Billy Coffey

storyteller

A Good Day…

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The tuck-in is a crucial part of every parent’s nightly routine, a delicate process by which clingy and energetic children must be persuaded that the absolute best thing in the world to do is go to sleep by themselves. If you get it just right, a night’s peace just may be in order. Screw up even the tiniest detail, however, and you can forget sleep. For the both of you.

The rituals differ for my two children in detail, though the overall process is pretty much the same: prayers, story, small talk, covers, kiss, goodnight. Not much to it on the surface maybe, but still harder than it looks. Repetition is key.

My son likes to recount his day just before bed. It’s as if he needs some sort of confirmation that everything he did and said and thought was worthy of my attention and comment (which is, by the way). A few nights ago, the normal exploits of eating breakfast, exploring his grandparents’ yard, going to preschool, and taking a nap seemed particularly stimulating, told to me with much body language and laughter.

“Sounds like you had a good day then,” I told him.

“I did?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. Then, “Didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.” He wrinkled his forehead and thought about it. “Maybe. I’m not sure. What makes a good day?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but only a breath came out. What makes a good day? What kind of a question was that?

“I’ll have to get back with you on that one, Buddy,” I finally said.

“Okay, Daddy. Night and love you.”

“Night and love you, too,” I said.

Though my son’s night was flawless and complete, mine wasn’t. I couldn’t get his question out of my head because it seemed the perfect sort of question to ponder upon for a while—simple, broad, and meaningful.

What’s a good day? As much as I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with an answer. Which was a little troubling. I prayed every morning for God to give me a good day, I’d tell my family after work that I had a good day, and I’d thank God every night for giving me a good day.

But I was beginning to realize that I didn’t really know what I was praying for, what sort of answer I was giving to my family, and what exactly I was thanking God for giving me.

Strange, huh?

So I thought I’d conduct a little experiment. I’d take the next couple of days and write down everything that happened. Then, at the end of the night, I’d take a look at my list, ask myself if it was a good day or not, and try to figure out why.

Day one was a Sunday. My list: Church, lunch (cheeseburgers!), a visit to my parents, a walk around the neighborhood, coloring with the kids, ballgame, bed. Not bad.

But good? Surprisingly, no. My day, I found, wasn’t really good or bad. Just…okay.

Then, day two. Monday. My list: get up at oh-dark-thirty, go to work, find a missing package for a student, listen to someone talk about her mother’s failing health, rush across town on an important errand for someone else, come home, collapse on the couch, hold my daughter because she’s sick, tuck the kids in, go to bed.

It sounded like a long, hard, stressful day. And maybe it was. But it was also a good day no matter how it sounded, and I didn’t know why.

How could a busy Monday be better than a lazy Sunday?

But maybe not. Sunday was a Me day, really. I did what I wanted and when. Monday? Monday seemed more about helping people, whether that help be as big as driving across town for someone else or as small as listening to a troubled friend. Maybe that was all the difference.

What makes a good day? I know the answer now. And when my son gets up in the morning, I’ll tell him.

Because what makes a good day isn’t what happens to you, but because of you.

p.s.- I’ve had the pleasure of having more than a few good days lately, though the reasons perhaps had little to do with me. I’ve received a lot of emails about the missing comments, and all were humbly appreciated.

One in particular came from a reader who confessed to being on the fence when it comes to God. My blog, she said, has helped to strengthen her fragile faith. Not necessarily my posts, though. It was the comments that you all so kindly contribute. I never paused to consider the fact that people enjoyed the comments just as much as the content, and in many cases even more so. After reading that, I felt pretty selfish. Yet another reminder that it ain’t all about me.

So to her and to you all: please, comment away…

Pick Your Cause

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The college where I work is a great place filled with great people. The campus is beautiful, the professors excellent, and the staff both accommodating and friendly.

But it is still a college. And as it is such, my work environment harbors the sort of modern, liberal predilections that a more traditional person like me can’t seem to understand sometimes. Some days, many days, I am both generally exasperated and specifically confused by what I see.

A few weeks ago the college held what is annually billed as Pick Your Cause Week. Each day brought exhibits, lectures, and a wealth of information concerning a particular organization or subject. This year children of alcoholics, muscular dystrophy, women’s cancers, domestic violence, and the poor were chosen.

Though there are some things here at work that I find questionable and a few I find just plain strange, I like this. I like it a lot. We should all have a Pick Your Cause Week.

I find it sadly ironic that in this age of computers and satellite television, when the smallest event that happens in the smallest corner of the smallest country on the other side of the world can be instantly beamed right into our living rooms, we’ve really never been so separated from one another.

The media blitzes us with a constant barrage of suffering and need. We see footage of disaster and crime and hear stories of loss and despair. And though we try every day to nourish whatever hope we have and coax it to grow, there is the daily reminder that our world seems to be teetering on the edge of a very dark abyss and there is nothing that can pull it back onto solid ground.

It all can be just a little too much to bear. For me, anyway.

So I do what a good Christian should. I pray. But I’ve found that I often use prayer as an excuse, a poor example of doing something. As much as I pray for this world and all the people in it, I find that I do little else about it. And while those prayers are vital, they shouldn’t be the final solution. Asking God to help the world and asking Him to equip me to help the world are two different things. I don’t often get that.

I have a tendency to shrink the world. Shrink it so its dimensions extend no further than the small part I happen to occupy. Shrink it to only that which affects me. My world is my family and my town and my work. Whatever else that happens outside of my world that is sad and regrettable and unfortunate affects me emotionally. But it is also none of my business. I try to ignore it. I don’t hope it will go away because I don’t think it ever will, I just try to stay out of its way and hope it doesn’t find me or the ones I care about.

All of that is of course the silliest thing any Christian should ever believe, and yet I do. And so do a lot of us. We all at some point fall for the great lie that there is nothing we can do about the state of things, and in doing so we risk developing a mindset that is perhaps as unchristian as we can get:

We don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to us.

That is why a Cause is so important. We are all called to spend our time and energy toward something that will continue on long after we leave this world. It is our purpose, our mission. No matter who we are or what we do or where our talents lie, we are all here for the same reason: to make things better.

To heal the wounded. Clothe the naked. Feed the poor. To offer help to the helpless and hope to the hopeless.

And the light of God to the darkness.

ILUVME

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I was sitting at an intersection yesterday, passing the time between stop and go by studying the car in front of me. Vehicle: a rusty, broken, and tired Toyota. Driver: young lady, no more than seventeen and blissfully unaware of her surroundings. A sound system that was worth much more than the car itself vibrated everything from the windows to the doors to the license plates.

Vanity plates, of course. If you’re seventeen and cool, vanity plates are a requirement.

They also say a lot about a person. Vanity plates are tiny windows into a personality, a creative assemblage of letters and numbers that offer a glimpse into what matters most to the owner.

And it was pretty obvious what mattered most to that young lady. Her license plate used the term “vanity” in a more literal way.

ILUVME, it said.

I shook my head and grinned in an I-can’t-believe-this sort of way. ILUVME? Really?

A little arrogant, I thought. Then again, maybe there was much to love in being her. Maybe she really did love herself, and justifiably so. Maybe who she was, what she knew, and the direction her life was going was so perfect, so wondrous, that loving herself was natural and right and good.

Ha.

If true, then she should give herself a little time. Five years or so. Maybe ten. Let her grow up a little and get out into this big, beautiful world. Let her dreams crumble, her heart break, and her faith bend. Then we’ll see how much she loves herself.

I wrinkled my brow, struck by the coldness of those thoughts. Was I really that pessimistic of a person? Was I really hoping for her life to unfold such that she would one day regret putting such a thing on her license plates?

Why was I so upset because she loved herself? Was it because she possessed something I did not?

Did I love me?

An interesting question, that. Are we supposed to love ourselves? I flipped through the pages of my mental Bible for any scripture that confirmed or denied that question, but nothing stood out (though, admittedly, the pages of the Bible I hold in my head are not nearly as complete as the pages of the one I hold in my hand).

But I did know this: whether I was supposed to or not, I certainly did not love me. I knew my weaknesses and faults. The hidden things I thought and said and did. I knew what I paid attention to and what I did not. The struggles I faced, the times I feared and worried and doubted too much. What and who I hated. I knew, more than anyone else, the kind of person I was.

And that was not the sort of person anyone could love. Should love.

Besides, the point of life isn’t to be content with the person you are, right? No, it’s to try to do and be a little better every day. To keep becoming. That’s tough to do when you’re happy with who you are. When ULUVU.

Still, something bothered me. Wouldn’t hating yourself for who you are, for what you feel and think and do, be just as bad?

My thoughts were interrupted by the stoplight turning green. ILUVME turned left, and as I watched her I realized she was pulling into the parking lot of a church. Black letters that spelled out GOD IS OUR FRIEND glittered in the sun on the marquee at the entrance.

Yes. God is our friend. My friend. So powerful that He could do anything, He chose to die for me. So omnipresent that He could be anywhere, He chose to live in my heart. My heart. Not because He had to. Because He wanted to.

Because God loved me.

Loved me despite knowing my fears and worries and doubts. Despite knowing my failures and faults. Despite knowing me better than I knew myself.

If an all-powerful, all-knowing God could love me, why couldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I?

The foundation of the Christian faith states that we are flawed beings. Sinful souls in need of a Savior. I knew that to be true. Perhaps just as true, though, was that our worth didn’t depend upon what we did or did not, but upon the spark of the Divine that gave us life. There is a beauty within us beyond our flaws and failures. A beauty worthy of our compassion, of our acceptance.

And of our love.

Always a Story

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My post last week about an incident at the mall garnered some interesting reactions, at least to me. I figured a lot of you would wonder what in the world was going on with this poor woman who refused to let me hold the door for her. And a lot of you did. But just as many wondered how I could have possibly kept hold of myself. How could I have not either burst out laughing when she fell or given her the good cussing she maybe deserved?

Truth is, I might have been calm and cool on the outside she she tripped and went splat!, but I was jumping up and down and cheering on the inside. I’m not proud of that, mind you, but I can’t deny it either.

But what kept that told-ya-so mentality from bubbling up to the surface was a story a friend of mine named John shared one day. One I’d like to share with you.

A brilliant man, John. He has two PhDs, is about to get his first book published, and is currently the head of the Christian Counseling program at Liberty University. He was also the best Sunday school teacher I ever had.

John told me that one night while he was in college, he had dinner at a local restaurant with one of his psychology professors. Their waitress was a young, twenty-something lady named Anna, who seemed to have a bit of a personality problem and could have used a refresher course in customer relations.

She was rude and offensive and vulgar. She forgot up their order twice and, when she finally got it right, rewarded John and his professor by unceremoniously dropping their plates on the table with a loud thud and walking away. They nearly died of thirst because she never returned to offer more drinks. And when she finally resurfaced forty minutes later, she greeted them with a curt “Ya’ll done?”

With a “Yes, ma’am” from the professor, she scribbled their bill onto a receipt, pushed it to the middle of the table, and walked away. Two specials, two drinks, two cups of coffee—fifteen dollars and forty cents.

“I have the tip,” the professor said. He took a ten out of his wallet and placed it between the salt and pepper shakers.

John flinched. Ten dollars? This had to be a mistake. He was going to give Anna a ten dollar tip? For what? Yelling and cussing and throwing food at them? A dollar and a half would have been plenty, the accustomed 10 percent. And that was for good service. But this wise and learned man was going to give her almost ten times that?

“Excuse me, Professor,” John said. “You just sat a ten down.”

“Yes, I did,” the professor answered.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask why?”

“Maybe,” the professor said. “Later.”

The two walked up to the cash register, paid for their meal, and left. Just as they were getting into the professor’s car, though, the door to the restaurant opened and out ran Anna. Crying.

“I’m so sorry,” she said through her tears. “I know I was awful to the two of you. I’ve just had such a bad day. My kid’s got the flu, I just found out my mother has cancer, and my husband left me two days ago. I just can’t take it anymore. And then I saw your tip just sitting there, and I…I just had to thank you. You don’t know what this means.”

The professor smiled. “It’s quite all right, Miss,” he said. “Things may look bad now, but I promise you they’ll get better. You just need a little faith.”

She nodded and smiled back, then turned around to go back inside. John stared at his professor, who watched as the doors closed around her.

“Remember this, John,” he said. “We are all working our way through our own story. We pass people by every day of our lives. We talk to them, nod and say hello, and we have no idea the sorts of struggles they are enduring or what pains they bear. We are all hurting in our own unique way. We have all been wounded by something. Never forget that.”

John hasn’t. And since the day I heard that story, I haven’t either. Because we all may share one world, but we each live in our own. One made bright or dim by our own faith or doubt, joy or despair.

Life’s two sides

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Ever have one of those days? The ones when nothing seems to go right, when you start to question the very value of your existence and wonder if there is actually a point to anything?

I had one of those days yesterday.

Confusion is often our constant companion. Our eyesight and the extent of our understanding reach no further than the present moment. It’s hard to see how some things could ever possibly work out for the good. Rather than nice and neat, our lives are tangled and messy. Full of knots.

These were the things preying on my mind when I arrived home this afternoon and found my wife cross stitching.

Cross stitching is an art, I think. No less than painting or composing a poem, it demands much in the way of effort and time, of undoing and redoing. Yet my wife finds it relaxing in a meditative sort of way. The fruits of her labor adorn the walls of our hallway, where past creations have been framed and displayed for the world to see.

She sat patiently, running her needle and thread up and over and down, as I vented the constant frustration that is my life. Then she got up, kissed me on the cheek, and suggested that maybe a cup of coffee was in order.

My depression glued me to the couch. Then I noticed the cross stitch she had sat on the chair.

A teaching career and two children had limited the amount of time my wife could devote to her hobby. It looked to me as if she had lost her touch. Really, really lost it.

Thread lines were arranged in a hodgepodge of clusters and colors that zigged and zagged with no discernible pattern. Knots of various sizes dotted a maze of tangles that seemed to have neither a beginning nor an end. This was a mess. A catastrophe. And just about the ugliest thing I had ever seen in my life.

But just when I began to seriously question my wife’s mental stability, I noticed something. She had placed the cross stitch face down. I was looking at the wrong side.

I took the material in my hand and turned it over. Sure enough, the colors there were blended to form one seamless picture. No tangles. No knots. Just perfect.

That’s when I understood.

There were two sides to life. There was a side we faced, a side that on the surface appeared tangled and confused, where thick knots dotted the landscape and colors zigged and zagged with no apparent purpose.

But beneath that jumbled surface, beyond the reach of my eyes, there was another side. The side God sees. Where the tangles were transformed into intricate designs of perfection and colors seamlessly interacted and flowed. Where there was no confusion, no zig or zag, but a complete, flawless piece of art.

We all pray for God to undo our knots. What rational person wouldn’t? But as I turned the cross stitch over and back and over again, I realized that the knots in my life served a purpose I had never considered. They had to be there. Otherwise, a color might have been gone or a pattern may have been incomplete. The tapestry of my life would be missing something valuable. A knot wasn’t just a knot, whether it was in a cross stitch or a life. It was simply where one part of the picture ended so another could begin.

I couldn’t see how it all fit together because on my side and from my vantage point it didn’t. But from God’s vantage point, everything was coming along just fine. And who was I to argue, really? I was merely the material. God was the Weaver. Does the canvas tell the artist how to create? The fabric doesn’t say to the weaver, “Please, no more knots. No more tangles. It will hurt too much. I will look too ugly.”

Besides, when it was all finished, when God’s plan for me was fulfilled and my purpose in life completed, which side of the picture would He frame for the world to see?

Hugging Purpose

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(This piece was first published as a column in the Staunton, Virginia News Leader)

My daughter wants to be a writer. Also a Sunday School teacher, a regular teacher, an artist, and a geologist. The latter come and go depending upon the whims of her six-year-old mind. The former, though, has been a constant in her young life. One she has become more passionate about in the last couple of years.

I asked her one morning what exactly she wanted to be a writer of. Fiction? Nonfiction? Poetry? Would she write books or newspaper articles? Would they be secular or religious? The possibilities are many, I told her. Best to narrow things down a bit, even this early in the game.

She shrugged her answer and munched another bite of Cheerios. “Books, I guess,” she said.

“What kind of books?”

“Books for diabetic kids.”

I raised an eyebrow. My daughter continued munching. Then, feeling as though further clarification was needed, said, “God wants me to write books to help kids with diabetes. He told me.”

“He did?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Well,” she explained, “He didn’t tell me tell me. But why else would He have let me get diabetes if He didn’t want me to help kids who had diabetes?”

I managed a weak nod. Such is the faith of children, faith that sees clearly what adulthood often fogs.

My daughter was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes two years ago. Up until that time, I had never truly doubted God. Doubted myself? Yes. Humanity as a whole? Absolutely. But never God. Because He had always been there, always kept things right in my life, and always protected my family.

But when you’re sitting at the end of a hospital bed watching your sick child struggle to find sleep against the beeps of machines and the IV tubes running into her tiny body, you doubt God. You doubt Him a lot.

You wonder how He could allow such a thing to happen to someone so undeserving. How any sort of purpose or meaning could possibly be found in this happening. And you wonder if maybe, just maybe, all those people who say God is figment of our primeval imagination are right. Because if there was a God and if that God really loved us, then he wouldn’t let children suffer like this.

That’s what you think. What I thought, anyway. And though I still went to church and read my Bible and prayed, those thoughts just wouldn’t go away.

The faith that I held in God, faith that had been built and stripped and built better over thirty-six years, was crumbling. But my daughter’s faith, all two years of it, was growing stronger. The anger I held toward God paled in comparison to the love she continued to show towards Him. At nights when I would lie motionless in bed, praying but not, I could still hear her in the next room speaking to God as if He were sitting attentively on the edge of her bed.

“Bless Mommy and Daddy and thanks for the macaroni and cheese,” she would say. Thanks and thanks and more thanks. Never asking, never wanting, because in her mind she had all she needed, diabetes or not.

I pushed God away. She hugged Him closer.

We all have a why in life. Why did this happen? Why does it have to be this way? We all have questions we want answered. It’s just that some want to know because they want an excuse, and others want to know so they can do something. I wanted reasons. She wanted purpose. I suppose that’s why I never got my answer, but she did.

God wants her to write. He wants her to give Him the bad things that have happened and watch as He turns them to good. He doesn’t want her to give up, doesn’t want her to doubt. He wants her to help. Because in the end, that’s why she’s here. Why we’re all here.

To help.

I have no doubt she will do just that. And I have no doubt about this, too: I give my every day to teach my daughter something about this life. But she teaches me more.

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