Billy Coffey

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Stain Remover

May 5, 2009 by Billy Coffey 38 Comments

(In the sort of inonic twist that seems to define my life, the post I wrote on Saturday about not freaking out about the flu has resulted in me getting it three days later. Not H1N1. Worse. Like H10N30. And since I’ve been trying lately to go from three posts a week to five or six, I promise I tried to sit down and write something. But then my eyes blurred, my computer seemed to melt into my lap, and I gave up. So I decided to instead open the vault and give you a post from way back when, just so I can feel as though I’ve accomplished something today. Your prayers that my eyeballs won’t fall out or my throat doesn’t explode would be appreciated. But on the other hand, I get to spend all of today on the sofa watching Steve McQueen and Humphrey Bogart movies. Becase even if you’re sick, turning lemons into lemonade is fun.)
I am standing in aisle eleven at Wal-Mart next to a fortyish woman who is both smartly dressed and a bit frazzled. Both of us are contemplating the correct choice among the dizzying array of what may well be the most important technological advancement for anyone trying to protect an innocent home from the ravages of children.

Stain remover.

I woke up this morning to find a blotch of spaghetti sauce on the sofa. How’d it get there? No idea. But as the blotch was in the shape of a small handprint, I have two suspects.

Such events are common in the lives of parents. There are messes and spills and catastrophes both large and small. And there are stains. Many, many stains. So many, in fact, that I can’t seem to walk through my own house without glancing behind me to dwell on them all.

So. A trip to Wal-Mart.

I don’t know this lady beside me. I don’t know if her issue is child-related or not. I don’t ask, and she doesn’t tell. We piddle through the bottles and packages and cans of cleaner, pondering to ourselves.

Stain fighting has come a long way. Whereas past generations had to make due with soap and elbow grease, we are fortunate enough to possess the fruits of science. As I scan the shelves I see products that promise to eliminate stains completely, to restore damaged goods to immaculate condition, and to do both with a minimum of effort. After careful thought, I choose the bottle that promises to clean deeper than its competitors and even disinfect while doing so. Excellent.

The lady beside me makes her choice as well, opting for the industrial strength cleaner that promises to eradicate not only stains, but staph, strep, and E. coli as well. I raise an eyebrow and offer an appreciative nod. She must have a bigger family.

She turns to leave and chuckles, partly to herself and partly to me. “Wish they could make a stain remover for your life, too,” she says.

What a wonderful idea! I think to myself. After all, there is even more to clean up in a life than in a house, children or not. There are plenty of messes and spills and catastrophes of varying degree. There are surely more stains. In my own case, a lot more. And like my own house, I can’t seem to walk through my life without glancing back to dwell on them all.

I’m sure I’m not alone here.

It would be nice if we could all just stroll over to aisle eleven at the Wal-Mart, grab a bottle of miracle goop, and rid our stains with one quick spritz and wipe.

But we can’t.

Cleaning up failures and regrets is a lot harder than cleaning up spaghetti sauce. Those stains are deeper and more permanent. That’s okay, though. Because those stains remind us of what happens when we try to go it alone, when we think we can do things our own way, in our own time, and with only our own interests at heart.

Walking through this life is more like walking through the woods than a house. It’s tough and hazardous and it’s easy to get lost if you’re not paying attention. And no matter how carefully we step or how experienced we believe ourselves to be, we all get a little filthy in the process.

But there is a secret to getting through those woods and safely back home. It isn’t to look down in shame at the stains we’ve managed to get on ourselves, it’s to look up to the God who can take those stains away.

The God who put our eyes in front of us so we can see where we’re going, not where we’ve been.

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Family Favorites Week

April 12, 2009 by Billy Coffey 38 Comments

The saying is that time goes by fast when you’re having fun, and I’ve been reminded of that here lately. Believe it or not, it’s been six months since I first started this blog. Seems longer than that in some respects. I feel like I’ve known some of you for a lot longer than that. But it sometimes seems so much shorter than that, too.

I’ve posted 159 blog entries since then, which I figure amounts to two or three books (a good thing to keep in mind if my other two don’t get taken soon.) In honor of making it this far, I’ve decided to give myself what amounts to a little vacation. So this week’s theme is going to be Family Favorites, courtesy of my wife and children, who took the time to go through all of my posts, pick the three they like best, and offer a little polishing.

Since a lot of you are new to these parts, chances are what you’ll read this week won’t be reruns. And for those who’ve managed to stick with me from the beginning, I hope these will still move you as much as they did the first time around.

Regardless, please know that each of you make my day, every day. I love you stopping here and sharing your own wisdom, and I love visiting your blogs. Here’s to six more months (at least!!).

The Dance

Here I am, huddled together with four other men in a corner of an elementary school gym. We are all in the same predicament, though we are all too insecure to admit it. So we talk sports and trucks and the year’s corn crop and anything else with masculine connotations, if only to take our minds off where we are:

A ballet recital.

My six-year-old, Molly, has been taking ballet lessons for six weeks now. And as tonight is the final performance, the culmination of all that study and work, my presence is required. Thankfully, other fathers of other six-year-olds have been similarly persuaded. I have company. Company is a good thing to have when you’re where you’d rather not be.

Within our conversation of the new Fords and the dry spell, I watch Molly. She twirls and steps and trips and repeats. And she laughs.

(“I love the dance, Daddy,” she has told me often. “I think God loves the dance, too.”)

Another twirl and step, but two trips this time. Molly turns, looks at my wife, and wiggles a finger–come here, Mommy. The two meet in the middle of the basketball court, and I know what’s wrong. I excuse myself from the group and join them.

“My sugar’s messy,” Molly says. We retreat to the stands for her glucometer. Her diabetes doctor says that her sugar should be between one hundred and one-fifty. After a prick of a finger, the readout says “389.”

“We should go home,” I say.

“We can’t,” my daughter pleads. “It’s not over.” She looks back to her teacher and her classmates, still struggling through their routine. “God wants us all to dance until the dance is done.”

Both look to me. I have the final decision. Yes, we should go. Go and get a bottle of water and a blanket and climb up on the sofa and rest. But according to Molly, God wanted her to dance. And who am I to argue with God?

Molly returns to her group, but I remain apart from mine. I am stand alone and watch, lost in this little girl, in her spirit and her joy. She dances in spite of her disease. With her disease.

Our evening is over with one final bow, and upon leaving we are confronted in the parking lot by a sea of red and blue lights across the street. Sometime between the first foutette and the last pirouette, a horrible accident had occurred. A mangled white car, it’s top shorn, lay upside down in the median. Police, firemen, and rescue personnel scramble in choreographed chaos. A medical helicopter waits, blades churning, an angel of metal and wires, death and life.

My family stands silent.

“God bless the wrecked people,” murmurs my son. We all join him, holding hands.

My wife and I exchange a glance when our eyes open. Our town is small, the identity of the injured likely an acquaintance. Coming from the school, perhaps. Football practice. A child? One of my wife’s students?”

How can I live with this fear?” I whisper to God.

Silence.

“How can I bask in Your light while standing in this shadow?”

The helicopter blades swoosh.

“How must life be lived

(“God wants us to dance until the dance is done,” Molly had said. “Because God loves the dance.”)

in the face of death?”

I look at my daughter, safe in the crook of my arm. She rests her head on my shoulder.

The suddenness of life presses into me. To be a parent or a spouse is to have your fears magnified. You have much, and so you have much to lose. So fragile is our existence in this world, so easily taken and taken for granted.

Yes, God loves the dance. And so should we. We should hear the music in this life, surrender to its rhythms. We should make its cadence our own. And we should always dance until the dance is done.

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The Great Follower Conspiracy

February 24, 2009 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

A quick look at the clock on the wall tells me that it’s 6:31 p.m. I’m about twelve hours into what has to be one of the most bizarre but meaningful days of my life.

It is the day of the Great Follower Conspiracy.

It started with a simple glance at my blogger account before work this morning, just to see which of the blogs I follow had new posts. Then my eyes just so happened to wander up and to the right, where my own followers are posted. Or rather, were posted. My heart stopped, my mouth dropped opened, and I had a rather funny sensation in my stomach.

I had lost almost half of my followers.

My mind raced:

How can this be? What have I done to make all these people mad at me? Is it the comment thing? It has to be the comment thing. I KNEW I shouldn’t have done that. And now all these people are gone. GONE. All because of me.

The tiny thought that maybe this was something totally different, that maybe this had much less to do with me and much more to do with Blogger, was ignored. That just couldn’t be.

And then I checked my email, which happened to be pretty full of people who were wondering just the same sort of thing I was:

“Have I done something to offend you?”

“I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done.”

“Please continue to stop by…”

Oh. So that’s it.

I spent the better part of my day talking to members of my blogosphere family, trying to sort things out and figure out how and if it could ever be fixed. As of right now, many of my followers are still missing, although I did manage to get a new one, (nice to meet you, Peg!). Where they have gone is anyone’s guess. I’m sure I’m still MIA to a lot of the blogs I follow as well.

Still, as aggravating as all of this is, I think there’s a pretty big lesson being offered for everyone affected.

We all want to be accepted and loved, for who we are, the words we write, and the lives we offer our readers a peek into. There’s nothing in the world wrong with that, either. It’s part of our testimony to a loving God, and a chronicle of what He’s doing both in and around us.

Maybe it’s just for that reason that everyone I’ve spoken with today confessed to having the same first reaction: They don’t like me anymore! It was definitely my reaction. In fact, worrying about the whole thing ruined the first few hours of my morning. Because I thought I had Finding out that it was all an innocent screw up made me feel better for a little while. Then something else started creeping into my mind.

Should I have really been so upset over all of this? What if I really did lose a lot of my readers? I should have taken it as God’s will. Instead, I took it as a catastrophe of epic proportions.

Jennifer Lee said it much better in an email: “How would I react if I lost every last follower? I say that God is ‘enough,’ but is He? In my life, is He REALLY enough?”

That’s a good question. One that I found myself asking a lot lately and today especially. And one that maybe we should all spend some time pondering.

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Gotta love computers!

February 24, 2009 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

So I fire up the old computer this morning, log in to my blogger account, and find that I’ve lost almost half of my followers. First reaction: “Oh no, what have I done to make all these people so mad at me?!” Second reaction: maybe there’s something else going on…

That something else was confirmed when I checked my email and found a few messages from people wondering the same thing.

Now, thanks to Sarah and Jesse, I know what happened.

Turns out Blogger had a few problems with the Follower widget and is in the process of trying to fix them. Nothing more than that. Mystery solved.

This whole thing has gotten me thinking, though. About that first reaction. I’m the sort of person who automatically thinks that when something goes wrong, it’s my fault.

Gonna have to work on that one.

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Balancing the scales

February 19, 2009 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

There are a lot of reasons why people take up blogging. Some see it as a means of preserving life’s events for family and friends. Others use it as a tool for self-examination or a way of connecting with others. Still others regard it as a potential starting point for bigger and better things. And then there are people like me, who blog for all of the above.

The self-examination part is new to me in a way. Simmering deep down for a while, but only recently bubbling up to the surface. I’ve found the act of posting small essays in the hope that others will read them reveals far more about myself than I expected. The good, yes. But also the potentially bad.

I’ve been writing this blog for about six months now, and I’m continually both amazed and humbled at how far things have come. I remember the first comment online comment I ever received for one of my posts (thank you, Sharilyn!) In December, my post about the Santa Story was the first to get comments in the double digits. A few weeks later, over twenty people commented about our mysterious backyard hole.

Which was, in a word, incredible. I never thought such a thing was possible, much less likely. There is a unique sort of joy that comes by checking one’s email and seeing a dozen or so messages of praise in the inbox. On many days, doing so was what propped me up and kept me from lying motionless in the muck of self-doubt. I love the comments I get.

Maybe too much.

I’ve always made a conscious effort to ask myself this question after finishing anything I’ve written, whether it be a post or a manuscript or a note in one of my children’s lunch boxes:

Does this honor God?

Sometimes, that answer is yes. Other times it’s no. But regardless, the end result is usually something I feel both He and I believe is worth saying. Any benefits that come after the fact, whether it’s a small check from the newspaper or a nice comment from a reader, is extra. Gladly accepted, but not counted upon.

Then a while back, as I was putting the finishing touches on a post, I asked myself this question:

I wonder if this will get thirty comments?

The question tried to be insignificant, small and soft, but it was made large and loud by the simple fact that I had never wondered such a thing before. And that bothered me. It meant that something had changed. The focus of what I write and why had shifted. Somehow my writing had become less about God and more about me.

Sometimes the self-realization side of blogging stinks.

It strips away those pretty masks we wear and leaves us staring at our own nakedness, forcing us to look at who we truly are. Not so we can despair at our own faults, but so we can fix them before they get worse.

And this, I think, needs fixing.

So I’m going to eliminate the comment option from my posts. For a while, anyway. If only so I can make sure I’m writing to further God rather than myself, and to inspire others rather than my own ego.

Of course, if something you see here particularly strikes your fancy or you just want to chat, my inbox is always open. Just click on the little Contact Me button on the sidebar, and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

“Be on your guard,” the Bible says. Because we sometimes take the things God means for good and mangle them. For much of my life, I’ve ignored that little bit of advice. I’ve paid for it every time, too. So this time I’ll heed that advice.

Maybe I can balance the scales a bit.

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Playing Tag

February 8, 2009 by Billy Coffey 12 Comments

Lori over at Life, Love, and Laughter… has been kind enough to award me with not one, but two awards.
The Love Friendships Award states: “These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.
As for the Honest Scrap award: A) First list 10 honest things about yourself – and make it honest (hence, the award ‘Honest Scrap’), even if you have to dig deep! B) Pass the award on to 8 bloggers that you feel embody the role of the Honest Scrap. (This is an award only to display on your blog that everything you write on it is in truth, sincerity, and integrity.)*
A nice one, that Honest Scrap award. So I can honestly say that:

1. Though I no longer believe in monsters (and tell my kids such nearly every night), I still cannot sleep with any body part protruding from the covers and hanging over the edge of the bed. Just in case.

2. All those parties I went to in high school when I would end up stumbling outside and passing out in someone’s yard? I wasn’t drunk, and I’ve always hated alcohol. I just wanted to be by myself and watch the stars.

3. Up until the third grade, I thought there was only one letter in the alphabet between k and p, and that it was pronounced “ellemenna.” Seriously.

4. On our second date, I arranged things so that my wife would come by right at seven-thirty. Which, by some strange coincidence, just so happened to be when Jeopardy came on. While I was getting ready, I amazed her with my vast knowledge of inconsequential trivia by answering every question correctly (I even prefaced my answers with “What is…”). She thought I was a genius. And still does, I suppose. But I can honestly say that I am not. Because the Jeopardy that came on at seven-thirty was a repeat of the one that aired at seven on another channel. I had memorized the answers.

5. I’ve seen an angel. Honestly.

6. I’m not one of those End Times people who pour over magazines and newspapers for evidence of Armageddon. Still, when I look at this world and all this mess, I can’t help but think that something is about to happen. Good or bad, I suppose, is largely up to us.

7. I can honestly say that God will allow us to suffer just so we can better understand the pains other people feel.

8. My fifth grade teacher once told me I would never amount to anything. On the last day of school, I wrote my name down on a piece of paper, handed it to her, and told her to hang on to it. It might be worth something one day, I said. So far, it’s not. But I figure I have a lot of living left, and you just never know…

9. I can honestly say that faith will always overcome doubt, love will always conquer hate, and that there is as much power in a smile as there is in a bomb.

10. And finally, I honestly believe that out of all the thousands of years of human existence, God chose to place us here, now. Not by chance, but by reason. By holy purpose. And the sooner we realize that, the better off our world will be.

So, there are my ten honest things. And in the spirit of keeping the ball rolling, here are my eight new award winners:
Frisbie Family Fun Forever
jasonS
Leslie
Tracy
janelle
Sherri
Becki
KM
Be sure to check these great bloggers out!

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