Forever Odd (Read - er/ing)
Yea, it is a good title, the Odd part. You might think I'm referring to myself. Although it does apply to twisted chickens like me, it is the title of the latest Dean Koontz novel. Just letting you fiction readers know, it's good. Same basic formula. Good triumphs over evil. This particular foray into the "dark side" isn't typical Koontz though. His treatment of the destructive and malevolent side of humanity isn't as fully fleshed out as in previous books, but otherwise he does a good job to pull you into the story through the protagonist, Odd Thomas. Odd is a great character and I suspect we'll see him, at least once more. It gets a thumbs up from me...but, I like this odd type story.

Picked up Bird by Bird, an Anne Lamott non-fiction title. If you haven't read her Traveling Mercies make a point to find it. (It's out in paperback and should be at most 1/2 Price or Used Book dealers.) WARNING: Lamott tells her tale in raw, revealing language. She is a recovering drug addict who found Jesus in a small church down by the San Francisco docks. (Yes, they still have churches in San Francisco.) Bird by Bird is her contribution to the field of "here's how to write." Half-way done...it's a good read, especially at $3.95.

Stepping Up (Part 2)

I apologize to those who've asked me about this, and to those who've waited on the outcome. It is a bit lengthy, but so is life. Peace.

Scripture says that joy cometh in the morning. I am here to testify that it also comes at dusk. Here's what I mean.

In my quest to become emotionally and spiritually "healthier," a few months ago I took a wholesale examination of my life. And the words "whole - sale" take on a different meaning when you look at the items placed on the display rack tagged "Experiences of Time. " Wholesale = it would be good to sell the whole thing. Sell your whole past. But, obviously you can't. Selling isn't an option, but coming to terms with it is. Coming to terms can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but at least it means not allowing it to have unreflective/ unconscious power over your attitudes and behavior. One way to tame the demons of the past is to name them and release them.

There is a very cheese quote (by that I mean sappy) saying if you love something set it free and if it loves you it will return. Coming to terms with my past I adhere to a type of reverse wisdom on this. If you despise something set it free and pray it will never return.

Here's how I spent three weeks, two months ago, in self examination. (Understand this wasn't a process which I was engaged in every moment of the day, but in half hours and hours at a time, praying for recall and sensitivity to the past - especially parts I may have shut the door on.) I took a yellow legal pad and began dividing my history into chunks of time marked by major events. Early childhood in Sherman, Texas before my mom died; childhood in Sherman with just the boys (my Dad and brother); childhood in Sherman after Pat, my step mom, joined the family; moving to Florida; next period; you get the idea.

Each chunk of my life contained memories and experiences that either harmed me or in which I harmed others. Now here is the hard part. I carted that yellow pad around with me everywhere I went and when I had a related thought, BAM! I wrote it down. On each page of my "history" I listed those offenses: who was involved, and how it affected me, or what I did to cause the injury and what was at the heart of the abusive/sinful action. The hard part for me wasn't really the remembering of those things. [We all can, and do, recall - even for a partial breath, a wrong. Then we most likely, and intentionally, push it out of our mental frame.] The hard part wasn't remembering wrongs, the hard part was writing it down. Putting thoughts and feelings on the page, Bic to blue lined document, ink to paper. In some strange way writing it down makes the memory real again. Not only does it make a fuzzy memory real, but it also sharpens the smeared lines of the past. Writing is a channel, a tunnel into memories and feelings. Moving your hand across the page, pen scrawling up and down, allows the experiences to flow out of your mind and heart and into a reality outside yourself. The writing of a memory makes it "real" in a whole new way. Enough existential philosophizing on writing...

After two weeks of remembering episodes in your own life you'd probably have a line or two of issues needing to be addressed (yea, right!) Being that I'm so extraordinarily unique, I had pages full of past junk. What do you do with so much garbage? Simple. You trash it.
But how? Oh, the possibilities!
Here's the healing action I took that released me through this episode.

One Tuesday afternoon, I took all that pent up, written down stuff, and spoke it out loud to a friend. Christians call it confession. 12 Steppers call it a 5th Step. Psychos call it a Therapy Session. (I'm one of all those things!) More philosophy - telling another person - especially a person you trust, who won't judge you - is cathartic. Yes, writing down all my stuff helped me get it straight in my head, but telling someone else about it all furthered the process of getting it out of me. Confession is disarming. It is as if those secrets were chains constantly dragging along behind me. No matter how strong I was, those chains hindered my speed when I ran, my buoyancy when I swam, my sleep when I tried to rest, and my hugs when I tried to love. They were always there clanging around in the cell of my mind. Verbally speaking of them - giving them another physical life in words- didn't give them more power, but ironically, striped them of the iron hold they had on my heart.

So, in effect, for about three or four hours, I told on my self. I told it all and I told it loud. Was it weird? Absolutely. But man was it wonderful. I got it all off my proverbial chest and out of my head. All my crud - and a lot of other people's crud - was now out in the air. No longer could it use me as a punching bag. No longer could it pull me down or lie to me about how rotting and corrupt my interior life was. It was out. Someone else knew and they hadn't run from the premises, cell phone in hand, dialing 911. As a matter of fact they hugged me when it was all said and done. Can you imagine? I couldn't until I lived it.

After my long talk I went to an area park on a lake near our house. I took those pages of the past and stood outside watching the sun drop. I looked each page over, re-reading the words I'd written for weeks. And as I read, for just another second, I recalled each of those events. I thought of them, probably not for the last time, but for the last time in a way they'd have power over me. And as I looked them over, I again spoke them out loud, this time to no person, but I spoke them all to God. Each offense named, each hurt enumerated, every sin (I could think of) counted, and before the Creator they were called forth. As the sun went down, my "stuff" went up.

Clean is not the word. Scrubbed? Not really. Boiled in bleach? No, more like bored out. If you've ever cleaned the barrel of a rifle you know this image: a stiff wire brush, some Borax, a strong arm and a ton of moving it up and down. When your done the inside is shiny, waiting to be oiled. That's how I felt, shiny inside. "Whole" might get near to the sensation, but Forgiven is the only real word I know for the experience. It wasn't just a knowing that my past had released its hold on me, but a peace experienced deep in my gut.

As in every public park, this one was equipped with those - always aesthetic - Port A Potties. Bright white and smelling of human refuse, you know the ones. With my yellow papers in my hand, stained with the ink of past garbage I stood out in the crisp fall air watching the Sunset, and a thought - I can only attribute to God - dawned on me. Wouldn't it be positively poetic if the metaphorical refuse of my life imprinted in ink, ended up in a literal refuse pile? Absolutely. I took all those pages, walked over to the crapper, grabbed the dirty handle, opened the creaking door, reared back and tossed the entire wad into the waste hole. GONE! Crap where crap belongs!

As I let go of the handle and the spring door slammed shut, I let out a hoot. "YEA!" I ran down to the lake and stood on a rock in few feet out in the water. I bent down and washed my hands of the filth I just held. As I stood up, hands washed, still wet and dripping, I raised them to Heaven and said to God, "You have freed me from my past. You have freed me from my sin. You have freed me from myself. I give it all to you. I surrender all to you."

I'd like to say I had a Ziggy moment and God spoke to me out of a cloud, but I didn't. There were no clouds. Only a few lines of orange and purple were left in the sky as evidence that the Sun once existed and shone on me. No thunderous words boomed, but it was in those streaky lines of orange and purple that I saw and felt God's hand upon me.

Scars

As was his custom, my father almost always had a dump truck load of dirt brought to the house and deposited on the drive way in the spring. “Hurray,” thought the kids, “our own Mt. Everest.” However, everyday after school, before we could properly explore, we had to fill a rather large wheelbarrow three or four times (can you imagine!), shove it to various spots in our hole-ly titled patch of terra-firma we called a backyard, and dump it. We did this, as it was explained, to make the yard a bit more level. (I took that to mean, less dangerous).

The mound of driveway dirt slowly shrank after days of dumping, but any rain hampered the dirt moving progress, putting a hiatus to spring excavations. Rain not only provided a break from the wheel barrow, it also solidified the driveway mound in ways that only a true spelunker can appreciate. Rain meant tunnels! I should clarify, rain meant a tunnel. One rat sized hole, just big enough for a really skinny 6th grade boy, who hadn’t eaten that day, to wriggle carefully through. Not too much shoulder turning and scraping the sides or the thing would cave in. Not too much sound, or thump, cave-in.

Tunnels were the only saving grace to a truck load of dirt at my house. To the adults in our neighborhood a 4 ft mound of dirt indicated a serious gardener, an avid yards-man, was near. (I believe my father had secret hopes of making the cover of Better Homes and Gardens; but really our yard’s progress was more in line with This Old House.) To the kids in the neighborhood, that same mound of earth was an invitation to the realm of Kid-dom. Kid-dom, the land where Pigpen rules and King of the Hill is a past-time. What joy we took from knocking the snot out of the person standing on the sandy peak. In Kid-dom, violence is a standard greeting. “My ass you’re king of the hill…Here’s my shoulder. Glad to meet ya!”

The stars aligned one spring and we got a particularly good load of dirt and a good soaking rain which made for an exceptionally tunnel receptive hill. My brother, Stephen, with Mike - or it may have been the Jeff across the street – and I, had dug the Kid-dom equivalent to the English Chunnel. It must have been three feet long. It was almost long enough to get your entire body in. If you were lying on your stomach, arms outstretched, you’d still not have too much leg showing. As all good dump-truck-tunnelers know, you have to have a drag man when you tunnel. The drag man doesn’t get prettied up in a dress and pumps…different “drag.” The drag man is the one who grabs you by the wrist when you are half way through the tunnel and drags you out the other side. This method of exiting - requiring less squirming - helps to ensure the tunnel remains intact for the next crawler. Stephen was the biggest of the bunch so he usually dragged.

For some reason which escapes me at the moment, this marvelous, tunnel accomplished day, we had fireworks. (A few firecrackers and bottle rockets are always found at teenage boy’s houses, and my friends were no exception.) I was two feet into the Kid-dom Chunnel. Dirt in my mouth. Dirt in my nose. Fingers clawing through the exit. My arms were completely exposed. Head down, eye’s closed, slowly wriggling. Half-way through. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! “Someone is setting off fire crackers,” I thought through the ringing in my head. Then I felt a burning on my left forearm and heard another…BOOM! That was the exact time the Chunnel collapsed on top of me. At least a hundred pounds of dirt on my head and back, a second degree fire-cracker burn on my arm, and partial loss of hearing…I easily qualified for 6th grade disability.

After my brother pulled me out, I was informed that the fire-cracker on my arm was an accident. It was really meant for my head. Rather, Stephen meant to throw it near the tunnel exit, but it slipped and he “accidentally” dropped it on me. (Yea, right.) That small burn - about the size of a dime - hurt for two weeks and created a memorably sweet scar.

I still have that scar on my arm. It, and a lot more, remind me of my brother. That scar has faded a great deal over the years. It is so faded that I have to point at the exact spot in order for my kids to see it. “Oh, I see it. That itty-bitty place right there? That’s nothing!” they say. Oh, but it isn’t “nothing.” It is a big, big, something. It is a scar. It is my scar. I earned IT and a hundred more just like it. I endured their pain, I have their memory, and I wouldn’t trade one – even if I could. Every scar, physical, emotional, and spiritual, has a story. Some are still raw and fiercely painful, while others are sweet and even funny. Scars. They tell a lot about a person and a lot about their life.

I don’t mind parading these scars of mine, letting the world know what they mean or how I got them. I’m quite sure Jesus parades his scars around too. (You do know he still has them. He showed them to Thomas.) Like I said, they tell a lot about a person and a lot about their life. The scarred hands and feet of God tell a compelling story. It is powerfully painful and those scars tell the world the extent to which one man agonized to provide us all with healing love.