a secret

Renee had made chili for dinner before heading out for the evening. I was on my way home, but a couple of hours later than normal when she called from her cell phone to tell me she had already left with Ayda, and left the chili on the stove for the rest of us.

I was relieved and pleased to hear her say that Katie and Hannah, our oldest girls, were home and had no plans for the evening – an increasingly rare occurrence. I was relieved because I knew they would be helpful with the other kids. I was pleased because it seems I can never get enough time with those two any more.

Dinner became one of those simple, Dad-doesn’t-care meals. Katie scooped up bowls of chili for everyone and that was it. The side dishes were cheese and sour-cream, and I grabbed a bag of tortilla chips.

Ethan complained and pouted about the menu, so I pushed and prodded and threatened the 4-year-old for 30 minutes to get him to swallow half a bowl. When he tried to talk me into letting him eat on the deck with the other kids, who had already inhaled their single-course meal and moved on, I shut him down, knowing he would be out the door no more than a step before his promise to eat it all would be forgotten.

I was overjoyed to find Katie and Hannah in a lingering mood. School is out. Their projects for youth-group camp scholarships were finished. They had no plans with friends, and their occasionally-irritating siblings had scattered.

For an hour or so, we just sat there and talked about nothing in particular and everything on our minds, as I coaxed Ethan along one spoonful at a time. We laughed and teased and shared insignificant stories of minor victories and slight disappointments while the sky, seen through the patio doors behind Katie’s back, turned from bright yellow to burnt orange to gray.

When Ethan was finally near the bottom of the bowl, he had the nerve to ask if he could have ice cream. Being the great father that I am, I assured him there was no way he was getting dessert . . . unless he finished his dinner, and only if there was enough for me, too. He picked up the pace and I got up to check the freezer.

It’s hard to keep ice cream in a house with 12 people. Not a trace of that treat could be found in our home that night.

Lucky for us, though, Renee has an appreciation for Oreos, with double stuff, and has developed skills in hiding them from short eyes. The package on top of the fridge was about two-thirds vacant, but that was plenty full for those of us in the room.

“Ethan, there is no ice cream. Do you want some Oreos?”

“Yes!” (Insert here: little boy with giant brown eyes and a mouth full of smiling teeth.)

I held out the package for him to take a couple. He grabbed them and ran to the open patio door.

“Hey guys,” he yelled into the near-darkness of our back yard before we could interrupt him.

“No, Ethan!”, Katie and I both yelled, attempting to quiet him before he alerted the herd, but alas . . .

“We got Oreooooos!”

“No, Ethan! It’s a secret!”

Still facing the backyard, Ethan continued, “It’s a seeeecreeeet!”

Somehow, I was still able to get more than my fair share of Oreos before being trampled by the herd in a cloud of black cookie dust.

Being the Dad has its benefits, I guess. Most of the benefits are unrelated to what we eat, though. Most of the benefits are contained in that two-letter word: We. That’s the real secret.

boys

The sunset was amazing last night, not just for the beauty of it, but for the way we spent the time as the day came to a close.

Leaning against the railing at the highest spot on the skate park in Loveland, at the center point between the concrete bowls and the wood and steel ramps, I had a great view of everything around me. The skies were wonderfully clear – a rare event for that time of day this spring. As far as I could see in any direction, not a single cloud could be found impeding my view of the universe.

Looking west, I was overwhelmed by the golden halo spread for fifty miles in each direction across the peaks of the front range of the Rockies, with Longs Peak standing so tall and clear it seemed I could almost reach out and grab a handful of snow from the drifts lingering on its peak.

The boys, William (12), Ben (10), Noah (8), and Ethan (4), and I had emerged an hour earlier from the popcorn-, soda-, licorice-, and sour-gummy-worm-fueled, green afterglow of The Incredible Hulk with a hankering for some muscle flexing. In anticipation of that need, Ethan and I had filled the trunk with skates, skateboards, helmets and pads before we picked up the other boys from Grandma’s house to head for the theater.

Noah is decent on the Heely’s, and Ethan is an imaginary expert on the Spiderman board he received as a gift from Ben a few weeks ago, but Will is truly impressive on a skateboard, and Ben’s gymnastics lessons have definitely given him an unusual level of coordination on his aggressive skates in the bowls. My boys consistently impress me with their skills, courage and behavior.

Ben was reluctant to drop-in into the 9-foot concrete bowl while a crowd of kids a little younger than him stood around spurring him on. I was proud that he didn’t succumb to the peer pressure, but after they had scattered and we were all alone on the rim of that bowl, I whispered, “I think you can do it, if you want to try.”

He slowly stepped to the edge, looked down, placed the first two wheels of his right skate over the edge of the coping, bent his knees, and leaned into that hole. Less than two seconds later, he was popping out of the opposite rim with a big grin on his face, and I’m pretty sure my grin was even bigger.

Years ago, when Will first showed a sincere interest in skating, I warned him that if his behavior ever reflected that of the majority of kids who tend to frequent skate parks, with their profanity and general disrespect for everybody and everything, including gravity, his skating career would be short.

With the help of committed volunteers at a local, indoor, Christian-sponsored, skate park, Will’s skills and character have grown by leaps and bounds. When we go to a public park, Will keeps his mouth shut and lets his skating speak for him. I like to watch him. He is seldom distracted by the surrounding tomfoolery, and he is truly fun to watch.

Noah hasn’t developed into much of a skater, yet, but he is also fun to watch as he easily befriends the other kids his age who are hanging around. He is not intimidated by them, but he understands the look in my eyes from across the park, and quickly separates from the crowd to hang-out by me when I silently communicate that I’m a little uncomfortable with the attitudes of his new buddies.

The day before, we had a boys’ haircut party in the garage. I got my clippers out and gave three of them the only haircut I know how to give: fuzzy. Noah wanted to be a little more radical, though. He wanted to be bald. So after I clipped him down to the nubs, I got my razor and shaved him clean. It’s weird. Later, he said to me, “Dad, I can’t believe you made me bald! Now, I look like an idiot!”, and then he laughed so hard he cried, and I laughed right along with him.

A lot of life will happen between now and the time my boys will be watching their own sons at a skate park, or something like it, somewhere in the world. I don’t know what life will bring to them in that time, or what God has in store for them.

I’m sure it won’t always be great behavior, a lack of injuries, and beautiful sunsets.

Today, though – and today is all I’ll ever really have – I’m basking in the glow of days well-lived on the edges of ramps and bowls with helmets and pads and all things just and beautiful.

Today, I’m just glad to be here with these boys. Today, I’m just glad they’re mine … at least for a little while.

shade

The evenings are cool at this time of year in Colorado. The newness of Spring and the long days generate an overwhelming impulse to be outside. We are spending a lot of time in parks this month.

We even made a mid-week, impulsive, evening trip to Niwot to have pizza and gourmet ice cream on the patio at a little place called Lefty’s. It’s next door to the Niwot Inn where Renee and I have spent a couple of romantic weekends.

With the kids tagging along, there’s a little less romance and a little more noise, but the patio at Lefty’s still engenders dreams and visions and hope, not to mention good pizza and a game of chess. The bonus for this trip was the lightning storm to the east, as we drove back home, providing an early and awesome fireworks display like only heaven can produce.

Today, at the park for lunch with friends, the shade was almost too cool for t-shirts and the full-on sun was almost too warm for t-shirts, like going from mid-August heat into an air-conditioned living room.

After cleaning out the garage tonight, and topping off the fluid levels on the Pratt-family buses, we sat in the grass on the front lawn while the kids played basketball and skated and drew pictures of mom and dad with scary teeth and strange eyes.

The metaphorical contrast of the heat and shade seemed fitting as we struggled to cope with a waning weekend and kids laughing and playing while creating a constant wake of new work to be done. The work and weariness it brings can be sweltering to the soul, bringing a meltdown in minutes, unless the convenience of cool shade under the hard-to-hold joys and beauties of kids at play can be sustained.

The contrast is keen, turning on a dime, like a line across a page separating the real from the imaginary.

Makes me wonder how much of my time I waste seeing the negative and focusing on the hardship.  The balance is fragile, like seeking to sustain the perfect temperature.

Kids at play can either invoke disdain for the messes they’re making of themselves and their surroundings and the work required to restore order, or the highlights of God’s gifts – laughter and creativity from souls too young to be jaded and stifled.

These are the contrasts dancing through my brain on cool spring afternoons, and evenings when the breezes are too cool to leave the windows open after tucking the kids into bed with a kiss and a prayer.

Lord, thanks for Ethan. He’s a super-hero. Lord, thanks for Ellie. She’s beautiful. Lord, thanks for Noah. He’s Noah. Lord, thanks for Ben. He really wants to spend time with me. Lord, thanks for Meghan. Her smile oozes your joy. Lord, thanks for Ayda. She sparkles. Lord, thanks for Will. Is his voice really changing? Lord, thanks for Hannah. Help her sore fingers find the right chords for that latest song. Lord, thanks for Madeline. She starts dance classes this week. Lord, thanks for Katie. I want to be her friend. Lord, thanks for Renee. Oh God, thanks for Renee!

And thanks, Lord, for the cool of shade, and for the warmth of the sun which makes me appreciate the shade all the more.

confusion of face

My friends, Tim and Krysten, are in the middle of a two-year stint teaching in Kuwait. In response to previous posts, “inconceivable” and “sand castles“, Tim had the following questions and comments:

With all this wack Christianity stuff, I guess we make the same mistake my students make with almost every piece of literature we read. They fail to recognize the figurative meaning, or worse yet, they convert the figurative into literal. So religion in general is like my less-than-bright students: it takes symbols and makes them literal…But it’s weird. I think all humans at least subconsciously understand all kinds of symbols…so what’s the deal? Is it that we’re all just morons? Or is it that it’s easier to stay at surface level. Yep, that’s it. My students suck at seeing figurative meaning because they don’t want to exercise their higher level thinking skills. They also care too much about their own lives to put themselves in a book and truly empathize with a character… It’s when we neglect the figurative that everything in Christianity gets really weird. But still, why do all the symbols of Christianity seem so flippin’ esoteric and require all kinds of explanation? They shouldn’t, right? They’re intrinsic enough to the human spirit, are they not? You tell me…

My opinion:

As I thought about this, my mind flashed back to a phrase: “confusion of face”. It took me a little while to figure out the source, but eventually I remembered an essay of that title by Frederick Buechner, included in his collection called The Hungering Dark.

Buechner quotes from a passage of scripture in Daniel 9 of the King James Version, which uses the phrase in two places:

To thee, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us confusion of face, as at this day, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those that are near and those that are far away, in all the lands to which thou hast driven them, because of the treachery which they have committed against thee. To us, O Lord, belongs confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee. (Daniel 9:7,8, emphasis added)

You gotta love the good old King James for those “flippin’ esoteric” statements. Most other translations replace confusion of face with shame. Interesting.

To us belongs confusion of face, or shame, because of our treachery against God. How is confusion of face related to shame? When we cover our shame with layers of culture, heritage, self-righteousness, fear, hatred, selfishness, bravado, false-modesty, education, drugs, cynicism, wealth, vanity, and so forth, we get confusion of face. We forget who we are.

Remember the line about Adam and Eve in the garden before sin? They were naked and they were not ashamed. After sin? They were naked and they were ashamed. So they covered up and hid from God.

The esoteric elements of Christianity are naked and not ashamed. They are counterintuitive to minds and hearts that are buried beneath layers of filters which allow only enough light to pass to sustain the most primitive form of life.

Buechner says it so well that I have to stop squirming to try and say this and let him have his say:

Fathoms down into the mystery of yourself you go – into the darkness of guilt and beyond, into the darkness of loneliness and need and beyond. Deeper and deeper you go until at last the darkness begins to be tinged with gold, as the poem says, which is the gold of light…Words like these are in many ways unpopular and distasteful in our culture; they deal with introspection and self-examination, and we tend to shy away from such enterprises because they seem somehow unhealthy and morbid, because they lead us away from action, and we are all activists…We shy away from introspection because, however fearful the surface seems, we fear the depths still more. And we are right; there is much to fear there.

The voyage into the self is long and dark and full of peril, but I believe it is a voyage that all of us will have to make before we are through…if we search ourselves deeply enough, we will begin to see, very dimly at first, our own true faces.

The esoteric is home. We have gone to great lengths to run away and in the process we’ve forgotten the way back. There is no place like home, though, so we keep the ideals close…and locked up, like treasure in a chest.