image courtesy of snopes.com

The picture you see to your right is of a man named John Gebhardt, a Chief Master Sergeant who was assigned to the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group at Balad Air Base in Iraq. The child he’s holding is a girl whose entire family was executed by insurgents. She survived despite the gunshot wound to her head.

The picture was taken in October 2006. Chances are you’ve seen it and know the story of how that little girl wouldn’t stop crying and moaning unless Chief Gebhardt held her. So that’s what he did every night in that chair, he recovering from another day of war, she recovering from a horror she likely always be shackled to.

I could go a lot of places with this story. I could talk about the fact that Chief Gebhardt is back home in Kansas now and that the little girl (whose name he never knew) was eventually released to a surviving family member. I could talk about the cruelty of war and the darkness of the world. I won’t. I’m sure you know all about such things.

The website where I rediscovered this picture offered only the picture and the bare bones of the circumstances surrounding it, followed beneath by hundreds of comments. I will say I tend to skip over comments when it comes to news stories. They tend to quickly devolve into politics and meanness, both of which are things I see enough of every day. I don’t have the heart to go in search of more. But my eyes drifted nonetheless, and though what I found didn’t surprise me, it did offer me a chance to ponder.

The vast majority of the comments were from women, many of whom professed a deep admiration for the Chief’s actions and offered thoughts or prayers (or both) for the girl. What political commentary was offered leaned toward the fact that while we may disagree with the wars our country has fought, we should all agree on the fact that our soldiers deserve our praise.

But what caught my eye was that despite all of these hundreds of voices and the different lives they each must live, nearly all of them shared a common sentiment:

This is what a man looks like.

It seemed almost sad that so many were led to offer such a reminder. It was even sadder to know that such a reminder was needed. Blame the culture, blame Homer Simpson, blame the government, blame whatever—the truth is that somewhere along the way males forgot how to be men. And though our national ills can be traced back to a great many things, I have no problem saying that the fall of men has something to do with it.

We live in a country of fathers who are not dads and spouses who are not husbands, where honor has been replaced by X-Boxes it’s not only acceptable to act like a boy, it’s cool.

That’s why we need people like Chief Master Sergeant Gebhardt. To show us that a real man has the capacity to fight and to love. He will risk his life to defend the oppressed, and he will comfort the brokenhearted. That he will believe in the goodness that lies within us all but know that darkness lies there as well.

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 2^nd 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.

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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.

(If you’d like to make a donation to JDRF, you can click on the link to your right and it will take you to their site.)

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If you would by chance happen to knock at my front door and ask to see where I keep my most prized possessions, I would lead you to my upstairs attic, pull the string on the exposed light bulb, and point to a spot along the far wall just beneath the vent leading outside.

There you would see an old toolbox, battered and rusty from years of use. The chipped green paint and rusted hinges may lead you to believe its contents are inconsequential at least and forgotten at most.

You would be wrong.

What’s inside that toolbox represent my life’s more memorable moments. A gum wrapper, some pine needles, a spent ring from a cap gun, and so on. Like I said, my most prized possessions. Knowing they’re up there makes me feel a little more comfortable being down here.

My mother has something similar, though her toolbox is disguised as a hope chest that sits in the corner of her bedroom closet. Inside you’ll find old report cards, forgotten toys, and pictures. Lots of pictures.

My father opts to store his keepsakes in the top drawer of his dresser, which had for years been strictly off limits to my prying hands until last week, when I summoned the courage to ask permission to rifle through its contents. I found old coins and older knives, one gun, several bundled letters I did not read, one wooden cross, and more old pictures.

I asked around, and most everyone had their own places for such things hidden somewhere out of sight. People have confessed to stashing their tokens of both past and present in socks and safe deposit boxes, cookie jars and coffee cans. One friend even stored his the old fashioned way—under the mattress of his bed.

Each admitted that no one else would be much interested in their private treasures. Again, none of them could be defined as valuable. Not on the surface, anyway. But beneath? Beneath they were priceless. I could tell they were by the hushed tones and soft smile they would offer along with their confession, as if the telling conveyed some holy secret.

Which I suppose is exactly the case. Handling those relics of the things we hold most dear often takes on the appearance of religious ritual. Touching a memory can be a powerful experience. An old photograph may not represent a mere moment in time, but a token that love is something worth holding onto. And a trinket may not be a trinket, but a symbol that faith does indeed move mountains.

We should consider these things holy. We are, after all, the sum of our experiences. We need those reminders lest we blur our today and cloud our tomorrow. We need to know where we’ve come from if we’re to know where we’re going.

One person I asked had things a little more figured out than the rest of us. A full-blooded Sioux, his people have had much experience in placing great meaning on physical objects. When I asked him where he kept his most precious things, he pulled his T shirt down and pulled out a leather necklace. On the end was a small beaded pouch that was fringed at the bottom.

“Here,” he said. “I keep them here.”

I told him about my toolbox, about the hopes chest and dresser drawer and socks and coffee cans. I even told him about my friend the mattress stuffer. He nodded and smiled, then said, “We all have our sacred things. But you keep yours hidden and far away. What good will they do you there? Why not keep them visible and close instead?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. He was right. Everyone I had talked to kept their treasures hidden away in the darkness of a chest or drawer. Myself included.

Why? Was it because we felt them too valuable to risk the light of day? Or too fragile to be handled often?

I wasn’t sure. But I began thinking about the things our treasures represent, the love and the faith. And I began thinking that often they, too, go hidden and unused. We tuck them away for fear that they are too valuable or fragile, when they are the very things we should carry close to us every day.

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Before I tell you about Mark, let me talk about trash. Or rather, let me talk about how much I hate to take out the trash.

In our house, that’s a blue chore (blue meaning a job for the guys, as opposed to, say, washing the clothes, which is a pink chore). Nothing irritates me more than hauling two bulging bags of garbage out to the cans. It’s done twice weekly and takes all of five minutes, but it’s an eternity to me. It stinks. Literally And it’s messy. Though far from a germaphobe and even though I often use gloves, I still wash my hands afterward. Usually twice. And then I’ll take a shower.

I know, I know. But deep down, we’re all weird in our own ways.

Mark, on the other hand, doesn’t mind trash. At least that’s what he says. I would imagine he would have to say that, given his job. He doesn’t have a choice. You see, Mark picks up our trash every week.

He’ll be the first to say his is not a career to which most aspire. Mark himself never expected to become a garbage man. But when your formal education stops just south of eleventh grade, your options are somewhat limited. It was either trash man or cashier down at the 7-11, and Mark says he’s never wanted to work with the public.

And besides, it isn’t all bad. Sure, some days are worse than others. He’ll say the weeks after Christmas are really bad, what with all those boxes and such. Halloween is no picnic, either.

Yet for the most part, the work is as enjoyable as it can be. He gets to ride around hanging from the back of a truck, which I admit I’ve always considered cool. And it’s outside work, which I admit is much better than being chained to a desk. Yes, it’s smelly. And many times it’s disgusting (I won’t tell you about what Mark has to go through during hunting season).

One would perhaps think that a man whose occupation revolves around the thing I hate to do most would be a man I’d pity. I will say I do not. Well, not anymore. I once pitied Mark as I pitied the downtrodden or the lame. He was the sort of person I’d look upon and wonder if God had somehow overlooked him. He was an example of the inherent unfairness of life.

But then I got to know him, and I discovered otherwise.

For instance, Mark is a family man. Has a wife and three kids. Mrs. Mark works at the Family Dollar and teaches Sunday school at a little church one town over. The kids, two boys and a baby girl, are the pride of his life. I’ve seen pictures that prove his pride is not the sinful sort. The clan lives in a single-wide trailer that backs up to the national forest. It’s a peaceful place, Mark says. The sort of place where a family can put some roots down.

Despite the perceived shamefulness of his job, Mark takes his work seriously. Someone has to clean up, he said to me, and it might as well be him. It’s a public service, and an important one. What kind of town would we have if no one picked up the trash?

So he works and his wife works, and together they spend what they have to and save what they can. Mark has big plans. So far his family has managed to squirrel away almost five thousand dollars to put toward a new double-wide, one that has a fireplace and even a Jacuzzi tub. He says his supervisor has noticed his hard work and attention to detail. A promotion may be in order in the coming years. He’s prayed for that and keeps his fingers crossed.

It’s difficult in this life to define happiness. Sometimes I think we attribute too much to it. We think we need money or education or fame to have it, but we don’t. I’d even be pressed to say such things often get in the way of happiness rather than provide it.

It’s not ironic then that the secret to happiness isn’t found in bound volumes of experts or esoteric writings of sages, but in the life of one single garbage man named Mark.

Because he’s happy, and I know why. Mark has the three things happiness requires.

Someone to love.

Something to do.

And something to hope for.

image courtesy of photobucket.com

I blame the wedding for all of this. The royal one, I mean. William and Kate, the Duke and Dutchess of…something or other. Yes, it’s all their fault.

I share part of the blame, of course. I didn’t have to record their nuptials, even if my daughter looked at me with those pleading eyes and asked me to do so. And I didn’t have to let her see the ceremony. Or the pretty white dress. Or the fancy church or the waving crowds and the first kiss.

Didn’t have to. But I did.

Those pleading eyes are going to get me into trouble someday.

Now I have to deal with the aftermath of all this. Since then, my little girl (MINE, mind you) has been all atwitter about her own wedding.

She’s made lists. Many lists. What kind of dress she will wear, where the ceremony will be, what sorts of flowers, what colors. She even told me I should go ahead and put in for vacation now, just in case I won’t be able to in fifteen years or so.

My answer to that—all that—was the sort of “Humph” that is code for “You better start talking about something else in the next five seconds.”

Because despite race or age or ethnicity or faith (or lack thereof), all fathers share this one thing in common—they will always see their daughters as little girls. Their little girls.

Yesterday:

Daughter and I are in the truck, on the way home from a stop at Lowe’s. Conversation is both light and shallow, touching upon school and work and writing.

Then, “Daddy, when I get married I think I want it to be outside.”

“Humph.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I looked at her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were thoughtful. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“What if it rains?” I asked.

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“I don’t think you need to be pondering such things. Plenty to do between now and then.”

“But I ponder it a lot,” she said.

I looked away and through the windshield. Fiddled with the radio. Rolled the windows down a little more. Anything to distract her, to get her mind off a subject I had no desire whatsoever to elaborate upon. And, truth be known, I thought that maybe it would have been better if my son were sitting in the backseat of the truck and not her. Because we would be talking about baseball and dirt and mulch. I understood those things. Those things, I could freely talk about.

“I wonder where he is,” she said.

“Where who is?”

“The boy I’m going to marry.”

I doubt I can fully describe the magnitude of what she said. Suffice it to say it was enough for all the blood in my body to succumb to dread and pool in the toes of my boots. My arms went numb, my vision fuzzy. And I swear my heart stopped beating.

I’d never thought of that. I’d never paused and considered the fact that the boy my daughter will someday marry is alive right now. Growing up, just like her.

“I don’t know, honey.”

We drive home in silence, each of us staring out the nearest window. Thinking about him.

For my daughter, I have no doubt her thoughts revolved around how handsome he was and how kind. How he was perhaps a farmer or a scientist or a teacher.

For me, I thought more of who he would be than what, and what his parents were doing about all of that right now. Were they teaching him about honor and respect? Responsibility and hard work? Were they instructing him of the proper way to treat a woman? Were they slowly indoctrinating him to the truth that life is a hard thing and that love is a fragile one?

I hoped so.

Because one day the little girl in the backseat of my truck—my little girl—will be shared with someone else. The heart she has given me will be his. She will lean on him and love him and trust him, not in the same way she does with me now, but in a way similar.

The radio station went from commercial to a song we both knew. George Strait is a favorite in our home. He sang, I hummed. My daughter hummed, too. And when he reached the chorus, we both sang.

And I said, Let me tell you a secret about a fathers love,
A secret that my daddy said was just between us.
He said daddies don’t just love their children every now and then,
It’s a love without end, amen.

Amen.

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The tree stood like a king in the middle of the field, gazing over its sovereignty. It was tall, taller than any building in town. And old, as evidenced by a trunk so thick that it split partway up so as to give the appearance it was two and not one. Its canopy stretched out and then down, as if gathering up those who pause beneath it.

To see it was to recall the Ents of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The tree was that magical. Put your ear to its wood and you could swear you sensed a beating heart and coursing blood just beneath the bark. Listen, and beneath the chirps of the robins and mockingbirds and the squirrels snacking on nuts you could almost hear the stories it had to tell, old stories of long-ago times and long-ago people, back when times were simpler and a man named Wenger owned the field.

The oak was known by many names, but mostly it was The Kissing Tree. There was evidence of that if you look closely enough, names and initials scrawled into the wood but even then mostly absorbed, adding to the stories the tree could tell. Some said the tree had grown to such magnificence because it had been watered with love as well as rain. But I knew better, even then. No doubt there had been much love kindled beneath that gathering canopy (and no doubt many children), but there had also been much love that was kindled only to be extinguished by fickle hearts and dashed dreams.

Such was my experience there on that day.

Her name was Sara, a neighborhood girl who lived down the road in a house that defied any description beyond a simple Fancy. She was smart and achingly pretty and knew how to climb trees. Once on a dare, she leaped into the murky, snake-infested river down by the place where Murphy Johnson swore he saw a ghost. She swam to the other shore and back again and said it was no sweat.

I knew then I was in love with her. She was perfect. And best of all, she wanted to kiss me.

I was eleven that summer and had never kissed a girl, didn’t know how or how long a person should do it and what I should do afterward. But I at least knew where to take her for that kiss.

We met at The Kissing Tree on a hot afternoon in July. That’s when I saw the tree as king of the Ents and felt it’s beating heart. Sara was already there, dressed in a pair of denim shorts and a white T shirt that showed the bumps on her chest. Seeing them and her and knowing we were alone under The Kissing Tree was enough to make me turn tail and run away, but I didn’t. I was too scared to move.

We talked for a bit, me about baseball and going to the beach the next week and Sara about how her mom and dad always fought and she wished she could run away. I think in that moment I saw her for the first time, not the tough little girl who swam across the river to where Murphy saw that ghost, but the fragile little girl who wanted nothing more than to be loved. As scared as I was, I wanted to kiss her even more then, just so she could hold that happiness tight, if only for a moment.

We closed our eyes and kissed beneath that great oak, adding our names to the stories it could tell.

Things between us didn’t work out. They seldom do when you’re eleven. But I ran into Sara the other day, and our talk wound itself back to that day beneath The Kissing Tree. It was strange that our versions were similar but not exact. She could not remember telling me of her parents. I did not recall us bumping heads before we met lips. And while I swore we kissed beneath the tree, she promised it was away beyond its shadow instead.

It was strange knowing one of the moments I thought had defined me was a fuzzy one. Not as sharp, as exact, as I thought. Now I wonder of all of my reminiscences are such, if my memory has glossed over them and rounded their sharp edges. I wonder if memory is simply an incomplete experience.

And I wonder if that is our blessing or our curse.

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Let me tell you about Johnny.

I met him when I was eight. It was during Bible school, those dreaded five days during the summer when you’re trying to fight the sensation that you’re back in school because you’re afraid God will be mad at you if you feel that way.

He was sitting under the big oak tree by himself, which was where the wayward softball Brent Stinnett hit landed. I was playing centerfield, so I was the one who retrieved it. I asked Johnny to toss it to me. He wouldn’t, so I got it myself. Then I asked if he wanted to play.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

Johnny lowered his head and kicked at a root jutting up from the ground, then shrugged.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s fun.”

“No,” he said again.

So I left him there under the oak.

I found him in the same spot the next day for the same reason (that Brent Stinnett could really pound a softball). This time, Johnny was first:

“I don’t want to play,” he said.

“I didn’t ask if you wanted to,” I told him.

“Well, just in case you were gonna, I don’t want to.”

I suppose the Christian thing would have been for me to befriend Johnny right then and there, or at least do a bit of gentle prodding to see what was really bothering him. But I was your average eight-year-old boy, which often means doing the Christian thing is not nearly as important as playing a game of softball.

Besides, by then the chattering had gone around the Bible school playground that Johnny wouldn’t play because he was afraid. Of what, no one was certain.

By day three, I’d learned that when Brent Stinnett came up to the plate, I should back up. So I did, right next to Johnny under his tree.

“Are you really scared like all the kids say?” I asked him.

Silence. Which to me even then meant yes.

“You ain’t gotta be scared. It’s just a game.”

“I ain’t scared,” he said. Then, as if remembering he was in Bible school and thus that God was watching, he added, “Much. I ain’t scared much.”

“What are you scared of?”

“Lots of things,” he said. “Falling down. Striking out. Getting hurt. Hitting somebody. Getting my clothes dirty. Getting stung by a bee. I’m allergic to bees, you know.”

I didn’t know, but at that moment Brent Stinnett flew out to left field and the inning was over. I jogged back toward the field and shouted at Johnny over my shoulder, “You’re just thinkin’ too much.”

Johnny never did play softball that year. Or any other, as a matter of fact. But he did keep coming to church, and it didn’t take me long to realize he was afraid of much more than playing softball. Much, much more.

Like telephones, radios, the dark, spinach, horses, thunder, and butterflies. The list was endless. Johnny was a walking neurosis. It’s a wonder he’s survived this long.

But he has.

I ran into him at the post office the other day, along with his two children and Mary, his wife. Nice family. Johnny has a big job at a bank now. He’s happy and content. And, finally and completely, unafraid.

There was no psychotherapy involved in Johnny’s transformation. No pills or prescriptions. To hear Johnny say it, there was just his faith and his family. That was all he needed.

Maybe that’s all everyone needs. Because the truth is that we all harbor our own fears, those shadows that crawl and slink deep inside and get in the way of seeing the beauty of things. I’m not afraid of softball or telephones or spinach, but I am afraid. I’m afraid a lot. And there are times when I want more than anything else the opposite of that fear.

For the longest time, I thought that opposite was courage. Makes sense, doesn’t it? But Johnny’s taught me different.

He’s taught me that the opposite of fear isn’t courage, the opposite of fear is Love.

These little notes have been showing up a lot around the house lately, courtesy of my seven-year-old Girl Scout.

I found one waiting for me in the mailbox the other day. Turns out there was no need to perform that small part of my coming-home ritual. My Girl Scout had gathered the bills and junk mail for me. Yesterday when I went into the office to sort the mess of papers on my desk, I instead found four neatly stacked piles with one sign in the middle—A Girl Scout was here! And this evening I found another beside my washed and dried coffee cup that had been placed (handle facing toward me, no less) by the espresso machine.

I like having a Girl Scout in the house.

And I like these notes….

To read the rest of this post (and to find out what those notes really taught me), I’ll invite you over to High Calling Blogs, where I’ve hung my shingle for the day. And thanks to everyone for all the get-well wishes!