anger – Page 2

Choosing love over anger

August 26, 2013 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

Screen shot 2013-08-26 at 9.12.17 AM Antoinette Tuff went to her job at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy last week thinking it was going to be just another day. That lasted until Michael Hill walked into the school carrying an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammunition. Armed and telling her to call police and reporters so everyone could bear witness to the coming slaughter, he said he didn’t have any reason to live. Said no one loved him. One man with a weapon, nothing to lose, and a wish to die, standing in a school containing hundreds of children.

Yet another example of just how awful we’ve become. That’s what I thought at first. Close behind that was a firm desire to see Michael Hill strung up and every parents of every child in that school given a baseball bat and one free shot. It would have been Newtown all over again. Or Virginia Tech. Or Columbine. Or any number of that long string of school shootings that stretch back too far and contain too much senseless death.

But it didn’t happen that way. Antoinette Tuff was there.

She was the one who stopped Michael Hill, who distracted him long enough for the students to be evacuated. And who, as Hill exchanged gunfire with police, began to pray. For herself, of course. But also for the man who was going to kill her.

“I give it all to God,” she said after. “I’m not the hero. I was terrified.”

She convinced Hill to stand down and save his own life not by threatening him, but talking to him. Antoinette told the story of her own life to calm Hill down, sharing how her separation from her husband had left her feeling lonely and broken.

She told him not to surrender to despair.

Then she told him she loved him.

That’s right. Antoinette Tuff told this monster, this would-be mass murderer, that she loved him. And she said God loved him, too.

Michael Hill surrendered to police not long after. No one died that day.

I thought about Antoinette Hill all week. Thought about what almost happened and what had happened too many times before. I thought about what she said to Michael Hill when news broke of the Australian student shot by three young men who were simply bored and decided to kill someone. (Or because it was a gang initiation; reports vary, but does it really matter?)

I don’t know about you, but anger is my first reaction when I hear stories like that. Maybe it’s the redneck in me, or the father. Maybe it’s the decency coming through in the wrong way. I don’t know. All I know is it’s anger. Every time. It’s rage not only against the people who perpetrate such horrible acts, it’s a rage against the society that creates them and the God who lets this sort of thing happen. We’ve lost our way as a country. There’s a rot deep in our collective heart, and it’s spreading.

But I needed Antoinette Tuff to remind me that anger isn’t the way to fight that rot. Faith is. Love is. What will fix this country isn’t a fist, it’s an open hand.

“Our weapons are not carnal, they are spiritual.” So said Paul to the Corinthians.

Which means our fight isn’t against people. It’s against the heart.

Three people

August 8, 2013 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Though my workdays are normally filled with all the commotion and stress that a thousand college students can generate, the days between June and mid-August are mine alone to enjoy. It’s only slightly ironic and more than a little unexpected to me that summer break means even more to me now than it did when I was in school, but it’s true. Never let it be said that a little separation between yourself and others is a bad thing.

Despite the fact I have plenty to keep myself busy, I also have plenty of time to myself. Time that will be spent writing. Which is what I tried to do just a bit ago, and with unfortunate results.

I had just started typing when the buzzing began. First in one ear and then the other and then back again. My right thumb punched downward on the space bar and trampolined my hand upward, waving through the air.

“Stupid fly,” I muttered.

The buzzing returned, and this time the fly actually bounced itself off my head. More waving. More missing. Then the creature circled around and landed right on top of my computer screen, staring at me.

Black, juicy one. Hairy legs and monstrous eyes. And a wingspan that seemed almost unnatural.

Where it had been and how it had gotten into my office escaped me, and I really didn’t care. All that mattered was that I went back to work. I shooed it away and went back to my typing.

SMACK!

Against my head again.

I wheeled my chair around and swiped at it, missing the fly but not the stack of books on the opposite table, all of which tumbled to the floor.

SMACK!

“Dang it, you come back HERE!,” I yelled. “I’m gonna KILL YOU!!”

I roamed around my office for the next five minutes. Found nothing, of course. No buzzing, and no kamikaze attacks. So I sat back down and started writing. Four paragraphs later,

SMACK!

And then after that SMACK!, it stuck. To my head. And I swear, I swear to you, that fly made a beeline toward my ear. I was convinced it was going to burrow in and eat my brain.

I jumped up, slapping at my head and flailing my arms in every direction. The fly somehow managed to retreat back to whatever hell it came from and left me alone. For the moment.

But I knew it would be back. Oh yes, I knew. Which is why I put on my cowboy hat (to prevent any future burrowing) and started to fake type.

Two minutes later, buzzing again. And just at that moment I transformed myself into some strange Jedi/Mr. Miyagi/redneck hybrid, sliced through the air with an open palm—

—and connected.

The fly tumbled backward through the air and crashed against the far wall.

That was five minutes ago.

I’m back at my computer now. Order has been restored. But now I’m suffering through the fits and stops of trying to write, because every sentence I’m trying to type is interrupted by more buzzing.

The fly is still alive, though just barely.

It managed to right itself a bit ago by flopping back onto its legs, but it can’t do much else. Every attempt to take to flight has been both paltry and meaningless.

And now I feel guilty.

There are certain religious adherents who would say I sinned a bit ago, that every creature is worthy of respect and life and that by denying those things to them I deny them to myself. Others would say the sin was letting both haste and anger lead me to do something I now regret.

I suppose a sort of atonement is called for now, though I’m not sure what the proper course of action is. Should I walk over and euthanize it with my boot. Or should I try to nurse it back to health with small tweezers and bits of rancid meat? I’m not sure.

I am sure of this, though. We can try to model our lives to the Good, to walk straight and never wander, to be our very best selves. And sometimes that will work. But who we truly are deep down in our broken souls will always be there, ready in an instant to bare its teeth.

That is, I suppose, why we are all three people in one—there’s the person we want to be, the person we are, and the person who must daily choose which way to lean.

Errant negotiations

June 24, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

My children are arguing.

Not exactly breaking news, of course. Kids fight. It’s one of those givens in life that are about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning or a hot day in July. Blame it on summer vacation. I think they’re just tired of each other.

I’m not sure what caused the conflict; I just got home from work and caught the tail end of it. Something to do with Legos, from what I gather. Or an errant water balloon. One of those. Or maybe it was something else all together. You never can tell with kids. Kids can argue about anything.

I get caught up to speed by my wife, who doesn’t really know what the conflict is about herself. She was in the kitchen fixing dinner at the time. There was just a thump and a scream, followed by yells and accusations. That was enough for her. She sent both of the kids to their rooms to calm down.

I walk down the hallway to their bedrooms to say hello and gauge the amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth and find the Go To Your Room rule broken. My son is in my daughter’s room. She’s sitting Indian-style on the bed. He stands in front of her. Both are talking. Each have their arms crossed.

These are some serious negotiations, which is why I don’t barge in, make a Daddy Arrest, and charge them with not abiding by their mother’s wishes. It isn’t often that I have the opportunity to listen in on my children’s discussions. More often then not, they clamp up as soon as I enter the room and offer little more than, “Yes, Daddy?” I get plenty of opportunities to learn about what they think and believe in my conversations with them, but most times that seems like only half the story. What you think and say when your father or mother is around is often quite different than when it’s just you and a sibling in the room.

So I put my daughter’s bedroom wall between us and listen.

“I didn’t hit you on purpose,” my son says.

“Yes you did,” says my daughter. “You liked it. I saw it in your eyes.”

“You can’t see in my eyes. And you should have gotten out of my way.”

“I didn’t want to. It’s MY house too, you know.”

I’m not going to play anymore until you say you’re sorry.”

“Well I’M not going to play anymore until YOU say YOU’RE sorry.”

“All I was trying to do was get a Lego.”

“Well all I was trying to do is get a Lego, too.”

And on. And on and on.

Rather than interrupt, I decide to let them be. My kids will work this out, they always do. And then things will be fine until the next skirmish. I suspect my home isn’t much different than any other in that peaceful times are merely those few quiet days between wars of both opinion and blame.

In the meantime, I retire to the television and the evening news. Which, by the way, is much the same news as yesterday and the day before. Still the arguing, still the blaming. The system is broken, they say. I’m inclined to agree. Especially since the people who made the system are broken as well.

A commercial appears, one of those thirty-second spots about scooters old folk can ride around in to make themselves feel useful again (free cup holder included!).

The news is back, this time given by a pretty blond rather than a non-pretty man, as if bad news could seem a little better if she is the one telling it. She wonders aloud how we fix the problems in Washington, then poses the question to an educated man in a pair of thick glasses.

That’s when I turn the television off. I don’t need to listen to a pretty blond or an educated man to know how to fix things. I already know fixing them is pretty much impossible.

Because in the end, we’ll always prefer arguing rather than talking.

And we’ll always choose stubbornness over compromise.

We’ll always strive to reinforce our own opinions rather than admit those opinions might be wrong.

Call me pessimistic, that’s just how I see it.

Because our politicians really are representative of us all, if not in political philosophy than in brokenness.

Which means the adults we send to Washington aren’t really all that different than the kids we send to their rooms.

Weep with those who weep

May 23, 2013 by Billy Coffey 9 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Coffey versus the vending machine

January 23, 2012 by Billy Coffey 14 Comments

Of course anyone with a modicum of junk food knowledge understands that Snickers is the best candy bar. Of that there can be no argument. And when one’s day has been so busy at work that any chance of a proper lunch break is thrown out the window, the vending machine in the next building becomes a kind of promised land, one that flows not with milk and honey, but chocolate and nougat.

Getting there from here, which is a rather modern-looking building on the northern end of a college campus, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Because as I said, I was busy. And more than that, I was hungry. I’d been up against it since seven o’clock, and my watch told me that it was a little after two-thirty. My head hurt. My skin felt as though it were beginning to crawl and feed upon itself. My stomach was somersaulting. My insides sounded like a raving pack of hyenas.

I needed a Snickers bar. Bad. In fact, it was quickly becoming apparent that I needed a Snickers bar or I was going to kill someone.

Thankfully, the hectic nature of my day relaxed enough to offer me just enough time to walk to the next building, get what amounted to my breakfast, and get back. I managed to scrounge up just enough change for the machine, not a penny more. I threw on my coat and hat and trudged through a twenty-degree wind chill that seemingly wanted nothing more than to turn me right back around to where I came from. By the time I neared the next building I was literally punching at the breeze in an attempt to fend it off.

I was HUNGRY, people.

The vending machine was on the third story of a building constructed just after the Civil War. No elevators. By the time I reached the third floor landing, I felt as though I’d just summited Everest.

And after all of that, all that work and all that hunger, I fished my seventy-five cents into the slot, chose C2 for my Snickers bar, and watched as the metal spool slowly drew that chocolately goodness toward me only to get hung up on the end.

I watched it as it dangled there, mocking me from the other side of a half-inch piece of Plexiglass, the bar turned sideways so that the S on the package curled into a cruel, sinister grin.

I’ve told you all of that in the hopes that what I say next will not alter your opinion of me, if indeed it is favorable.

Because I beat the holy snot out of that machine.

Oh yes I did. I rocked it, punched it, kicked it, tilted it, even head butted it. And in the process I came to realize that I was not doing so just because I was hungry (which was a good thing, seeing as how afterward my Snickers was still dangling from the metal spool on the end of C2) or even because I was mad.

No, I was physically assaulting an innocent metal box because I DESERVED that candy bar.

I didn’t get my Snickers that day. In fact, I drove home two hours later convinced that someone would find me alongside the road barbequing some innocent dairy farmer’s heifer.

It was tough, I tell you. But even tougher than that hunger was the knowledge that I’d done everything right. I’d put the right amount of money in that vending machine, chosen the right letter, picked the right number. I’d followed all the rules.

When you do the right thing and follow all the rules, you shouldn’t find your reward dangling on the other side of a piece of hardened plastic. You’re supposed to get your reward in hand and embrace the sublime satisfaction of enjoying it. Because that’s right. Because that’s what’s supposed to happen.

And I wonder now as I wondered then about all the others who’d had to learn that same lesson. About the ones who spent their lives working only to have their jobs snatched away or the ones who prayed and had those prayers go unanswered. I wondered about all the love that was given but not given back and all the hope that was lifted up only to come tumbling down.

We’re all hungry for something, that’s true. But our hunger isn’t what defines it. Our hunger doesn’t make us who we are.

No, who we are is what we choose to be when that something we hunger for tarries.

Choosing stubbornness

July 18, 2011 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

My children are arguing.

So I put my daughter’s bedroom wall between us and listen.

“I didn’t hit you on purpose,” my son says.

“Yes you did,” says my daughter. “You liked it. I saw it in your eyes.”

“You can’t see in my eyes. And you should have gotten out of my way.”

“I didn’t want to. It’s MY house too, you know.”

I’m not going to play anymore until you say you’re sorry.”

“Well I’M not going to play anymore until YOU say YOU’RE sorry.”

“All I was trying to do was get a Lego.”

“Well all I was trying to do is get a Lego, too.”

And on. And on and on.

A commercial appears, one of those thirty-second spots about scooters old folk can ride around in to make themselves feel useful again (free cup holder included!).

That’s when I turn the television off. I don’t need to listen to a pretty blond or an educated man to know how to fix things. I already know fixing them is pretty much impossible.

Because in the end, we’ll always prefer arguing rather than talking.

And we’ll always choose stubbornness over compromise.

We’ll always strive to reinforce our own opinions rather than admit those opinions might be wrong.

Call me pessimistic, that’s just how I see it.

Because our politicians really are representative of us all, if not in political philosophy then in brokenness.

Which means the adults we send to Washington aren’t really all that different than the kids we send to their rooms.

Last week, Jay Leno introduced the following video as a meeting between the republicans and democrats in Washington. Maybe not, but the similarities are striking:

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