Billy Coffey

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No less precious

February 23, 2011 by Billy Coffey 24 Comments

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

It was a little over sixteen years ago when Ken Copeland’s wife woke up feeling a little queasy. It was a Sunday, he remembers. The big deal that day was the football game later that afternoon. Redskins and Cowboys.

Ken never saw that game, because his wife decided to take a pregnancy test later that morning. In the two years they’d been trying to conceive a child, she’d gone through dozens of those tests. All had produced nothing but a disappointing minus sign. On that day, however, a vertical line appeared and bisected that familiar horizontal one. It was a plus.

Ken and his wife celebrated that day with tears, fears, and a steak dinner at the Sizzlin’ in town. They told everyone (even the waitress, who discounted their steaks as congratulations). Everyone wanted to know if Ken wanted a boy or a girl. His answer was the usual one. Ken didn’t care, just so long as the baby was healthy.

Matthew Brent Copeland was born nine months later at the local hospital.

Fast forward sixteen years to the playground at the local elementary school. Father and son are at the swings, Ken pushing Matthew. It’s the younger Copeland’s favorite activity, one that somehow calms the storms that rage in his mind. Ken thinks it’s the back and forth motion that does it, that feeling of flight and peace. He takes Matthew there every evening.

There are smiles on both their faces, though that hasn’t always been the case. The Copelands went through a tough time when Matthew was diagnosed with autism at age four.

In quiet conversation, Ken will tell you that almost killed him. He’ll admit the anger he felt toward God and the despair over his son, whose life would now never be as full and as meaningful as it should have been.

And he’ll tell you that deep down in his dark places, if he and his wife would have known what would happen to Matthew, he would have preferred abortion over birth. There would be less pain that way. For everyone.

Yet now, twelve years later, he smiles.

I watch them from the privacy of a bench on the other side of the playground. See him push his grown son and yell “Woo!” as he does. I see the perfect and innocent smile on Matthew’s face as he’s launched out and up. Hear his own “Woo!” in reply.

When they’re done, Ken takes his son’s hand in his own and together they walk across the soccer field toward home. Their steps are light, they take their time. It’s as if their world has stopped for this moment between father and son to marvel at the bond between them, proof that the hardships life sometimes thrusts upon us don’t have to break our hearts. They can swell our hearts as well and leave more room for loving.

Ken has made his peace. Peace with God, with his life, with his son’s condition. It hasn’t always been easy, but nothing that is ever worth something is easy. There are still times when he looks at Matthew and wonders what his son’s life would be like if he were normal and healthy. He’s sixteen now, that age where a boy’s world should expand in a violent and glorious eruption of girls and cars and sports. But Matthew’s world will never expand. It will always remain as small as it was when he was four, and just as simple.

Ken says that’s okay. That it has to be. He’s learned that in a world that seems full of choices, there are really only two—we can hang on, or we can let go. Ken has let go. Of his anger and his disappointment, of his despair. And he’s found that what has replaced those things are peace and fulfillment and joy, things he’d always chased after but until Matthew came along never really found.

If Ken would change anything, it would be what he said to all those people who’d asked him if he wanted a boy or a girl. His one regret is what his answer always was, that it didn’t matter as long as the baby was healthy. Because an unhealthy baby is no less precious, no less valuable, and no less life-changing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: children, decisions, family, health

Playing dead

January 19, 2011 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Image by Tim Miller, used with permission via Flickr.
Image by Tim Miller, used with permission via Flickr.

My kids have been dead for the last three minutes, and off and on for the last ten. I just checked them to be sure. They were where I’d last seen them—splayed out on the living room floor and framed by rays of sunshine that poured through the windows. I stepped over them. They didn’t move. Even put a foot in front of their noses. Nothing.

They’re good at this.

By the way the living room has been demolished, it must have been an epic battle. Lightsabers and laser pistols litter the floor. The overturned ottoman seems to have been where the last stand was made. My son is there, pistol still in hand. My daughter is near the door. She’s doing her best to be lifeless, but I can see her lungs heaving.

“Who won?” I ask them.

“We both did,” my daughter says, and I am not surprised. At eight and six, they believe there are never any losers during playtime. The winning comes in the playing itself.

“I died good, Daddy,” my son says below me. He keeps one eye closed to stay in character and opens the other to make sure I heard him.

“What’s it mean to die good?” I ask him.

“I was a hero,” he says.

“Me, too,” says my daughter. “We both were.”

I’m guest posting for my friends at High Calling today. To read the rest of the story, click here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: children, High Calling

Holding on to Santa

December 21, 2010 by Billy Coffey 24 Comments

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about my daughter and her love of books. Normally, this would be a great thing to a parent. In the age of X-Boxes and i-Pods, when everything is electronic and shiny and instantaneous, reading a plain old book can seem pretty dull to an eight-year-old. Not so for her. She reads more than I do.

All that reading included Snow Day, in which her father went ahead and wrote that Santa was not real and that flying reindeer and sleighs and Christmas magic was all a lie. The sudden realization that she’d either had or was about to read that chapter bonged into my head late one night, which resulted in me sneaking into her bedroom and mangling a copy of my own book. I wasn’t sure if she’d gotten that far into the novel or not, wasn’t sure if she still believed or didn’t, and wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it.

Now I know. Sort of.

It is Christmas week. My house is abuzz in last minute shopping, frantic wrapping, and the sugar-induced spasms of two small children who can barely contain themselves. They are both awash in the sheer beauty of Christmas. It’s the lights and the singing and the promise of two school-free weeks, the gifts that are on the way and the Happy Birthday Jesus.

Every year I fear the joy of Christmas will abandon me, that the pressures of having to buy and do will get transform me from Linus telling everyone about the real meaning of Christmas to Scrooge telling everyone to just leave him alone. But my kids keep me believing and my insides soft. Children can have that affect on you.

My son is six, that perfect age when the line between magic and fact is nonexistent. To him, Santa is just as real as anyone else. Flying reindeer? Of course! He’s seen a platypus, so why not flying reindeer? Platypuses are weird.

I’ve seen no apparent changes in my daughter’s behavior. She seems as excited as ever, and she’s mentioned Santa often. I think we’re in the clear, for this year anyway.

And it shouldn’t matter. I know this. Sooner or later, the truth will come out. Besides, Christmas isn’t really about Santa at all. It’s a fact my kids know deep down, evidenced by the carols they sang at the Christmas pageant at church and the birthday cake they’ve made for Jesus.

But I also know this—it does matter. For my daughter, it matters much. Her diabetes has forced her to grow up long before she should. She knows life isn’t fair and that this world can be just as cold as it can be warm. She is not the boisterous child her brother is. She ponders and thinks. Just like me.

I’ve seen her thinking a lot over the past weeks.

She’ll say it’s nothing or that she was just looking at the lights on the tree, but there’s more. With her, there’s always more.

Sometimes I think she read that chapter in Snow Day after all and she’s just figuring things out on her own. And that she doesn’t really believe in Santa anymore, but she wants to. She wants to hold on.

I hope she does.

Her letter to Santa sits here on my desk at work (I told her I’d mail it, and I couldn’t very well stash it at the house. I’ve learned my lesson). Included were the usual eight-year-old little girl’s wishes, along with some that drifted much more into God’s territory to grant than jolly old Saint Nick’s.

There is a P.S. at the end, though—

“I’ll have cookies for you on Christmas Eve and also a list of questions. I need you to fill them out please. I love you.”

I don’t know what those questions will be, but I guarantee you this: I’m bringing my A game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: children, Santa Claus

Unanswered prayers

November 12, 2010 by Billy Coffey 33 Comments

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

It is the custom of the Coffey house to gather just before bedtime for a period of scripture reading and prayer. The stories we share would be familiar to most—Noah and his flood, Moses and his staff, Jesus and his cross. Each are read and discussed and questioned at length. Nothing gets left out.
 
If this description of our religious home life conjures an image of four people huddled together in reverent silence, I’ll ask you to erase that picture from your mind. It is not like that. Very often one or both of the children will interrupt with sounds of various bodily functions. Or they will offer their own commentary about it not all being Eve’s fault or that sitting in a whale’s belly would stink or that Moses would have done much better if he would’ve had a lightsaber.
 
It is lite fare to be sure, a mix of holy and silly that ends with a firm foundation in the ways of God. My kids know what they believe, and they can defend it. These days, they must.
 
It is afterward, when the Bible is closed and hands are joined, that all silliness ends. We close our eyes and pray. Thanks comes first—for the good day and the sunshine and the mountains, for an absence of homework and an abundance of macaroni and cheese. Only after the thanks can the asking come. It’s always been like that with the kids. It’s as if children are born knowing how to pray and then slowly forget as they get older.
 
Chief among their asking every night for the past year has been healing for Ms. Pierce, a teacher at their school suffering through cancer. There have been days when her mention was brief—“God please help Ms. Pierce”—and days when it was much longer. Yet neither of my kids have wavered in their conviction. The faith of children overshadows the smallness of their bodies, like the oak in the acorn. They never doubted that God would make her cancer go away, even if everyone else did. Because God is bigger than sickness. Bigger than even the sunshine and the mountains. To them, miracles are a given and the hand of the Almighty rests upon us all.
 
Every night, they prayed.
 
Tonight, they did not.
 
There is silence in our home as I write this; the only sound is that of my pen sliding across a pad of paper. But if I listen closely I can still hear the quiet sobs of my daughter, who has for the last two hours refused to surrender her despair to sleep.
 
Ms. Pierce has passed on.
 
Hers was a quiet death, one that provided peace after a year of pain. For her family, this day is almost a release, the dropping of a burden too heavy for them to bear any longer. There are times when God delivers us from our mortal pains, and times when He delivers us through them. Ms. Pierce went through, and that was God’s holy and mysterious will.
 
But those words will not comfort my children. They are too young to understand such things. And as I sit here in the fringes of lamplight surrounded by this dark night, I cannot help but think that there are times—many times—when I believe I’m too young to understand them, too.
 
To my children, Ms. Pierce’s death means the miracle did not happen. That either God did not hear them or He did not care to listen. That they did not pray hard enough or believe hard enough or that they were bad in some way. I’ve talked with them, told them that wasn’t true. It isn’t working yet. There is wisdom that comes from the going and wisdom that comes from those who have gone, but much of our truth sprouts from the former.
 
I’m sure God seems distant to them now. It’s a terrifying feeling, one that feeds a pain they’ve been blessed to have not felt before. They will mourn as we all must mourn. They will struggle with doubt and the value of their prayers. They will wonder of God’s love.
 
And they, too, will find that He is indeed never distant. That He is in fact closer to them now than they’ve ever known. Each heart must be broken against the hardness of this world, broken and pieced together and then broken again, that His light may shine through the cracks and illumine the world.
 
They will know that one day.
 
But it will not be today.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: cancer, children, death, miracles, prayer

Vehicle cleaning: No children allowed

November 1, 2010 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

image courtesy of photobucket. com
image courtesy of photobucket. com

I will be honest and say that when it comes to a clean vehicle, I can be somewhat of a jerk. I have friends who believe that a dirty truck is a point of pride, that it implies someone who is rough-and-tumble and manly. Not me. I just think they’re lazy.

Which is why the truck had to be washed last night before any trick-or-treating could begin. It was a simple act that was complicated once my kids became involved, but one that became yet another Teachable Moment. For me, not the kids.

To read about it, hop on over to katdish’s site.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: children, chores, fun

Encouraging a young reader and epic dad fail

October 20, 2010 by Billy Coffey 27 Comments

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
When my daughter climbed onto my lap a few weeks ago and asked if she could read my novel, I said she absolutely could. There was nothing in those pages that could be considered inappropriate for eight-year-olds—no cussing, no sex, no murder. And as she’d already gone through just about every book on the shelf of her room, she had nothing to read.

For a week I watched her curled up on the sofa with brow furrowed. She was the perfect reader, the epitome of the audience every writer desires. She laughed much. Cried some. She pondered and asked questions and underlined her favorite parts.

And it was during all of that when I began thinking about how I was such a wonderful father, fostering in my child a love for words and books and stories. How I was expanding her mind and giving her proof that any dream could be attained with the right amount of work and faith. Yes, a wonderful father. Perfect but for my fallen nature.

Looking back, it seems appropriate that a few nights ago I would be brought back down to earth in such a sudden way. There is a great amount of danger in thinking too less of yourself, but the greater danger lies in thinking too much. Wonderful fathers do not dash the sense of magic and possibility that is inherent in their children. And yet that is exactly what I believe I’ve done.

It began late at night, in that dimness of mind when wakefulness and sleep melt into one another. I was settled in bed, eyes closed, when a thought that perhaps for days had been boring its way to the front of my thick head finally broke through.

It was the afterword. I had written about Santa Claus in the afterword.

About how he wasn’t real.

I threw the covers back and sat up. How could I be so stupid? How could I have forgotten that? Yes, every child must at some point be confronted with that horrible and inevitable truth. It is often the first baby steps on the road to adulthood. But this way? Having to read it in a book your father’s written? There, in black and white, told by the man who has told you over and over that people who don’t believe in Santa are wrong?

My mind seemed to fold in on itself. Men tend to think of problems in terms of solutions. How something went wrong and why doesn’t matter as long as it’s fixed. And I had to fix this. Now.

And that is why I did what just hours before I would have sworn was unthinkable, an act that was so vile and so contrary to everything I believed in that in the process of its commission I felt part savage and part Nazi:

I took my knife into my daughter’s bedroom, opened the copy of my book that lay on her nightstand, and very carefully cut out the afterword.

I set the book back on the nightstand exactly as I’d found it. My daughter, immersed in a sleep of innocence the likes of which I would never enjoy again, never stirred. The only thing that kept me from taking a shower to try and wash all the failure off was the fact that her belief was intact.

Back to bed. Settled into my pillow, covers over me. I said a prayer of both thanks and forgiveness and waited for God to tell me everything would be okay.

He didn’t tell me.

Because I shot up in bed again when another thought managed to finally puncture my thick brain.

Why do writers include things in an afterword?

Because they’ve mentioned them in the book itself.

I hadn’t just mentioned Santa’s imaginary existence in passing. I’d written an entire chapter about it.

Out of bed. Back to my daughter’s room. I looked at the placement of her bookmark.

She’d read that chapter about two days prior.

And that is where things stand as of now. She hasn’t mentioned Santa. I haven’t either. And she seems fine, has even begun a Christmas list.

But I wonder. I wonder what this Christmas will bring. I wonder if I’ll walk into her room one December night and find her in tears. And I wonder what I’ll say.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: children, parenting, reading, Santa Claus, Snow Day

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