There are times when despite my best efforts, the blank page taunts me.  There are times when the exercises, the prompts, and the other items that are aids fail me.  And they fail to assist in squeezing out a single word onto the page.  I have been suffering from this malady for awhile now.  Suffering from an inability to fulfill that which was put in me by my creator to do.

The taunts from the blank page, the evil one, and the cynical side of my nature are cacophonous in my cranium.  The stats from my website add to the discouragement.  I know that I need to be creating content on a daily or near daily basis to redeem the endeavor involved in setting up the space.  And the taunt of, 'All right, writer, no what' stings more than it should.  Maybe I allow it to sting more than it should.

The temptation to allow despair to enter into my spirit is strong.  The temptation to judge effort versus results is a powerful one.  The temptation to measure my lack by the success of others is by far the most challenging.  The effort to keep that last one at arm's length is a herculean task.  Some days its the only thing I can accomplish.  Some days I fail.  Some days the weight of it all knocks me down.

On those days, I know the most I can ask of myself is to clear the load and come back up.  I must confess on some of those days the best I can accomplish is to come back to my knees.  On those days, I force myself to remember the truths.  The truths that have governed my writing all along.

-Success is not the primary goal.  Merely redeeming my gifting my gifting is the primary goal.  Anything more is asking more than the sum of my calling.  Getting the words out of my head is all I am tasked with doing.
-Seeking to chronicle the human experience as I have and as I continue to experience is my job.
-Finding ways to share the sum total of this chronicling be they big or small is my job.
-Focus on providing the fairest assessment of the sum of all that is within me is the primary locus.
-If after seeking these truths earnestly I experience success or failure as the world measures it, is not relevant.  The purpose is altogether internal to my calling and seeking to merely redeem it is the challenge.  As they say results will vary, and if no one else ever values a word I write, it matters not.  The effort is where success if found.

We are all confronted on a daily basis by people who are in difficult, trying, and at the extreme end of the equation desperate circumstances.  We are barraged in media sources of all sorts and types and even more personal please for aid multiple times each and every day.  Everything from images of starving people in far flung places across the globe to please to help people here at home to providing assistance to charities that do excellent work and everything in between.  Even after doing all the due diligence in the world in terms of research, the equation still ends up with more need than resources.

And so I, like many others, are confronted with the thorny question, "How do I decide where to put my resources?"  My resources in this arena are very finite.  And so struggle with do I put all my resources into a single charity like the United Way or the Red Cross?  Do I split up my efforts between causes and suffer from that depressing feeling that I am spreading things too thin?  Do I focus on working exclusively through organizations, churches, and charities because of a personal lack of expertise?  How do I respond to the people I run into in my everyday life then?  Do I send them to the charities I support?  In doing that am I being stubborn and non-cooperative with God?

The truth is that I struggle with questions daily.  The truth is that I am rarely of one mind in an audience of one on this subject.  The truth is that I just don't know at any given time what the right course is here.

Like most people, I try to let me faith and my conscience be my guide.  I know I am accountable for truth as it has been revealed to me and as I understand it.  I know I am, like the rest of humanity, an imperfect vessel.  And I know that no decision made in a single moment can be a law for all actions and interactions on that subject.

And yet I understand, that my faith teaches a bias in favor of acting and not holding back.  Accepting that as truth, how best to put shoes on that is the question I am confronted with more often than not.  How do I discern the correct choices?  How do I know that I've made a good choice or a bad one.  What yardstick do I use to measure results?  Do I apply a yardstick at all?  If I don't why shouldn't I?  Thorns, thorns, thorns even when I guided with the best of intentions.

My most reliable guide is an event that happened to me decades ago.  I was a struggling college student trying to make college work, pay the bills, and still be able live and survive largely on my own with work study as my single source of income.  And $3.35 an hour didn't go any further then than minimum wage does today.

At one point I was sitting in the common area in the multi-purpose building of the college with two things in my hands.  One was a bill for college that was huge, (from my perspective at the time) and the other was my check for work study.  The latter was nowhere near enough to pay the former.  Time has erased the exact amounts from my memory.  I had no idea how to make it work.  I found myself at the wall without the resources to climb it.

At this point, a person sat down next to me.  I knew of him, but we didn't really know each other.  I will call him Bob, though let me assure that is not his name.  He asked me what was wrong.  I was tempted to say 'nothing' in that stubborn way I have.  For whatever reason though I didn't.  I shared it all with Bob.  It came out of me in a fearful despair filled torrent.  And to this day, I don't know why I did.  I shared that I was just trying to fulfill the call God placed on my life, but circumstances were getting in the way.

Bob listened to it all.  He didn't run screaming from me, like I thought any sane person should in that moment.  He calmed me down.  He told me to have faith, that things always work out when God is involved.  I had a hard time focusing on anything other than the net facts in front of me.  I knew you couldn't get blood from a turnip.  I knew a net shortfall of this kind could not be solved with platitudes.  I knew hard choices and hard times were ahead of me.

He told me not go anywhere and he would be right back.  He was true to his word.  He came back and he brought with him the funds to pay a large share of the college bill and when my work study check was cashed I had enough to complete paying the bill and have enough money left over to get me through until the next work study check came.  He just gave it to me no strings attached.  He told me to do what was right with it.  He firmly told me view it as a gift and not try to pay him back.  He just told me find a way in the future to pay this forward.  His last admonition was not to tell anyone that he did this or use his name in connection with it, if I did. 

This was the late 1980's and I had never heard the phrase about paying it forward before.  I did follow his requests to the letter.  I did what was right.  I did not try to pay him back, though more than once I serious thought about it.  Bob and I never spoke of that moment ever again.

That wasn't the only tough moment I had during that year.  It was the most trying though.  I seriously debated packing up that day before I ran into Bob that day.  The trouble was my lack of mobility.  I didn't have anywhere to go either. 

I remember this overwhelming relief that I was able to exit the land of despair stage left.  I also remember not understanding to pay it forward at the time.  My life had been so hand to mouth that having the means to meet all my needs and have anything left over was an anathema to me.

It was only years later that I was able to understand what he meant.  The chance to give a cup of water in service to my fellow man, because once my fellow man gave one to me is a gift that is precious beyond description to me.  Having someone be grace and mercy to me asking only that I go and do likewise someday was a powerful example.

I haven't always been able to live up to Bob's admonitions to me.  The fallen heart with it's cynicism and sarcasm make it difficult.  And memory is a short thing.  It is easy to forget grace and mercy imparted to us.  It is easy to think all that we are is the fruit of our labor, even when it is so rarely the case.

So here is what I do now...  I tend to help people as directly as I can.  In large measure, because that was Bob's example.  I give to some charitable organizations and my church.  Largely because I think Jesus would say I should do the former without ignoring the latter.  I am not perfect.  I fail more often I succeed, but at least I am trying.

I do believe it is in the struggle with this issue that we are defined.  Not in the way you might think.  The definition is that we are struggling to live up to the sense of grace and mercy as we understand it.  The struggle is a sign of a heart that is alive and a conscience that is wrestling with the issue.  That I believe is all we can reasonably ask of ourselves.

Anything more is asking too much of our finite minds and temporal bodies.  If we just seek to do only what the truth we understand and our circumstances provide for, we are at least in the right ballpark.  As time passes, truth will guide us more effectively.  As time passes and our hair goes from brown to gray to white to gone if we continue to struggle our hearts will redeem the admonition to be the hands and feet of the gospel.

The key to living in harmonious similitude and domestic tranquility is found in a single word; love.  And before I proceed to unpack that statement, let me clearly make the following caveats.

• In our culture, the love has been used, abused, tortured, and left with little functional meaning.
• Many people recoil from the word love, because of how its been used to paper over traumatic
  barbarity.
• Our culture has turned this word into some fickle fancy that more in common with last call and shocking inebriation than anything else.
• This word as we have chosen to define it, is typically used as a shield to cover the foulest expressions of the darkened heart.  Even in the church.  Any conversation that begins with,  'I am telling you this in love...', makes me want to duck and draw a weapon, because incoming
  gunfire is on the way.
• Love in practical everyday use, is little more than a feeling that accompanies a good meal, a chick flick, or a sappy smarmy trashy harlequin romance novel.

With all of these caveats having been granted and entered into evidence, my thesis still stands.  The problem is not with the thesis, but rather with our understanding of love.  And from what our popular culture intones about love, and what we respond back to the culture with, I have come to the conclusion that we are fundamentally ignorant of what love means.

Webster's definition illustrates the problem well. 

• Love- Noun:  Strong affection for another person; attraction based on sexual desire; affection or tenderness felt by lovers.

What I mean by love is defined best by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Corinthian Church. (I Corinthians 13:1-13 The text below is quoted from http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=I%20Corinthians%2013:1-13&version=NIV )

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor
others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always
perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

This text stands as the functional definition of love.  It stands in stark contrast our construct that golden calf we call love.  Our common view of doesn't scratch real love's surface.  Our construct for love is bereft of real love's content.  So much so, that if real love were intellectual property of someone, that someone should file suit against the construct and insist that the name be changed to something more accurate, like say 'good feeling' or 'fickle in fatuous feeling' or 'momentary sugar high following a good meal'.

By accepting our construct we short change ourselves for what we were intended to have.  I understand why we did it.  The construct requires little of us.  It is a malleable thing that we can fashion as best suits our mood.  If our feelings change, we can refashion love to suit our feelings.

From a programming perspective, I am sure of what we've done.  Someone for reasons of expediency, unreasonable managerial timelines, or pure mischief, went to the base class of love and gutted it.  They left behind only what suited their immediate need, and pushed it into production.  The change vastly simplified love and allowed extensibility of the code, so other programmers picked up the change and ran with it and used it ad nauseum.

Leaving us in the state we are in today.  It is not unlike the issue that confronted those that managed the BASIC programming language two decades ago when they confronted the GOTO command.  The command had been so overused, and so abused that it muddled code and made updating it, managing it, or upgrading it tedious, time consuming, and nearly impossible.  They had to start to downplay and deprecate the command so that the language was clearer, and easier to manage.  It was a painful transition for them, but they came out in a much better place.

We have to start doing the same thing.  We have start unraveling the misused base class, and start removing each instance of the construct from our code.  We have to start by restoring the original code and parameters of the base class.  We to remove all the fake code we have inserted along the way to make the base class suit our selfish, and dare I say, evil desires.  I understand it will render entire application programming interfaces, or APIs, useless and non-functional.  I do believe that is a good thing.

Only in doing so will we begin to see love what it was intended to be.  Only then will we see that love is not about feeling in and of itself.  Only then will we see that love is first and foremost about commitment and sacrifice.  Only then will we see that it is not and never will be a zero sum gain equation.  Only then will we see that peace and tranquility in our domestic affairs is the direct result of a love that costs us everything that we are, and ever hope to be.  Only then will we truly see ourselves as third in any domestic equation behind our creator, and our beloved.

Anything less is worthless tripe, salty that isn't salty, a lamp that doesn't give light, a compass that points to anything but north.  Anything less is fake,  phony, and fraudulent.  Anything less is not worthy to be called by the moniker of LOVE!


 

I received a nugget of constructive criticism from a dear friend last night regarding my writing.  They told me my penchant for using words like penchant was a problem.  I was told I needed to recognize the vocabulary and attention span limitations of the average reader of the English language and adjust my vocabulary usage and word choices accordingly.

My first response to this was to bristle indignantly.  Mentally I thought, "I have a vocabulary and I'm not afraid to use it."  I also thought, "If you don't understand the word, get a dictionary."  This was followed by much more self-righteous posturing and vainglorious moon howling on the subject entirely within the confines of my cranium.

Truthfully, I recoil from this piece of critique, for its not the first time its been imparted, like a vampire from a cross.  In part this is due to my love for the English language and all its words.  I love words like menagerie, fecund, and penchant.  At least to me, they speak louder and more clearly than other comparable words like cage, fertile , and choice.  The latter words seem flat, small, and bereft of meaning.

Consider these two sentences...

Bob's fertile imagination isolated him in a cage of his own making limiting his choices.

or 

Bob's fecund imagination was a menagerie of isolation that limited him due to his penchant for opting for it.

The second sentence with its different word choices and slightly different structure speaks more clearly and doesn't require two or more sentences to reach the same content and depth of meaning.

On some level though I understand the thrust of the critique.  There are some author's whose works are unreachable for the average reader today.  Even I struggle reading Hawthorne, Dickens, and Shakespeare at times.  The works of these three author's are giant achievements in literature.  For most readers though, their encounters with these works are far from consensual,  which leaves a more bitter aftertaste than would otherwise be the case.  The experience coloring their future reading for pleasure options to their own detriment.

I think it takes the average reader being confronted with a form of writing that invites them, challenges them to seek something better.  I think it takes the reader confronting something that they want to consume, but requires significant improvement in their reading skills and vocabulary to master for things to change.  I feel this way, because it happened to me.  I encountered several authors whose works were beyond my ability to grasp, but in reading them I wanted to go where the writer already was.  This happened for me with Tolkien, and CS  Lewis. 

Another example that was formative for me was William F Buckley.  He was one of my favorite personalities that lived during my lifetime.  He was part philosopher, part linguist, part author, and part political theorist.  Some laud him as the father of modern conservative thought.  In truth for me, I see him as a man out of time.  He was a brilliant intellect with full and complete mastery of the English language.  Truly, a renaissance man in a modern context if ever there was one.

I loved reading his essays.  Though I confess needing to have a dictionary on my lap to unlock a large portion of what he had to say.  I savored the experience.  I relished it.  I consumed his work with reckless abandon.  I saw decoding Buckley to be a challenge.  Somehow  deciphering him became a mission for me.  I can only claim to being partially successful.  In the age before VCRs and DVRs when he was on television, his rapid fire delivery of truth wrapped in a language that was only partially common parlance, I missed a lot.  It was a sensationally delicious experience nonetheless.

This is what I see as the challenge to the modern linguist and writer.  The goal is to challenge the average reader away from essays written at a fourth grade level with a length timed to be read in the time it takes for an average bowel evacuation.  There are those that contend this challenge is too lofty.  They claim that no amount of perspicacity can reach this perch.

I fear they are correct.  I fear the gulf to be too wide to bridge.  I fear the glitzy garbage the average reader consumes is too attractive to draw them away.  The toxic concoction of fetid pabulum too sweet for them to want the challenge of reaching for a more challenging form of our language and literature.

The unlikeliness however of success does not mean we should not try.  Most tasks seem insurmountable at the outset.  Who would have thought a rag tag band of militia that were poorly equipped, poorly trained, and lacking all discipline could have defeated the greatest land army of its time in the British?  Who would have thought the undefeated Emperor of France in Napoleon could have been crushed and driven into exile?  Who would have thought the Soviet Empire possible of collapse and subsequently Germany reunified?

Some would say I am engaging in a bit of hyperbole by using those examples.  I however do not.  I see the task ahead as nothing short of a titanic struggle to rescue the core of the linguistic heritage that has been graciously bequeathed to us by countless proceeding generations.  It is an amazing gift we have been given.  The price of amazing gifts is an ennobling sense of responsibility and accountability.  It requires no less than surpassing conservatorship from us all.

It takes us all to seek better.  We need to seek better from what we read and what we write.  We need to build a bridge across the gulf that separates us from where we are and where we should be, and where inexorably we should be drawn.  So let us begin.

There is an odd thing with which I struggle.  It is an interpersonal communication struggle.  This happens most often around a narrow cluster of holidays.  Chief among them are Memorial day, Independence day, and Veterans day.  This usually doesn't happen in connection with complete strangers though.  Mostly this attributable to the fact that the person has to know I served in the military.  It happens at cook-outs, carry-in meals, and lately on Facebook.  It is impossible to create a Venn diagram based on the location aspect of this, trust me, I've tried.

When someone comes up to me, or singles me out in a crowd and thanks me for my service in the Navy and then calls me a veteran, I really struggle.  I assure you that I am a man of many words, but this event never fails to render me absolutely speechless.  My mind races vainly for the right thing to say, and usually locks up hitting a blue screen with a vague Microsoft fatal error warning.  Then after a safe mode reboot, it continues to flounder for the right words for awhile.  It usually ends up hitting the default, 'nod knowingly and say thanks politely' response.  I try to do this as graciously as I can without looking like a complete idiot..  I am fairly sure I fail at this about half the time.

You see, its ok to say those words I suppose.  They happen to be true.  And I suppose its good that in our narcissistic and materialistic culture that people take a moment to think of something other than themselves.  And I suppose its a good thing that people take a moment to think of the treasured history of selfless sacrifice in disgusting hell holes the world over.  But why in holy hell are you thanking me for crying out loud.

There are men and women much more deserving of this recognition, both living and dead.  My grandfather and great uncles are an excellent examples of this.  They served at great cost to themselves in World War Two.  My grandfather in the army served in India and Burma where he saw combat.  One of my great uncles served also in the army in the Aleutian Islands and saw combat there.  My other great uncle served in the Airborne and saw combat in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany.

In my view, those men exemplify what Webster means for the definition of the word Veteran.  Those men left a part of themselves all across this globe.  There are those that would ascribe their service to advancing the cause of liberty, but in having talked to them, I found their immediate motivations to be more earthy.  They fought to survive each and every day.  And at the end of the day if their efforts and sacrifices advanced liberty so much the better. Those are the type of men that deserve to be thanked.

When I compare my service to theirs, which I rarely do, mine is trivial in comparison.  Yes I served on a submarine.  Yes I was qualified in submarines, and earned my 'dolphins' the hard way.  Yes I graduated at the top of my class from the second hardest training pipeline the modern navy possesses.  I became a part of that happy one third that made it through training to my final duty station.  Yes I saw the coupe in the Soviet Union from the tip of the strategic deterrence spear on the USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN 640 at the passive broadband station.

But I didn't fight in Normandy, jump on St. Mere E'glise, or fight the German army in the hedge rows of the Norman countryside.  I did not survive being trapped at Bastogne during the Battle of Bulge.  I don't have a stack of purple hearts and campaign service ribbons.  I didn't see my unit mauled by enemy action and get reconstituted time and again.

Men of that caliber and that composition deserve the accolades.  They deserve the gratitude you bestow upon me.  They didn't get tickertape parades.  They didn't get lavished with praise as was their right.  They came home, resumed their lives, worked hard, and raised their families.  The generations that have come to be as a result of their sacrifice owes a debt they can never fully repay to men like this.

Recently, though I have found a palliative remedy for this.  When I am thanked, I have started accepting it on their behalf.  Mentally, I am ascribing it to the account it properly belongs in.  This is my mental nod to the greatest men I have ever known. 

It has made all the difference.

Our age has a fundamental problem with the question of value.  Given our general materialistic proclivity, we tend to adopt a, "its value is indicated by what a person will pay for it", perspective.  This is flawed but understandable.  We use the one measuring stick by which we allow all things in our lives to be evaluated, so why wouldn't we apply it to value.

The problem is that we then conflate price with value.  We then live in a world of depreciating value.  All that we have is worth less each day we exist.  It is a depressing method of determining worth and by extension value.  Ultimately we arrive at a place where all that we possess is bereft of value, and is worthless.

The materialistic worldview then tells us to go and obtain more things of greater worth/price.  It then becomes a vicious cycle that always ends in the same place, bankruptcy.  Not in that legal proceeding sense of of the word, but in that place where all we have and all we ever hope to have is of no worth, no value.

As if this cycle weren't pernicious enough, it becomes even more vexing and dangerous when we apply this logic to people, or even ourselves.  When we apply value to people by the yardstick of price, we disregard all other factors that work into this equation.  And we disregard the intrinsic value of the person.  We fail to regard the work product of the divine appropriately.  We fail to see into the eyes of those we value inappropriately the face of the creator looking back at us.

PSALMS 139: 13-15  
        For you created my inmost being;
        you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
        I praise you because 
        I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
        your works are wonderful,
        I know that full well.
        My frame was not hidden from you
        when I was made in the secret place,
        when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
            (New International Version quoted from Bible Gateway:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20139&version=NIV)

The hand of the Almighty crafts each and every single one of us.  And that crafting is missed in the price equals value method of determining worth.  It misses that the manual laborer is of the same value, as the CEO, as the politician, as the doctor, as the lawyer.  It seeks to value only price and ignore all else.  It approaches life from the motto "if it costs more it must be better."  And we embrace this equation at our peril.

We need to shift away from this method.  We need to see that the barista that gets our morning coffee.  The waitress that takes our lunch order.  The teacher that educates our children.  All are at least equal to our own worth.  We need to see value as intrinsic to the person.  We to SEE them as they are see by our GOD.  Their value is determined and derived by their creator.

This means that they are deserving of our respect.  They are deserving of a dignity not defined by the zeroes in a bank account or their hourly wage.  It means more than a grudging deference to what they can do for us.  It means seeing them as God sees them.  It means valuing them with the distinct worth that God places on them.  It means seeing that God created something that he called Good.  It means grasping that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made.  And in His eyes we all live, thrive, and survive.