failure – Page 2

Why not forget?

August 9, 2012 by Billy Coffey 7 Comments

It’s called propranolol.

A mouthful, to be sure. The reason why so many medicines have require long, unpronounceable names has always eluded me. I once asked my doctor why such a thing was necessary. He looked at me like I was stupid and answered nothing. I don’t think he knew why, either.

Propranolol is a beta blocker, used for everything from cardiac arrhythmias to high blood pressure to controlling migraines in children. A wonder drug with fantastic benefits.

A recent study by Dutch scientists has revealed another fantastic benefit, one that has led to a lot of thinking on my part.

Propranolol, it seems, also dulls memory. Dulls it to the point where these same scientists are boldly predicting a time in the very near future when we could rid our minds of bad memories all together.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? To get rid of all those nasty reminders of the bad moments in our lives. It certainly sounds wonderful to me. Much of my daily life is still lived in the past, whether knowingly or not. It’s fingers still grip me. Loosely perhaps, but enough that I still feel them. Feel them in my decisions and reactions and worries.

And I’m sure I’m not alone. I dare say that I’m not the only one who carries around a little excess baggage. So why not lighten that load a little? Why not forget?

I can certainly see the value in such a therapy being used to treat those suffering from some form of post traumatic stress: victims of abuse or soldiers returning from war come to mind. These people are particularly prone to the agonies of bearing what may well be an unbearable weight. Such memories can lead not only to depression and psychosis, but even death.

But what about the rest of us? The ones who are plagued not by horrendous moments, but horrendous decisions? Are our bad memories made less so because they are not as powerful? Because they foster more guilt and regret than terror and numbness?

I’m not so sure.

We are largely the product of our experience, the end result of the countless choices and innumerable decisions. Many of those choices and decisions were good. Many were bad. But both worked together in an intricate and holy dance that has culminated in bringing us to both here and now.

But what if that dance were interrupted? Would we truly be made whole if those bad memories were taken from us, or would we somehow become less than we should?

Would the lessons we’ve learned from our mistakes be dulled along with the memories? And so would we then be doomed to repeat them?

Is there value in the things that haunt us?

That’s the question. One worth pondering, too.

We don’t mind accepting that the good in our lives was ordained by God. I’ve never doubted that my wife, my children, and my job are gifts from heaven. They provide my life with a healthy dose of meaning. They have purpose.

But if the good God has given us is endowed with meaning and purpose, then shouldn’t also the bad? And can we, with our limited vision and understanding, really label something as “good” or “bad” in the first place? How can we know for sure until the end result of our lives is played out and our story is done?

The blessings of my wife and children and job were born of horrible memories of the person I once was. It is because of those bad memories that I realize, finally, how blessed I am now. I love these things not because of the goodness I enjoy now, but because of the bad I suffered through then. Because the bad taught me what mattered. Would I give those memories back? No. Because I think the grace that has been given to me would be lessened in the forgetting. Because forgetting the pain of who I was then would dull the joy in Whose I am now.

We are all scarred by life. No one leaves this world as perfect as we entered it. But it is those very scars that shame us that make us all the more beautiful in God’s eyes. Rather than hide them, He beckons us to give them to Him.

Better than forgetting our memories is surrendering them. Better than pushing them down is lifting them up.

Lost and found

April 23, 2012 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

I have a friend who’s gotten lost so often and so bad that he thinks it’s his lot in life. Not just lost trying to get from point A to point B, either. Lost as in trying to do the right thing and be the right person but somehow ending up doing and being the opposite. He says God hates him for this. He’s damaged goods now.

Me, I think we sometimes underestimate just how easy it is to lose our way in life. And, like my friend, we lead ourselves to believe that only bad people get lost. So if we’re lost, we’re bad.

And if we’re bad, then God doesn’t want us. Can’t use us, either. So the best we can do if we ever wander off the path is to try and find out way back and then just stumble along, heads down, in defeat.

But I don’t think so.

The great thing about the Bible isn’t just that it’s the word of God, but that it gives an honest portrayal of the people in it. And a quick look at the giants of both the Old and New Testaments tells us that people got lost back then, too. Adam and Eve got lost. So did Moses. David was called a man after God’s own heart, and he still got lost. Paul was lost before finding the Damascus road. Peter and John? Lost, too.

It happens. To all of us. No one is exempt.

Unusable? To God there is no such thing as unusable. We can all be used by Him, regardless of what we’ve done or what we haven’t. David committed unspeakable acts. God still loved him. Paul murdered thousands of Christians, but God still used him as the voice to speak to us all.

And damaged goods? Hey, we’re all damaged goods. There isn’t anyone alive who lives to his or her truest potential, who says and thinks and does exactly what is right and nothing else. Even Paul, that murderer reformed who was touched by the hand of God, fought daily with himself over what he should do and what he does anyway.

Yes, we’ll all get lost. We’ll take many wrong turns and end up in many places we’re not supposed to be. And we will hurt and suffer because of it.

But know this: the love and power of God is such that He will use every one of our wrong turns to bring us to the right place.

Future Kevin

October 5, 2011 by Billy Coffey 9 Comments

He sits by himself at a small table in the back of the lunchroom. Chin in his hand, eyes, down. His fingers flick at discarded bits of the day’s pepperoni pizza that were missed by the lunch lady’s dishrag. The afternoon sun filters through tiny handprints on the windows, making the grass stains on his too-short jeans glow a deep emerald.

He sees me as I walk in—there’s something about a door opening that makes even the meekest of look up in reflex—and turns aside. Today is Friday, and I told him I would need an answer by the end of the week. But his back is turned away and his body is folded in upon himself to make him as small as possible, and I think no. No, he still doesn’t know.

Waiting for my kids in the school cafeteria gives me a sense of connectedness to a part of their lives I mostly miss. I get to see where they eat, how they interact with others, what kinds of people surround them. And I get to see other kids, too.

Kids like Kevin. The one alone at the small table in the back.

He’s there every day, waiting for someone to pick him up and trying to stay hidden until they do. I said hello to him Monday afternoon. I was a bit early that day, and there was no one else to talk to. I was counting on a one-sided conversation. Kids like Kevin—and there seems to be many of them today, yes?—desire nothing but the next moment, to continue on, regardless of the unnamable weight they bear. I didn’t know what Kevin’s was (and I still don’t), but I knew it was there. I could feel it.

So I said hello. Sat down beside him at the small table and flicked a bit of food away—it was French fries that day—and waited for him to talk. It took prodding, but he did. General stuff. Nothing of home. Kids like Kevin, with their unnamable weights and downcast eyes, don’t talk much of home.

He’d been in trouble that day. Kevin showed me the white slip of paper his mama had to sign. Daydreaming, the note said. I told him I daydreamed a lot and that daydreaming was fun, but school was important.

“No it isn’t,” he said.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked him.

Shrug.

“Come on,” I said. “You have to want to do something.”

Shrug.

“When I was your age, I wanted to be an astronaut. Didn’t work out, but I still look at the stars a lot.”

Kevin said nothing.

“Tell you what, I’ll be back on Friday. You think about it and let me know then. Deal?”

He said he’d try. The kids came and we left. I waved to Kevin as we went out the door. He didn’t wave back.

And now, he’s ignoring me.

“Hey Kevin,” I say.

Shrug.

“Been doing any thinking about what I asked?”

His eyes said yes. I pulled a chair up to the table and sat. My mind tried to think of something little Kevin wanted to be. Maybe an astronaut, like I wanted once upon a time. Or President, though I figured there weren’t many kids nowadays who wanted to grow up to be that. Maybe a scientist.

“I guess I’m going to work at Little Caesar’s like my mom.”

Oh.

“That’s all you want to do?” I ask him. “I mean, that’s great if that’s all you want to do. But…that’s all you want to do?”

He lowers his head to find something to flick on the table. “That’s all I can do,” he says.

“I don’t believe that,” I tell him, and Kevin shrugs.

The kids are on their way. I say goodbye to Kevin and leave him at the table. I don’t know when someone will pick him up, don’t know when I’ll see him again. But I know I’ll worry about him. A boy like that, a boy that young, should see this world as one of possibility and magic. His sights should be set higher than where they are. He should believe in himself more.

But I wonder if we’ve reached that point where we no longer inspire our children to become more than ourselves. If we see them as mere carbon copies, destined to make our own mistakes and suffer through our own failures.

And if we’ve accepted the lie that says greatness in life is reserved for all but shy boys in too-small jeans who sit alone at the lunchroom table.

When God hates you

September 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey 17 Comments

She stared at me, jaw straight and chin high, and said the three words. I stood there looking back at her, my jaw not so straight and my chin normal, not exactly knowing what to say other than to ask her to say it again. In a slow cadence that enunciated perfectly each of the three syllables, she repeated—“God. Hates. Me.”

“God hates you because your mail isn’t here?” I asked.

“Yes. If He wanted, He could make sure it got here. It’s not here. So God hates me.”

It was the sort of logic I’ve gotten accustomed to here at work, a place full of higher learning and lower thinking. And I had no doubt the student in front of me really didn’t mean what she said. She was angry. Frustrated. Down.

“You know the mail’s backed up,” I told her. “The hurricane and all.”

“Didn’t God make the hurricane?”

“Doesn’t the atmosphere or something make the hurricane? Something about the air off the coast of Africa?”

“Doesn’t God make the air off the coast of Africa?”

I could see where this was going.

“I don’t think God hates you,” I said. “The U.S. Postal Service, maybe. But not God.”

My attempt at levity did little to resolve the situation. She grunted and walked off. I told her to check back again tomorrow. She said she would if God hadn’t killed her by then.

That was yesterday. I didn’t see her today—I’m assuming God hasn’t killed her—which is good, considering her mail still hasn’t arrived. I’m still of the opinion that she was kidding about the whole God-hating-her thing, assuming she knows a little about God. You don’t need a lot of knowledge about the Higher Things to know He doesn’t hate anyone, that God is love.

But still.

There have been times when I’ve caught myself thinking that same sort of thing. Maybe not that God hates me, but certainly that He’s ignoring me. That He’s more concerned with keeping the universe expanding and the world turning than little old me. I suppose that’s not as bad as thinking He hates me. I guess it isn’t much better, either.

Aren’t we all at times like that, though? So much of life is fill-in-the-blank. Things are going badly because _________. Often what we give as our answer is more pessimism than optimism. We hurt and we take sick, we fall on hard times, not because others have done so since time immemorial, but because God hates us.

A few months ago, I got the chance to observe a professional jeweler polish silver. The process charmed me. He walked me through the entire process. The secret, he said, was heat. A good silversmith knows just how hot to get the silver before it is molded. Too hot, and it’s ruined. Too cool, and it spoils. The piece he was polishing? Perfect. Just enough heat.

I think God is like that with us. We’re made for better things—Higher Things—than to simply exist. We must be good for something. We must be molded in a fire neither too hot nor too cool. We are all pieces of silver in the Jeweler’s hand.

It is true this world is cracked and made for suffering. But it is also true that by suffering, we are made to heal what cracks we can.

God does not hate us, He simply loves us too much to fill our lives with ease.

One final thing about that jeweler. He told me he’d been sitting there for hours shining that piece of silver. That fact seemed a bit pointless to me. I couldn’t imagine it shining any brighter. I asked him how he would know when it had been polished enough.

“The silver faces the fire,” he said, “but it isn’t done. Then it is molded and polished, but it still isn’t done. The silver is only done when it casts the Jeweler’s reflection.”

Yes.

Snapshots

August 31, 2011 by Billy Coffey 11 Comments

(Originally posted January 22, 2009)

Part of my job entails keeping up with the comings and goings of about one thousand college students. All have arrived at the doorstep of adult responsibility, and all must walk through as best they can. Some glide. Others stumble.

Students are constantly arriving, eager to fill their hungry minds and lavish themselves in newly found freedom. Others have found that those freedoms can lead to all sorts of trouble and so are on their way back home.

The status of these students must be cataloged and recorded and then shared with various departments by way of email. Very businesslike, these emails. Concise and emotionless. But they are to me snapshots of lives in transition.

One such message came across the computer yesterday. The usual fare—student’s name and identification number, and her status. But then there was this:

She will not be returning and is withdrawing.
She failed everything.

As I said, businesslike. Concise and emotionless.

I’ve always had a problem with brevity. I have a habit of explaining a small notion with a lot of words. Which I guess is why that email struck me so hard. Here was three months of a person’s life, ninety days of experiences and feelings, summed up in three words:

She failed everything.

Though I don’t know this person, I can sympathize. I’ve been there. Many times. I know what it’s like to begin something with the best of intentions and an abundance of hope, only to see everything fall apart. I know what it feels like to realize that no matter how hard you try, you just can’t. Can’t win. Can’t succeed. Can’t make it.

I know what it feels like to fail. Everything.

When my kids were born, I wanted to be the perfect father. Always attentive. Never frustrated. Nurturing. Understanding. And I was. At first, anyway. But things like colic and spitting up and poopy diapers can wear on a father. They can make a father a little inattentive, not so nurturing, and very frustrated. So I failed at being the perfect father.

Same goes for being the perfect husband, by the way. I failed even more at that.

And I had the perfect dream, too. What better life is there than that of a writer? But no, that one hasn’t gone as expected. Failure again.

At various times, struggling through each of those things, I’ve done exactly what young girl in the email did. I withdrew. Not from college. From life. I gave up. Surrendered. Why bother, I thought.

But I learned something. I learned there’s sometimes a big difference between what we try to do and what we actually accomplish. That many times we don’t succeed because there’s an equally big difference between what we want and what God wants.

That failure is never the end. It can be, of course. We can withdraw and not return. Or we can learn that it is only when we fail that we truly draw near to God. We can better understand the that our prayers must sometimes be returned to us for revision. Not make me this or give me that, but Thy will be done.

I’ve failed everything. Many times.

Also remade.

I may not have made myself the perfect father, but God has made me a good dad.

I may not have become the perfect husband, but God has shown me how to be a soul mate.

I may not write for money, but I do write for people.

Failure has not been my enemy. Failure has been my salvation.

Our lives have broken places not so we can surrender to life, but so we can surrender to God. And failure will hollow us and leave us empty only so we may be able to hold more joy.

Difficult losses

January 31, 2011 by Billy Coffey 20 Comments

image courtesy of gamescrafters.berkeley.edu

We Coffeys are a competitive bunch. Life most character traits, that particular one has both its plusses and minuses. But by and large, our competitiveness has served us well. We are not content to be merely good at something. We have to be the best. And of course, in order to be the best, you first have to beat the best.

Which I suppose is why my son kept challenging me to games of Connect Four. You know the game, right? Big yellow rectangle on a pair of blue plastic stilts. One person has black checkers, the other red, and the winner is the first to get four of his or her colors in a row. Santa brought it for Christmas. Mostly because I played it all the time when I was a kid.

My son took to the game just as I did in my once-upon-a-time. We played a game under the tree on Christmas night, then again the night after, and then every night since. Until tonight, anyway. But I’ll get to that.

The thing about playing games with your kids is that you wonder when and if you should let them win. I’ve let my kids beat me at wrestling and boxing and Scrabble and chess. Not often, mind you, but often enough. It’s important they learn graciousness. Both when they win and when they lose. But I never let my son beat me at Connect Four. Some things needs to be a challenge. And to be honest, I like my kids to think I’m a genius at something for now. I know it won’t always be like that.

So we played. He tried, I toyed. He lost, I won.

Until last night.

My son beat me. Snuck in a backdoor diagonal of four red checkers. I never saw it. And what’s worse—what’s maybe worst of all—is that by that point I really was trying to beat him. He had homework to do, and so did I. I’d used my last move to set up my third black piece in a row, hidden from his sight on the opposite side of the board. It was a brilliant move. His was more so.

He dropped in his fourth checker and bulged his eyes.

I bulged mine.

“I win!” he shouted. Then he jumped up and crawled around to my side of the board just to make sure. “I win!”

There had to be some mistake. He’d miscounted. There were three checkers, not four. Or four, but not in a row. Something. Anything.

But. No.

“You win,” I whispered.

He danced. He screamed. He told his mother and sister. He even took a picture of it.

I was happy for him. And not. Like I said, I’m competitive. I don’t like to lose, especially when I’m trying to win and ESPECIALLY when I’m trying to impress my son with my staggering strategic intellect. That’s bad, I guess. But honest. At least I was a gracious loser. I allowed him his celebration. All three hours of it.

He was still awake when I went to bed, though barely. The excitement had worn off by then, leaving behind a sheen of quiet reflection on his face. I tucked his blankets and kissed him on the forehead, then headed for the hallway.

“Dad?” he asked.

“Yeah, bud?”

“I’m sorry I beat you.”

I smiled and told him not to be, that he’d won fair and square and should be proud because I was proud. The next morning, he said he hadn’t slept well. Neither did I.

I waited tonight for him to suggest another game. He didn’t. The box still sits untouched in the basket behind the recliner. I supposed it will be untouched for a while.

I suppose every child must inevitably arrive at that moment when he realizes his father is not the perfect man he’s always believed. That he in fact makes mistakes and misses things. That he loses. That he is a fallible, fallen person. It is a difficult moment, but a necessary one.

Both for the parent and the child.