thank you, red dog

All three kids lounge in the stroller, and Nelly, the black, curly-haired, shedding, food-stealing, child-loving, sixty pound Aussiedoodle, trots ahead down the logging road skirting the edge of town, keeping us safe from unknown smells as we search for a garage sale.

From across a field comes a stray dog, meeting us at the side of the road. It has the build of a lab, hair of a retriever, and color of an Irish setter. Its tail is bobbed, and since that’s uncommon for the breeds mostly likely in its pedigree, we assume it was the result of an accident. But not a recent one. The dog is healthy, friendly, and collared, though without tags. He and Nelly give each other the obligatory hind-quarters sniff, and as we continue our walk, the new dog follows along.

I look back across the field the dog has come from and see no one. I hear no voices calling, no whistles as we inadvertently lead the dog away. For all we know the dog is returning home, not leaving it.

Were it not for the obvious difference in breeding, this dog could be Nelly’s brother. They have the same I’m-not-with-those-people-but-I’ll-never-leave-them gait, walking ten or twelve yards ahead of us, always choosing to turn the wrong way at intersections and having to be called back, always appearing on the verge of abandonment, and yet, when called, always veering to the correct course.

And every time we come to one of those intersections and it looks as if the new dog will leave us, the kids call out, “Nelly! Red Dog! Come back!” And they do.

The strange part is that each time “Red Dog” comes back, I’m relieved.

Its strange because I used to not like dogs. It's strange because I never had a dog when I was a child, because as an adult I used to think them dirty, and a nuisance, and -- in my days of hard-hearted pragmatism -- a waste of resources, financial and otherwise. In short, I did not think dogs worth loving.

My wife got Nelly as a puppy not long before I met her. "The Dog," as I still often refer to Nelly, was nothing more than baggage brought into my marriage. But over time I got used to her, and as I got used to her I began to train her, and as I trained her she began to love me, and as she loved me I began to love her.

Should I be ashamed that she had to love me first?

When we finally find the garage sale we’ve been searching for, my wife looks over the merchandise while I stay near the street with the stroller and the dogs, and it’s now that Red Dog shows me that his love is not simply wanderlust, but genuine, uninhibited, and unconditional affection. He presses his long-haired bulk against my legs and twists his face up into my hands, licking my fingers. Nelly, jealous of this attention, is not a licker, and for the first time in my life I wish she was. I wasn’t ready before. I would’ve pulled my hands away and washed them before. But apparently I’m now ready to accept this love, though I had no idea I was able until this moment. I knew I was slowly developing a stronger affection for dogs in general, but this is different, stronger.

I don’t want this dog to leave. I’m going to miss this dog.

My wife makes a few small purchases for the kids, and on we go, circling back through town toward home. Red Dog “leads” the way, Nelly’s wingman. And I know the closer we get to home, the sooner we will have to part with Red Dog. We stroll into our front yard, and as the children climb from the stroller, Red Dog joins Nelly in sniffing the grass and the children’s toys and the front porch, and I know if I were to hold the front door open for him, he would follow us inside.

But of course, I don’t. We all go inside, leaving Red Dog to sniff around the junipers lining the front walk. And the next time we look outside, he’s gone.

I haven’t seen him since.

Again, should I feel ashamed for taking years to offer Nelly the same love I offered so immediately to Red Dog? Granted, Nelly was not only high-energy as a pup, but disobedient. But without my struggles with Nelly, could I have loved Red Dog? Probably not. And without Red Dog, would I now fully appreciate Nelly’s love for me? Probably not.

But the greater question is this: Did my lack of love for Nelly at the beginning have any correlation with my ability to love people? Perhaps. As Solomon says in Proverbs 12:10, “A righteous man has regard for the life of his animal, / But even the compassion of the wicked is cruel.” Does Nelly lick up the crumbs from my table in more ways than one?

Whether or not there really is a correlation, I can say that my slow and painful flight from steely-eyed pragmatism has perfectly coincided with my growing love for dogs. And, I hope, for people. But, as I've come to realize, my love for other people is not something I can objectively judge, as is my love for dogs. I can only recognize such love by its fruit. And, in this fallen world, people don't always return the love they’ve been given.

Dogs, however, usually do.

highway to heaven

We filled up with cheap gas, then pulled forward to park near the main entrance of the travel center, two-thirds of the way between Portland and our home in the northeast-corner of the state. The sun was setting, and the McDonalds and Subway restaurants inside had just finished the dinner rush. We ushered our children through the glass doors and made our way through isles of cell-phone accessories, car parts, salty-snacks, Confederate flag ball caps, audio-books, DVDs, stuffed animals, shot-glasses protruding from the mouths of rattlesnakes, and T-shirts that said “Mess with me and you mess with the whole trailer park.” My wife took the baby into the women’s room, and I took the other two, both of them shuffling under my outstretched arm as I held open the men’s room door.

Like the more traditional greasy-spoons with trailer-filled tarmacs, the ubiquitous travel-center still caters to truckers, but you’ll also find Greyhound buses and plenty of all-American SUVs and minivans. The public restrooms – which are the one spot in the travel center everyone is sure to visit – is therefore one of the last remaining places offering a true cross-section of American society at a glance. Upper-middle-class suburbanites mingle with blue-collar bus riders and rough-and-tumble long-haul truckers. And it’s all smiles and nods and taking turns. The interstate travel-center restroom is the last place in America where all people are truly equal.

As my children took turns on the potty, an automated message came over the PA system: “Shower customer number…one-hundred ten, your shower is ready. Please proceed to shower number…nine.” By the time my children were finished, the music overhead had been interrupted by two more calls for shower customers. We ushered out of the stall, washed everyone’s hands, and turned for the exit.

There, holding the door, was the ultimate stereotype of the long-haul trucker. Over six-feet tall. White handle-bar mustache. Tank-top with ragged seams. Bulging biceps. Thirty-year-old tattoos turned blue-green with age. He looked down at my children with a smile. I gave him a smile and a nod. Yes, they are cute, aren’t they.

But as we shuffled past him, back into the aisles of travel convenience and sorry-I-missed-your-birthday-again kitsch, I wondered if the trucker’s smile meant something different. After all, what does a tough guy like him care for the cuteness of small children? Maybe he admired their comparative innocence. Or perhaps (now the writer in me was coming out) seeing my children brought back memories of his own past, an earlier time when he was a family man, before the children grew old enough to resent him and the wife grew tired of never seeing him. Maybe that look in his eyes, that tightness in his smile, was a recognition of what he had lost, or what he had never had, or what he had knowingly given up.

We led our children outside, slid open the minivan door, and began the arduous process of strapping everyone into their child-seats. And I realized it was entirely possible the trucker in the bathroom had a loving wife waiting for him at home, only a few hours away, and seeing my children reminded him of his own grandchildren, whom he saw regularly, pockets filled with small gifts. Maybe he was even a faithful follower of Jesus, having turned from the life depicted on his tattoos, using his image to reach the unreachable for the Kingdom of God.

Or maybe I needed to embrace the inconceivable. Maybe he wasn’t a trucker at all. Maybe he was a man of more-than-moderate means on a family vacation, waiting for his wife of thirty years to emerge from the restroom, waiting to link up with the grandchildren in the parking lot. Maybe he was the very embodiment of the American cross-section, the incarnation of the essence of the modern travel center.

As we pulled away from the parking lot and peeled off toward the interstate, accelerating eastward, I realized it was entirely possible that the man was climbing into an SUV for the return trip to his house in suburban Portland. After all, the travel center had an entire aisle of Confederate flag and trailer-park themed merchandise even though most truckers today make too much money to be “trailer trash,” even though the culture of the Northwest is almost  the polar opposite of  that found in the Southland. Even in my town of 500, in my county of 7000, I can operate a smart phone on a  3G network, and teenagers look just the same as they do in the inner city, whether Seattle or Atlanta.

How often have I been judged to be a successful, connected, wired, got-it-together professional simply because of my haircut, glasses and polo shirts, when in fact I am hardly any of those things? Why assume I’m a follower of Jesus just because I shave regularly and don’t use swear words? Why did I assume the man in the bathroom was a pagan just because he was big, wore a tank-top, had tattoos, and happened to be at a truck-stop? If the world is full of clean-cut men and women worshipping Mammon, why can’t it also be filled with bikers, rednecks, and truckers pursuing Christ?

Imagine the glory of such a man being redeemed by Jesus despite his appearance. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, even though, odds are, he climbed into the cab of a semi and thundered off toward the state line.

five

My wife and I have been married for five years as of Saturday. Living were we live (a county with only 7000 people), and being in our particular stage of life (three children ages four and under), and grandma having just started a new job on the other side of the state (the only kind of babysitting we can afford), we weren’t able to do anything particularly “memorable.” No bed-and-breakfast, no cruise, not even dinner-and-a-movie.

And yet, I’ll never forget this anniversary.

I think, for many modern couples, love requires context. And that context is often nothing more than a culmination of discrete experiences, the sum of all the “good times” minus the sum of all the “bad times.” So long as the bottom line is in the black (i.e. the “good times” outweigh the “bad times”), the relationship continues, and if in the red, it doesn’t. No, people usually don’t create spreadsheets that track the net effect of their experiences as a couple. Usually it just happens in the background, subconsciously, and all that rises to the surface are vague feelings: the spark is gone, you aren’t who you used to be, this isn’t working anymore.

Perhaps we can say for many modern couples – especially American couples – the context for love is really just a collection of vacations and date-nights and socio-economic milestones such as purchasing a first home. Or the lack thereof.

My wife and I don’t have such a context. I can count on one hand the number of true vacations we’ve had, and the number of date-nights isn’t much better (and therefore all the more precious). For us, money, travel and high-entertainment have been experienced too seldom to define our relationship. And in this economy, you can forget all about the socio-economic milestones.

All we really have is what we are. And “we are what we do when it counts,” someone wise once said. Which is why, even though our anniversary was on July 28, I keep thinking about something that took place in the middle of March.

Tax season was in full swing, which meant 60-hour work weeks. The winter had been long and wet, and the chill was still in our bones. And the kids were sick. Eventually all three kids would be taken to the ER, two would be admitted and diagnosed with what was basically pneumonia, and one of them would spend the night. But in the few days leading up to that hospital visit we did all we could to treat them at home.

Around three in the morning, my oldest (not yet four at the time) woke with a tight cough, the kind that usually works up her gag reflex and causes her to vomit up copious amounts of phlegm. I heard that tell-tale cough over the baby-monitor and lost little time slipping into the children’s bedroom and scooping my daughter out of bed. A nebulizer was already waiting in the living room. I strapped the mask to my daughter’s face, leaned back across the loveseat, and pulled her close.

There I sat. Nebulizer hum-rattling. Daughter curled up against my chest with a clear plastic tube snaking up to her mouth, steaming. The only light in the house came from the open bathroom door, just enough to see. And suddenly I wasn’t sleepy anymore. I felt in tune with everything in the house: the purr of the nebulizer, the shadows from the bathroom light, the boys sleeping unawares, the job I was to return to in the morning, my wife stirring in her sleep. It was a moment of objective calm. Everything at peace. Nothing taken for granted. Giving thanks for everything. Feeling the voice of God saying, “At this moment, however brief, you are fully (finally) reflecting My image, and I am illuminated.”

And it was during that moment of peace when my wife realized I was no longer beside her in bed. The buzz of the nebulizer drowned the squeak of the bedroom door and the squeak of the floorboards, and suddenly she was in the corner of my eye. Her curls fell in the wrong places, and there was still sleep behind her glasses, but the look on her face was a Mona Lisa smile. Concern giving way to peace.

And for that moment, as she stood on the living room rug watching, I stepped outside of time. I’ve always known how wonderful my wife is, but for that moment I could see it from the outside. I “realized” (though I already knew) how beautiful she was, how wonderful a mother she was, how much she loved me. I knew all these things well, and yet I found myself surprised, as if, only moments before, everything she was had been taken from me, tied up in a box, and reopened on the living room rug.

And after I assured her everything was fine and she returned to bed, I sat there wondering if Jesus – fully God and fully man – ever had the same revelations about His Bride, the Church. If I, a sinful man, can love my wife so (though she deserves more), then surely He, being perfect, can be perpetually and joyfully surprised at the loveliness of his Bride. Perhaps every Sunday morning He experiences this.

And if the Church, being unfaithful and often unlovely (though Christ makes her lovely whenever He is present) can be worthy of such adoration, how much more my wife, who is always faithful and always lovely?

But it seems such revelations of adoration only come in the eyes of certain storms. I would almost wish for more storms, if only for more opportunities to express such adoration to her. But I don’t want my children to catch pneumonia just so I can wax romantic. After all, as I said before, I always know how wonderful she is. It’s just that, sometimes, most times, I need a heightened experience to properly express my love.

Perhaps next year we can just go on a cruise.

snackin' on faith

I unzip my Bible case for a lunch-time reading in my basement office. A Goldfish cracker falls free and rests on my desk. No denying I was at church the previous day with my children. 

The question is this: can I be faulted for immediately thinking “Ixoye?” Feeding the five thousand? Peter and the temple tax? Is there a global interdenominational commission against corniness (GICAC, pronounced: guy-kak)? I swear it’s an automatic response, not a deliberate attempt to gain an evangelical psycho-pop book deal (Snacking on Faith: Finding God in everything from Twizzlers to Goldfish Crackers, Zondervan, 2012).

Yet, that little orange-yellow fish on my desk sends me on a spiritual stream-of-consciousness worthy of James Joyce. Children, fish, children fed, Jesus feeding his flock, His flock becoming fishers of men. Doing it justice would be the kind of trick only someone like Ann Voskamp could pull off, exploding the mundane until it fills the space between Earth and Heaven.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have written “Kubla Khan” based on an opium dream, which sounds unlikely to those familiar with it, considering the work’s high merits. Yet, the man was steeped in poetry, in the works of the greatest poetic minds both past and contemporaneous. Is it any wonder that someone so filled to bursting with classically poetic sensibilities can spatter his writing desk with “Kubla Khan” by merely pricking his finger with a lancet?

I am not Coleridge (thank the Lord). And unfortunately, I am not so filled with Scripture that it sloshes onto the rug when I’m shaken (though I strive for it, and perhaps I may be granted the glory before I die). However, two particular fish-related passages in Matthew -- Peter paying the temple tax with a coin from a fish, and Jesus telling the Apostles to cast their nets on the other side of the boat -- are not only recent readings, but also the subject of much recent meditation and journaling (and probably future blog posts). So perhaps it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to me that the stale Goldfish Cracker I’m now tossing into the trash throws me into contemplations of Christ.

Had it been an M&M, I probably would’ve just eaten it and gone back to work.

Geek vs. Nerd, episode 1

Some people think there's a fine line between "nerd" and "geek." Yes, sometimes the line is narrow, even microscopic, but for me it's not easily crossed. There is no demilitarized zone between them (another pesky military metaphor), no colorfully overlapped Venn diagram. It's more like an emergency changing of clothes, sometimes with body hair caught in the zippers.

The following is an example of the daily conflict between the two halves of my brain (yes, it's drawn on Post-It Notes):

the beginning

I suppose a good place to start this blog would be the source of the title.

I like words. Sometimes my words get in the way of my ideas. When that happens, I write a poem to put everything in its place, like soldiers at parade rest. And sometimes the ideas get in the way of the words, and I write in prose, which is more like soldiers in a live-fire exercise. (I also believe military metaphors are a necessary evil, and someday I'll learn to think without them.)

Anyway, you'll soon learn that this blog has nothing to do with rollercoasters. The title is taken from the following poem -- the result of words getting in the way of an idea.



Lifting Sodom

Then he said, “Oh may the Lord not be angry,

and I shall speak only this once;

suppose ten are found there?” And He said,

“I will not destroy it on account of the ten.”

—    Genesis 18:32, NASB

I would love the poor and downcast

with upside-down rollercoaster joy,

split the cicada-shell skins

of all financial institutions,

command every phone, pad and pod

to clap and sing hosannas

at the sidewalk-slap of Christ’s sandals.

Yet in my fluorescent-flickered office

I am a scientific wonder,

lacking mass and velocity

yet malleable and chronometric,

knowing I may produce no light

but the grindstone friction spark

of my family’s sanctification.

But give me a personal Abraham

to bargain with the Lord of Hosts,

and Christ will multiply my righteousness

with His thumb upon the scale,

lifting Sodom toward New Jerusalem,

curing the salt-pillar legacy of Lot

with grace beyond brimstone and angels.