding treasure, facts have little value. He was determined, my son, and I was determined to help him.
That piece of driftwood now proudly sits on my son’s dresser. He looks at it every day. It’s his treasure, he says. Found on the beach with his father.
Me, I say it’s treasure, too. Utterly unique and priceless. I hope he guards it well.
And I will guard the treasure I found that day as well. It too is unique. Priceless. Not a piece of wood, not a pretty shell. Just this:
Inspirational bacteria
January 4, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 13 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
Of all the depressing news stories of the past year (and there were quite a few, weren’t there?), one very uplifting story sticks in my mind. The fact that it involves arsenic and bacteria may convince you otherwise, but I assure you it really is inspiring. Really.
It seems as though a group of NASA scientists have trained a species of bacteria to survive without phosphorous. That didn’t seem too wonderful a thing to me, but then I read that phosphorous is one of the six essential building blocks of life. Take that one out, no life. In the span of a few short months, the bacteria replaced the phosphorous in their DNA with arsenic, which is poisonous to cellular life.
I’ll admit I quit reading that article halfway through and went on to something that better suited my tastes—something about football, if memory serves me right. But the story stuck in my mind for some reason, and I kept going back to it. There seemed to be something valuable there, some truth that needed to be pondered. I didn’t know what on earth it could be, especially considering the fact that science and I, while acquaintances, wouldn’t be considered friends.
But even if you know as little as I about biology, you have to admit this is pretty interesting news. A group of people have managed to sustain life when life should have been unsustainable. Amazing! Wonderful!
Then again, this is nothing new to most people. History is littered with periods when life seemed impossible and yet thrived nonetheless, times when hope waned and fear gripped us all. Times like the Dark Ages, when disease was rampant and death was a constant menace. Or that first Thanksgiving, with all those starving and cold Pilgrims.
I would imagine those who lived in my neck of the woods didn’t feel much like living during the Civil War.
Same goes for the depression of the 1930s.
I’ve heard stories from soldiers who fought in World War II, those who struggled through winters in Europe and summers in the South Pacific, who felt sure they would never make it home alive.
I’ve heard the same from veterans of Vietnam.
There are times when life is reduced to its most basic essentials—a choice between pushing on and lying down. And it’s in those times when all seems lost and impossible that we discover just how strong we are.
Time and again and through thousands of years, we’ve found that the sweetness of life cannot truly be tasted in the good times, but in the bad. When its preciousness is most apparent.
Of all the stories I read in 2010, that’s the one I’m carrying with me into 2011. Because for many, this is yet another in a long line of dark times. There’s so much uncertainty, so much fear. Our days seem to totter on the edge of some great abyss, and it seems that the only thing keeping this world on an even keel are prayers and what hope we can muster.
It’s worth mentioning that to some degree, every year is the same. People have always been hungry and still oppressed. Governments have always been corrupt. Earthquakes and hurricanes and floods and blizzards have always been with us. We say our times are especially bad because we’re the ones in them. The truth is that there have always been worse.
So for me, when things seem their worst and my fear seems the strongest, I’m going to remember the tiny bacteria that has managed to survive on poison. I’m going to try to emulate that.
I’m going to walk on, and not lie down.
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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