storyteller
I’m also posting today over at Prodigal magazine about the God of sharp edges. I wish my relationship with God was a more steady one. A more . . . peaceful . . . one. To a large extent it is now. That hasn’t always been the case. Head on over there to see why.
There’s also an opportunity to win one of ten copies of When Mockingbirds Sing.
No one is happier than I to see spring finally entrench itself into this year. I am not a fan of winter, of cold mornings and colder nights and darkness at four-thirty in the afternoon. Ba. Humbug.
We are in the main course of May now. The robins have returned outside my living room window, the trees in the yard are heavy with leaves, and I’ve cut the grass three times (a magnificent task, by the way. You learn a lot about God by mowing the yard. Another story for another time, though).
But even with sunshine and seventy degrees here in the valley, the tops of the mountains outside my window were clouded in snowfall just a few weeks ago. I was here, winter was there. And as I looked at that cold, angry storm, I knew it also saw me. Snarling, “I can come down there too, you know. I’m not done just yet.”
Which, ironically, was fine. As anxious as I was to put away the snow shovel and bring out my softball bat, I wasn’t so sure I wanted the cold weather to go away. Because even though spring meant birdsong and porch swings and windows-down-radio-up, it also meant I would have to put away my new slippers.
That they had been on my feet daily since Christmas, gently warming my toes and therefore my very heart, is an unlikely thing for me to say. I’ve never been a slipper guy. They’ve always seemed so un-me, so…girly.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
When I unwrapped them last Christmas morning, my wife asked me to just give them a try. “Please,” she said, emphasis included. Not because I wanted them, not even because I thought I needed them. But to, in her words again, “Finally get you to shut up.”
I love my wife.
You see, the floors in our home were cold. Very. The frigid temperatures coupled with an unwavering determination to cut down on the gas bill kept our thermostat at a barely tolerable sixty-eight degrees this year. By November, I was chilly. By December, I was a Popsicle.
It was easy enough to throw on a sweatshirt or a thicker pair of jeans to make things a bit more comfortable, but that did little to improve the condition of my feet. I tried wool socks, which did the trick so long as I stayed on the carpet in the living room. Venture out from there and onto the hardwood floors of the rest of the house, though, and it was like an ice rink in both temperature and friction. I almost broke a leg one Saturday afternoon carrying a bag of carrots into the kitchen. Almost died from hypothermia waiting for someone to help me, too.
Stupid house, I thought to myself. Stupid cold house with its stupid cold floors. Why didn’t we buy a house with a fireplace in it? Or two fireplaces. And radiant heat in the floors. Oh, yeah. That would be nice. Radiant heat…
Those thoughts were translated into words later on to my wife: “I hate living here, and I hate our life.”
She looked at me, puzzled. What in the world had brought this on? she wondered. Has something terrible happened? Has he finally cracked?
“What made you say that?” she asked.
“My feet are cold.”
Which brought about an even more puzzled look.
But it’s like that with us, isn’t it? We all have the unique talent of turning small inconveniences into major problems. And while I spent months believing that the source of my trouble was a drafty house, the truth was that it was something much closer.
The trouble wasn’t the cold floors. Not the weather, either.
The trouble was me.
There is a lot in my little world I pray that God will change. “Give me more and give me better,” I ask Him. I wonder sometimes if He’s not saying the thing to me.
I wonder if rather than making the rain stop, He’d rather just give me an umbrella. Because you have to learn to smile in the rain as much as you do in the sunshine.
Or if rather than making me comfortable, He’d rather leave me uncomfortable. Because that’s when I learn the most.
Or if rather than giving me a nice warm house, He’d rather just give me a pair of slippers.
Because there isn’t much you can change about your circumstances sometimes. But there is plenty you can change about you.
I suppose you could say it all started for Tommy back when the river took his house. That was six years ago, more or less. Tommy can’t remember if it was six or five. Or seven.
He does remember the house was a bargain—two bedrooms, two baths, 1200 square feet. And then there was the land—ten acres of woods that thinned out right at the river’s edge. Tommy always wanted a place like that, out in the country where everything was slow and the only sounds were the coyotes and the birds.
He settled in and got used to his new life. The divorce had been tough on him (all divorces are), but now the papers were signed and he was ready to move on. Tommy fixed up his new house with some paint and new furniture. Added a deck on the back so he could sit there in the evenings with his dog and watch the water drift by. Tommy said he loved that deck. Sitting there watching that water made him realize that things will always keep moving, that the bad that might be here now will be behind you soon enough.
Tommy was there for three summers when it all happened. It began as a front coming up from the Gulf, welcome news for the farmers and their dry fields. The weatherman said the next two days would be wet ones and that we should all spend the time sharpening the blades on our lawnmowers. Tommy didn’t do that. He couldn’t sit on the deck and watch the river, so he pulled the recliner around toward the window and watched it from inside.
Watched it rain. Then pour. And then the pour became a deluge.
The weatherman said the system stalled over the mountains, churning in a big circle the kept dumping water onto the valley. It rained nonstop for those two days. We all felt like Noah.
By the end of the first day, the river was swollen. By the beginning of the second, water was spilling over the banks. By mid-day, Tommy’s house was gone.
He managed to get out the most important things—pictures of his kids, his dog, the motorcycle. The rest was soaked or swept away. Including the deck, which was soaked while it was being swept away.
Tommy thought his new life would be better than his old one. But as he stood in what was once his front yard a week later, he figured he thought wrong.
There was little doubt in his mind it was God’s doing. The Lord sent the rain, the Lord kept the rain there. The Lord watched as Tommy’s house ended up floating down the river. It was His will, Tommy thought. Had to be. Because if it wasn’t, then that meant the rain was bigger than God. Tommy hadn’t been to church since he was a boy, but he said he knew enough to know God was bigger than the rain.
He knew enough to realize as well that if God allowed all that to happen, it must have been for a reason. I think that’s what kept Tommy going in the months that followed. The insurance check arrived. He used it to buy another house, this one with no river in sight. He settled in once more, with new furniture and new paint (not a deck, though, as this house already had one). Things started looking up. Tommy considered it the start of his third life, and he was glad to be putting the first two behind him. Somewhere in the midst of all that newness, Tommy did something else. He took a drink.
He’d never held much fondness for alcohol. A beer at the ballgame and maybe a shot of liquor during poker with the guys, but nothing else. To hear him say it, Tommy still can’t explain why he decided to pick up a six-pack at the 7-11 that day. He just did. And wouldn’t you know it, the last one tasted even better than the first.
Like I said, that was six years ago. More or less. Tommy can’t remember.
And as it turned out, his third life was even worse than his previous two. He lost his job because of the drinking, which has also started to affect his health—“Can’t have a beer without a smoke,” he often says. He spends his days sitting on the sofa with his dog watching television. The Price is Right is his favorite.
I guess that’s how it goes with some people sometimes, sad as it may be.
Tommy says it’s all God’s fault for sending that stupid rain. It was a catastrophe, he says, and there’s little doubt it was.
But he’ll also say the drinking was his idea. God didn’t have anything to do with that. Which is why I think the catastrophes that God sends are ones we can overcome. It’s the ones we send upon ourselves that we crumble under.
I want it known before I begin this post that but for a small handful of people, I do not grumble. Ever. It is a Coffey tradition steeped in Southern Redneckness—you do not whine. The reasoning behind this is both simple and teeming with most of the truth you need to get by in this world—life is tough on all of us. We all have our own stories and our own problems, and we’re all trying to get by the best we can. Therefore, complaining helps no one.
That said, my shoulder hurts.
A few weeks ago I was ambushed by a slab of ice that was cleverly disguised as snow, bruising my knee and spraining my shoulder in the process. The sprain further aggravated an ancient yet lingering rotator cuff problem from my baseball days, which basically rendered the entire right side of my body useless. I was pathetic for a week. Ask anyone.
Both my doctor and the nice folks in the local hospital’s radiology department concluded it was nothing truly serious. A good thing. In fact, I’ve been promised that I’ll soon be back to my normal self. Assuming that I do two things:
Wait and move.
The waiting is simply that. Waiting. Time heals all wounds, and apparently this holds true for busted shoulders as well. Which means full-contact sports are not an option, which is bad, but they’re not an option for now, which is good.
And as far as the moving goes, I have exercises to do. Stupid ones. Things like moving my fingers up the wall and swinging my arm in front of my like I’m pretending to be an elephant. Things designed to make me look as ridiculous as possible and thus be a fount of endless entertainment for my children.
But I’m following orders, if only because I know that by doing so I’ll get better. My wound will be gone.
Since I’m the type of guy who tends to philosophize about everything (and since I couldn’t really do anything else except watch reruns of The Dukes of Hazard), I spent a lot of time those seven days pondering my condition. I’ve come to realize there is a spiritual component to all of this. You can take a tumble on the inside just as easily as you can take one on the outside. Both hurt much the same, and both sorts of falls can be cured in the same way.
For instance.
It hurts more when you fall at forty than when you fell at seventeen. At least that was true for me. Either my body has gotten softer in the last twenty years, or the ground harder. Neither case is appealing. Such are the ravages of time. The body adds weight over the years, and not all of it is cushion.
The soul tends to add weight, too. A tumble there hurts more at forty than at seventeen too, and for the same reasons—either the heart has gotten softer or the world harder. The more you live the more you feel, and the more you feel the more likely you’ll get hurt. It’s unfortunate, yes. But the alternative to feeling too much is to feel too little. Ironically, that ends up hurting even more.
Most people think stumbles happen when you’re not paying attention. While that’s true sometimes, it isn’t always. I was paying attention (promise). But the problem was disguised. A thin layer of fallen snow had covered the ice, rendering it invisible until it was too late.
Which is why I do my best not to stand in judgment of whomever is unlucky enough to find themselves on the cover of the latest tabloids in the supermarket checkout lines. No matter how well we pay attention to our hearts or our heads, sooner or later life sneaks up on us all. Legend has it that when Jesus stooped down to write in the sand between the adulteress and those who wished to stone her, what He scribbled were the secret sins of everyone who held a rock in their hand.
I really like that.
We all need to wait and move. We all need to have patience, both with others and ourselves, and we all need to exercise our wounds to make them better.
We can think or act however we want, but the truth is that we’re all clumsy. The truth is that grace is given to us because we do not possess it ourselves.
You could say Radivoje Lajic and I have a few things in common, at least on the surface.
We’re both country boys for one, though what I call country happens to be the mountains of Virginia and what Radivoje calls country happens to be Gornji Lajici, a small village in northern Bosnia. We’re both content to live our own lives and mind our own business. And then there’s the fact that deep down, we both just want to be left alone. We want our lives free of drama and spectacle. We want to quietly go on our way and just keep doing what we’re doing.
Problem is, that doesn’t seem to happen very often with Radivoje. And sometimes it doesn’t happen very often with me, either. Things get in the way. Specific things.
In Radivoje’s case, it’s the aliens who won’t leave him alone.
Since 2007, Radivoje’s small house has been hit six times by meteorites. He has the space rocks to prove it, too. Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed them all as genuine. He even sold one of them to a university in the Netherlands so he could put a new steel girder reinforced roof on his house. He was tired of patching all the holes.
For their part, scientists are still trying to figure out how and why poor Radivoje has been forced to endure this. The odds of anyone getting hit by a single meteorite are about 0.000000136%. The odds of getting hit by six of them? Incalculable.
There is some speculation that either his house or his town sits on some supercharged magnetic field, but nothing has been proven. And even if it was, that wouldn’t explain the fact that all of this seems to happen only during a heavy rain. Never in the sunshine.
A mystery, the scientists say. But not to Radivoje. He knows what’s going on. To him, it’s pretty obvious:
“I have no doubt I am being targeted by aliens. They are playing games with me. I don’t know why they are doing this. When it rains I can’t sleep for worrying about another strike.”
Funny, yes. Funny to me, anyway. I don’t know why this is happening, but to think aliens are floating up in space playing a game of Hit the Serbian seems a bit of a stretch.
But then I thought it over and decided that maybe if Radivoje has his facts wrong, then so do I. Because if you substitute “aliens” for “God” in his quote above, you might just have me.
There are times in my life when I feel like God is targeting me. Lots of times. Many more than six. I suppose in that regard, Radivoje’s gotten off pretty easy.
I’ve been known to believe that God plays games with me. He’ll dangle some blessing right in front of my eyes and then snatch it away the second I reach out for it. He’ll answer little prayers like getting me a good parking spot at the mall but not big ones like not letting my kids get sick. And there are always those infernal lessons He’s intent on teaching me, things like patience and humility and trust, things I’m sure will build me up later but always seem to make me feel torn apart now.
To make matters worse, those lessons always seem to come at the worst possible time. Not when my life is sunny, but when it’s raining on my insides. And the rain always seems to pour harder then, because I’m left worrying what He’s going to do next.
“I have no doubt I am being targeted by aliens. They are playing games with me. I don’t know why they are doing this. When it rains I can’t sleep for worrying about another strike.”
I get that. I get it because there are times when I have no doubt I am being targeted by God. He is playing games with me. I didn’t know why He is doing that. When it rains I can’t sleep for worrying about another strike.
I can’t say there isn’t a little bit of Radivoje Lajic’s thinking in me. I have my moments when I think God’s in heaven playing Hit the Redneck. And chances are good that you’ve felt the same more than once about your own life. As for me, I’m going to work on that.
I’m sharing My Hazardous Faith Story as part of a synchroblog connected with the release of Ed Cyzewski and Derek Cooper’s new book Hazardous: Committing to the Cost of Following Jesus.
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.
***
Do you have your own Hazardous Faith Story? You can share it here:My Hazardous Faith Story.
