I gave notice at my tax job today. As of April 15th, I will officially be out of the tax business. It was the hardest thing I've done in a long time.
In previous blogs, I've alluded to the fact that I'm making changes to prioritize my life. This is the change I was talking about. I needed to wait for the right timing to give notice, and didn't want to tell the world until I'd done it.
See, as I explained to my boss, quitting my job was not one of those "I hate this job, good riddance" deals that most job changes tend to be. For me, it was giving up a job that I absolutely love. Yes, I love my job. I love connecting with people and making a positive change in their lives. Today, I found out that one of my clients got a divorce this past year and I wanted to cry because they're such special people and I care about them. I find tax law fascinating. I love empowering people with knowledge so that they don't fear the IRS but understand how to follow the law and get the maximum benefit the law entitles them to.
HOWEVER
Last year, God and I had a long series of conversations of His plans for me. Of what my real purpose in this life is.
I started my tax job because my husband had been laid off and had no prospects of another job for a long time. We had a family to support. And even though I was quite content in my role as SAHM, I needed to go to work so we could eat and pay our mortgage. Those were really tough times. Honestly, we survived because of miracles, small jobs here and there, and going into a lot of debt that we're still paying off. Our income now is embarrassingly high. Truly, I am ashamed of how much money we make and how little we have to show for it. Granted, much of it goes toward paying off the debt from the lean times: when we had little money to live off of, and when several business ventures did not work out, mostly because we trusted the wrong people.
But you know what? We do not NEED the money I am making at my tax job. Yes, the extras are nice. I like having the freedom to buy stuff because I want it. Do I need the stuff? Nope.
When God and I chatted about my purpose, He revealed a couple of important things to me. Number one, I am a wife and mother. That is such an important calling. And yet, because of all the work I do, I don't have time to be the kind of wife and mother my family needs me to be. Number two, I am a writer. Even if I never sell a book or reach bestselling status, I will always write. I will always tell stories. I will always have something to say. That's who I am. And again, I don't get to spend nearly the time on it that I'd like. So why am I taking my time and energy from those two things? For money we don't really need? Because it makes me feel good to get the constant praise, rewards, and acclaim I get at my job?
I feel good about my job because I get a lot of good strokes. A lot of good rewards. Praise. Acclaim. Promotions. Money. Bonuses. Titles. Yes, those things are good. But of what value are they when my husband and children aren't getting the attention they need? When I can't focus on writing the stories that make my soul sing? I might feel good, but I'm missing out on the most important things in my life. Even though I love my job, the rewards I get from that job, while they give me immediate satisfaction, do not last.
Matthew 6 talks about the difference between earthly rewards and heavenly rewards. All the outward praise and acclaim we get from others is our reward, paid in full. All the treasures we gain here on earth will fade away and will not be here for us to enjoy. Yes, we need money to pay the bills, but sometimes those bills add up to a lot of things we don't really need. We can't serve both God and money, and in this country, we do a lot of money serving. We justify it with a lot of talk about what we need, but I have seen how amazingly God provides for our needs when we let Him. He says He will... Matthew 6:33 says "But seek first his kingdom and righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well."
After living so many years from miracle to miracle, and working so hard to stay afloat, I believe that our family, like so many families in this country, reversed that principle. We started working for the things, thinking that eventually his kingdom would come. Um... no. That's not how the Bible says it works, now does it?
Back when I first made the decision to quit my job in response to the things God was stirring up in my heart, one of the verses that God brought to my attention was James 1:6-8. "But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does." God kept telling me I was a double-minded man. I strayed from the purpose God gave me because I started relying on myself to provide for our needs. Not just financially, but for the false value it gave me on a personal level. Don't get me wrong, I do believe my job was a much-needed miracle that God provided.
But now, the time is over. And God is asking me to trust Him, in a time of economic uncertainty for our country, a time when peope would love to be making what I'm making, and to give it all up. He's asking me to find value in the often thankless task of butt-wiping, homework supervising, and being the bad guy. Am I willing to give up the earthly reward and seek Him?
Please don't think that by my "I'm so empowered by God" post that I have this figured out. I'll admit, it was hard not to cave when my bosses offered me alternatives and more money to stay. Trust me, I'll spend the next four months hearing about more incentives they can think up. And then there's going to be the immediate gratification of clients whose lives I impact that's going to have me wishing I could stay, particularly on the days when I'm leaving the house to "You're such a mean mom for making me do my homework/clean my room/not watch shows that are bad/etc." I'm a human being, and those human rewards feel so good at times.
These next few months, I'm going to have to cling harder than ever to the hope that God has given me, and to continue to trust that His plan is so much better for me than my own, even if my own seems to feel good at the time. I've never tried drugs, but I understand they feel good at the time too. I've just never been willing to sacrifice the long term benefit of not frying my brain for the short term bliss of drugs. And I guess, as we look at earthly rewards versus heavenly rewards, it's the same principle.
So keep looking. Keep seeking. Keep holding on to the fact that today's reward isn't going to be nearly as good as what God has planned for us.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Thursday Thirteen #75: Best Friends Edition
I spend one Thursday a month with my best friend. We both have crazy-busy lives, and because my hubby wouldn't buy a house close to her, and her hubby wouldn't buy a house close to us, we only get to see each other once a month. Her day off is Thursday. Thankfully, it coincides with my day off. Love how God works that out. :)
The best part of our friendship is that our little girls are the same age. And they're best friends, too!
1. Our youngest daughters were born two months apart. I was there, pregnant, when she had her daughter, so I tell my daughter she was there for V's birth.
2. When we were pregnant, we both wanted boys. Were crushed when they were girls. And now, wouldn't trade our girls for anything.
3. Really prayed for our kiddos to be bffs. Amazingly (because such plans never work out) they are. Our two girls are so much alike and absolutely adore each other.
4. Hearing her struggles with her daughter is such a blessing to me, because my little one is so unlike my older one and definitely not at all like me. She reminds me that my daughter is normal, and not a terrorist disguised in princess clothes. Okay, I'm still convinced Homeland Security is watching our house because of her, but I'm at least convinced she no longer presents an imminent threat to the population at large.
5. Today, when I was picking up the living room at her house, I discovered that one of the kids had colored all over her brand-new couch. I, of course, freaked out, knowing that my daughter has been known to do such things. I went to her, apologizing all over the place. She freaked out, because she thought it was her daughter. We had to sit the girls down and figure out who it was. I have to admit to being really glad it was her daughter. :)
6. My daughter gets all dressed up in her most princess-y dress to visit them. Today, it was ballerina gear. We showed up to her daughter being dressed up in a flamenco costume. Love it!
7. Neither of our girls could say the other's name right when they were little, so they both call each other really bizarre names, even though they could probably do it correctly now.
8. Our girls both have the Sleeping Beauty Barbie. Neither can say her name, which is Aurora (a bit of princess trivia for you), so they call her by names they can say: Honora and Allora.
9. The girls are complete shoe freaks. Both of them. The good news is that my daughter is petite and hers is a lot taller, so we get a lot of the hand-me-downs.
10. Even though our daughters are the most high-maintenance creatures you will ever meet, they are also the kindest people we know. Crazy.
11. No matter how long it's been since we've seen each other, whenever we get together, it's like no time has passed- for us and the girls.
12. Since we both have similar parenting philosophies, and are often dealing with similar struggles, we often give each other advice that helps come at it from a different, but complementary way.
13. Add all of it up, and we always end up having a great time!
The best part of our friendship is that our little girls are the same age. And they're best friends, too!
1. Our youngest daughters were born two months apart. I was there, pregnant, when she had her daughter, so I tell my daughter she was there for V's birth.
2. When we were pregnant, we both wanted boys. Were crushed when they were girls. And now, wouldn't trade our girls for anything.
3. Really prayed for our kiddos to be bffs. Amazingly (because such plans never work out) they are. Our two girls are so much alike and absolutely adore each other.
4. Hearing her struggles with her daughter is such a blessing to me, because my little one is so unlike my older one and definitely not at all like me. She reminds me that my daughter is normal, and not a terrorist disguised in princess clothes. Okay, I'm still convinced Homeland Security is watching our house because of her, but I'm at least convinced she no longer presents an imminent threat to the population at large.
5. Today, when I was picking up the living room at her house, I discovered that one of the kids had colored all over her brand-new couch. I, of course, freaked out, knowing that my daughter has been known to do such things. I went to her, apologizing all over the place. She freaked out, because she thought it was her daughter. We had to sit the girls down and figure out who it was. I have to admit to being really glad it was her daughter. :)
6. My daughter gets all dressed up in her most princess-y dress to visit them. Today, it was ballerina gear. We showed up to her daughter being dressed up in a flamenco costume. Love it!
7. Neither of our girls could say the other's name right when they were little, so they both call each other really bizarre names, even though they could probably do it correctly now.
8. Our girls both have the Sleeping Beauty Barbie. Neither can say her name, which is Aurora (a bit of princess trivia for you), so they call her by names they can say: Honora and Allora.
9. The girls are complete shoe freaks. Both of them. The good news is that my daughter is petite and hers is a lot taller, so we get a lot of the hand-me-downs.
10. Even though our daughters are the most high-maintenance creatures you will ever meet, they are also the kindest people we know. Crazy.
11. No matter how long it's been since we've seen each other, whenever we get together, it's like no time has passed- for us and the girls.
12. Since we both have similar parenting philosophies, and are often dealing with similar struggles, we often give each other advice that helps come at it from a different, but complementary way.
13. Add all of it up, and we always end up having a great time!
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
A Day in my life...
No, it's not as exciting as sharks chasing me. But hey, I can only handle so much excitement. I'm a Christian you know, and I need to uphold the standard of the rest of the world that says I'm not allowed to have fun.
Next week at Words for the Journey, I'm teaching on, um, something, I forget the title, but it's brilliant, because Michele wrote the title. I stink at titles. Anyway, part of why I'm teaching it is that folks have commented on my high level of productivity and can't believe it. I can't believe it myself. But I do think I have some useful ways of helping folks figure out how to up their own productivity.
As I was thinking about the class and what I want to teach, I started looking at my own schedule, and I realized that it would be useful to share with folks in general what a day in Danica's life looks like. So here it is: My Schedule!
Monday, Wednesday, Friday:
7:00 wake up, angry at the universe for forcing me to be conscious at an inhumane hour.
7:30 get out of bed and get kiddos ready for school, realizing that if I don't, my kid will go to school with messy hair, no lunch money, and child services will show up on my doorstep.
8:00ish jump in the shower
8:15 Yell goodbye down the stairs as kiddo leaves and get myself dressed
8:20 Fight with smaller child about her wardrobe and eventually compromise on something we can both live with. See underwear post.
8:45ish drag little one to car for school.
9:05 drop little one at school five minutes late (note school is only 5 minutes away. It just takes that much to get her out the door)
9:20-11:20 PANERA TIME: This is my "me" time for writing and drinking tea. Ginger Peach.
11:30 Pick up kiddo, fight with her on the way to the car and on the way home over some thing I didn't do according to her rules.
Mondays, we hit the grocery store on the way home. Wednesdays, I have to rush home to fix lunch before my weekly meeting with el boss lady. Fridays, we just go home.
12:00 online meeting with boss for my online hosting job
post meeting-3:00 Online Job. I've checked in a couple of times during the am to make sure nothing was blown up or there are not urgent emails, but this is when I get the bulk of that work done.
3:00 other kiddo gets home, we dive into homework, dinner preparations, etc.
4:30 I leave for tax job
9:30 (if I'm lucky) I get home
post arrival at home-whenever my work is done: Finish up loose ends from online job, finish loose ends from writing, Bible study, and *gasp* exercise.
My goal is to get to bed by midnight.
Tuesdays:
AM Schedule looks pretty much like MWF, except I drop little one at "bed school" which is code name for daycare.
9:30-11:30 Words for the Journey (Seriously, it's an amazing group, you should go)
11:30-1:30ish Lunch with my writer friends
1:30-3:00 Writing Time
3:00 older kiddo gets home and we have quality time together until I have to fix dinner or get small child. I try to con hubby into picking her up.
4:00 Start dinner, attempt a few household chores, catch up on work I missed while out
6:00ish-9:00ish Church
9:00 fight with kiddos to go to bed even though they're hyped up from church
9:30ish See MWF schedule. I tend to have to be up later because I didn't get my usual chunk of time for online job and have to play catch up.
Thursdays: My semi free day
Technically, my day would look like, get kiddo off to school, go back to bed, fix lunch, go back to bed, fix dinner, go back to bed.
In reality because it's the only day not jam-packed with stuff, it ends up being jam packed with stuff that I can't do on the other days like errands, doctor appointments, catching up on work I didn't get to on other days, seeing my non writer friends (yes, they do exist), etc. Occasionally, I even do housework on this day.
Saturday:
The whole morning routine, except I don't have to get kiddos anywhere, I just have to be to work by 9.
During not busy season, I work until 5, during busy season, I work until 9. Yes, twelve hour days.
After work, I come home and catch up on all the writing/online/general life stuff/etc. I don't go to bed until it's done.
Sunday (or holidays)
I sleep until I'm good and darn ready to wake up and don't you dare try to make me get up any earlier, because I. WILL. KILL. YOU. Just saying.
I try very hard not to work on Sunday, but if I'm really behind on any of my jobs, or there's a project to be done on that date, or I'm avoiding housework, I will.
The truth about my life/schedule is that I am productive because I have to be. I've got too many balls in the air. And yes I am working on reducing some of them. Not fully prepared to share that yet, but I will eventually. While my schedule looks pretty rigid, I do adapt it as needed. If little one climbs on my lap and says, "I need mommy time," she gets it. Even if that means powering down and staying up later that night.
That said, there's also the non-negotiables. I made a commitment to my writing a long time ago. That's sacred time. Because I believe God has called me to be a writer, I honor Him by giving Him that writing time. I call it "me time" but the truth is, when I'm writing, creating, living in "the zone," it is when I truly feel closest to God because I know that's who He created me to be.
Not everyone can handle my schedule. Totally get that. But here's what works about my schedule: I look at the important things in my life, and I make time for them. More importantly, even though I don't always have a lot of time for them, or as much time as I'd like, I look at all the ways I can make the most of the time I do have.
And, that my friends, is what we'll be talking about next Tuesday. :)
Next week at Words for the Journey, I'm teaching on, um, something, I forget the title, but it's brilliant, because Michele wrote the title. I stink at titles. Anyway, part of why I'm teaching it is that folks have commented on my high level of productivity and can't believe it. I can't believe it myself. But I do think I have some useful ways of helping folks figure out how to up their own productivity.
As I was thinking about the class and what I want to teach, I started looking at my own schedule, and I realized that it would be useful to share with folks in general what a day in Danica's life looks like. So here it is: My Schedule!
Monday, Wednesday, Friday:
7:00 wake up, angry at the universe for forcing me to be conscious at an inhumane hour.
7:30 get out of bed and get kiddos ready for school, realizing that if I don't, my kid will go to school with messy hair, no lunch money, and child services will show up on my doorstep.
8:00ish jump in the shower
8:15 Yell goodbye down the stairs as kiddo leaves and get myself dressed
8:20 Fight with smaller child about her wardrobe and eventually compromise on something we can both live with. See underwear post.
8:45ish drag little one to car for school.
9:05 drop little one at school five minutes late (note school is only 5 minutes away. It just takes that much to get her out the door)
9:20-11:20 PANERA TIME: This is my "me" time for writing and drinking tea. Ginger Peach.
11:30 Pick up kiddo, fight with her on the way to the car and on the way home over some thing I didn't do according to her rules.
Mondays, we hit the grocery store on the way home. Wednesdays, I have to rush home to fix lunch before my weekly meeting with el boss lady. Fridays, we just go home.
12:00 online meeting with boss for my online hosting job
post meeting-3:00 Online Job. I've checked in a couple of times during the am to make sure nothing was blown up or there are not urgent emails, but this is when I get the bulk of that work done.
3:00 other kiddo gets home, we dive into homework, dinner preparations, etc.
4:30 I leave for tax job
9:30 (if I'm lucky) I get home
post arrival at home-whenever my work is done: Finish up loose ends from online job, finish loose ends from writing, Bible study, and *gasp* exercise.
My goal is to get to bed by midnight.
Tuesdays:
AM Schedule looks pretty much like MWF, except I drop little one at "bed school" which is code name for daycare.
9:30-11:30 Words for the Journey (Seriously, it's an amazing group, you should go)
11:30-1:30ish Lunch with my writer friends
1:30-3:00 Writing Time
3:00 older kiddo gets home and we have quality time together until I have to fix dinner or get small child. I try to con hubby into picking her up.
4:00 Start dinner, attempt a few household chores, catch up on work I missed while out
6:00ish-9:00ish Church
9:00 fight with kiddos to go to bed even though they're hyped up from church
9:30ish See MWF schedule. I tend to have to be up later because I didn't get my usual chunk of time for online job and have to play catch up.
Thursdays: My semi free day
Technically, my day would look like, get kiddo off to school, go back to bed, fix lunch, go back to bed, fix dinner, go back to bed.
In reality because it's the only day not jam-packed with stuff, it ends up being jam packed with stuff that I can't do on the other days like errands, doctor appointments, catching up on work I didn't get to on other days, seeing my non writer friends (yes, they do exist), etc. Occasionally, I even do housework on this day.
Saturday:
The whole morning routine, except I don't have to get kiddos anywhere, I just have to be to work by 9.
During not busy season, I work until 5, during busy season, I work until 9. Yes, twelve hour days.
After work, I come home and catch up on all the writing/online/general life stuff/etc. I don't go to bed until it's done.
Sunday (or holidays)
I sleep until I'm good and darn ready to wake up and don't you dare try to make me get up any earlier, because I. WILL. KILL. YOU. Just saying.
I try very hard not to work on Sunday, but if I'm really behind on any of my jobs, or there's a project to be done on that date, or I'm avoiding housework, I will.
The truth about my life/schedule is that I am productive because I have to be. I've got too many balls in the air. And yes I am working on reducing some of them. Not fully prepared to share that yet, but I will eventually. While my schedule looks pretty rigid, I do adapt it as needed. If little one climbs on my lap and says, "I need mommy time," she gets it. Even if that means powering down and staying up later that night.
That said, there's also the non-negotiables. I made a commitment to my writing a long time ago. That's sacred time. Because I believe God has called me to be a writer, I honor Him by giving Him that writing time. I call it "me time" but the truth is, when I'm writing, creating, living in "the zone," it is when I truly feel closest to God because I know that's who He created me to be.
Not everyone can handle my schedule. Totally get that. But here's what works about my schedule: I look at the important things in my life, and I make time for them. More importantly, even though I don't always have a lot of time for them, or as much time as I'd like, I look at all the ways I can make the most of the time I do have.
And, that my friends, is what we'll be talking about next Tuesday. :)
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Blessings from the shark dream
Last night, I had this really fascinating dream.
In my dream, I was on a pleasure cruise, sort of like Gilligan's Island. Then, we ended up getting blown off the ship in a big yellow life raft. Now, before you start thinking it was a nightmare, you need to know I wasn't scared. I actually thought it was really cool. (So not me in real life, but that's why we have dreams, right?) Then, we lost the raft, and were swimming in this tunnel. The fish were super cool... so beautiful and colorful. Except every few minutes, we'd hear this noise, the fish would disappear, and sharks would show up. (I keep saying we, because someone was with me, but I don't know who. A woman.) The sharks would nip at our feet, and I'd kick them really hard in the snout. Try that in real life. The sharks would back off. Finally, just as I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, the shark opened his mouth really wide like he was going to swallow me whole. I kicked my leg back to kick him again, wishing I had a harpoon or something, and I woke up. As I woke up, I heard a voice tell me that I had everything I needed to defeat the sharks because they were machines, something I could tell because of the noise they made. It was mechanical, not a shark noise. (As if I could tell you what noise a shark made.)
The point of telling you my dream is something that God spent the whole day showing me. Now I have no idea if it was actually related to my shark dream, or if I'm reading into the shark dream in retrospect. So bear with me.
In my dream, I kept fighting against the sharks. As they chased me, and I kicked them, I was really scared. Though with each successful battle, I felt more confident. So much so that as the shark came for the final bite, I really did believe I could beat the shark. Which is really hilarious considering I saw Jaws as a young child and have had an irrational fear of sharks ever since. Here I was, fully confident I could beat the shark on my own, and before I could have the satisfaction of victory, I woke up with the knowledge that the battle was rigged in my favor to begin with.
Talk about a let down.
And yet not.
I've had some battles in my life over the past few years. Things I've been praying about. Things I've desired with all my heart. Things I have been fighting for. Things I have spent hours crying over.
Today, God showed me how, in so many little ways, He's already given them to me. I've been fighting and delivering blows in battles He's already won on my behalf. None of them have been the big, here's your shark, find a taxidermist and mount it on your wall victory. But wow... as I look back at all the tiny little things, God has given me some really cool victories. Tonight, as I sat in church, hearing Him whisper, it was like He was recounting all the lovely things I've received lately, and saying, "see, this is how much I love you. I delight in you. I want these things for you, not because you deserve them, or because you've earned them, but because you're mine."
I don't have to fight the sharks for God to give me the victories I desire. The sharks aren't going to hurt me because they're not real. When I see a shark, I think Jaws. But that's not always what they are. First off, whatever the battle is, the final battle has already been won, so why am I fighting so hard? It doesn't matter. God's already got my trophy mounted on His wall. And as for everything else, rather than worrying about what I am or am not equipped to do, I need to remember that He's already equipped us with everything we need. If He's sending us to fight sharks, then yes, the power of our foot smack dab in the middle of the snout is going to be big enough to send Jaws running.
OR
I just had a weird but cool and creepy dream that happened to coincide with the fact that God revealed a lot of cool things He's been doing in my life and because I haven't been all that creative lately, I combined the two to make what is probably my strangest blog post yet.
Whatever. But I hope that somehow, you find a little blessing in my shark dream. Even if it's as simple as knowing you're not as nuts as I am.
In my dream, I was on a pleasure cruise, sort of like Gilligan's Island. Then, we ended up getting blown off the ship in a big yellow life raft. Now, before you start thinking it was a nightmare, you need to know I wasn't scared. I actually thought it was really cool. (So not me in real life, but that's why we have dreams, right?) Then, we lost the raft, and were swimming in this tunnel. The fish were super cool... so beautiful and colorful. Except every few minutes, we'd hear this noise, the fish would disappear, and sharks would show up. (I keep saying we, because someone was with me, but I don't know who. A woman.) The sharks would nip at our feet, and I'd kick them really hard in the snout. Try that in real life. The sharks would back off. Finally, just as I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, the shark opened his mouth really wide like he was going to swallow me whole. I kicked my leg back to kick him again, wishing I had a harpoon or something, and I woke up. As I woke up, I heard a voice tell me that I had everything I needed to defeat the sharks because they were machines, something I could tell because of the noise they made. It was mechanical, not a shark noise. (As if I could tell you what noise a shark made.)
The point of telling you my dream is something that God spent the whole day showing me. Now I have no idea if it was actually related to my shark dream, or if I'm reading into the shark dream in retrospect. So bear with me.
In my dream, I kept fighting against the sharks. As they chased me, and I kicked them, I was really scared. Though with each successful battle, I felt more confident. So much so that as the shark came for the final bite, I really did believe I could beat the shark. Which is really hilarious considering I saw Jaws as a young child and have had an irrational fear of sharks ever since. Here I was, fully confident I could beat the shark on my own, and before I could have the satisfaction of victory, I woke up with the knowledge that the battle was rigged in my favor to begin with.
Talk about a let down.
And yet not.
I've had some battles in my life over the past few years. Things I've been praying about. Things I've desired with all my heart. Things I have been fighting for. Things I have spent hours crying over.
Today, God showed me how, in so many little ways, He's already given them to me. I've been fighting and delivering blows in battles He's already won on my behalf. None of them have been the big, here's your shark, find a taxidermist and mount it on your wall victory. But wow... as I look back at all the tiny little things, God has given me some really cool victories. Tonight, as I sat in church, hearing Him whisper, it was like He was recounting all the lovely things I've received lately, and saying, "see, this is how much I love you. I delight in you. I want these things for you, not because you deserve them, or because you've earned them, but because you're mine."
I don't have to fight the sharks for God to give me the victories I desire. The sharks aren't going to hurt me because they're not real. When I see a shark, I think Jaws. But that's not always what they are. First off, whatever the battle is, the final battle has already been won, so why am I fighting so hard? It doesn't matter. God's already got my trophy mounted on His wall. And as for everything else, rather than worrying about what I am or am not equipped to do, I need to remember that He's already equipped us with everything we need. If He's sending us to fight sharks, then yes, the power of our foot smack dab in the middle of the snout is going to be big enough to send Jaws running.
OR
I just had a weird but cool and creepy dream that happened to coincide with the fact that God revealed a lot of cool things He's been doing in my life and because I haven't been all that creative lately, I combined the two to make what is probably my strangest blog post yet.
Whatever. But I hope that somehow, you find a little blessing in my shark dream. Even if it's as simple as knowing you're not as nuts as I am.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Be Strong & Curvaceous by Shelley Adina
It is time to play a Wild Card! Every now and then, a book that I have chosen to read is going to pop up as a FIRST Wild Card Tour. Get dealt into the game! (Just click the button!) Wild Card Tours feature an author and his/her book's FIRST chapter!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Be Strong and Curvaceous (All About Us Series, Book 3)
FaithWords (January 2, 2009)
Plus a Tiffany's Bracelet Giveaway! Go to Camy Tang's Blog and leave a comment on her FIRST Wild Card Tour for Be Strong and Curvaceous, and you will be placed into a drawing for a bracelet that looks similar to the picture below.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Shelley Adina is a world traveler and pop culture junkie with an incurable addiction to designer handbags. She knows the value of a relationship with a gracious God and loving Christian friends, and she's inviting today's teenage girls to join her in these refreshingly honest books about real life as a Christian teen--with a little extra glitz thrown in for fun! In between books, Adina loves traveling, listening to and making music, and watching all kinds of movies. It's All About Us is Book One in the All About Us Series. Book Two, The Fruit of my Lipstick came out in August 2008. Book Three, Be Strong & Curvaceous, came out January 2, 2009. And Book Four, Who Made You a Princess?, comes out May 13, 2009.
Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $ 9.99
Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: FaithWords (January 2, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0446177997
ISBN-13: 978-0446177993
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
BE CAREFUL WHAT you wish for.
I used to think that was the dumbest saying ever. I mean, when you wish for something, by definition it’s wonderful, right? Like a new dress for a party. Or a roommate as cool as Gillian Chang or Lissa Mansfield. Or a guy noticing you after six months of being invisible. Before last term, of course I wanted those wishes to come true.
I should have been more careful.
Let me back up a little. My name is Carolina Isabella Aragon Velasquez . . . but that doesn’t fit on school admission forms, so when I started first grade, it got shortened up to Carolina Aragon—Carly to my friends. Up until I was a sophomore, I lived with my mother and father, my older sister Alana and little brother Antony in a huge house in Monte Sereno, just south of Silicon Valley. Papa’s company invented some kind of security software for stock exchanges, and he and everyone who worked for him got rich.
Then came Black Thursday and the stock market crash, and suddenly my mom was leaving him and going to live with her parents in Veracruz, Mexico, to be an artist and find herself. Alana finished college and moved to Austin, Texas, where we have lots of relatives. Antony, Papa, and I moved to a condo about the size of our old living room, and since Papa spends so much time on the road, where I’ve found myself since September is boarding school.
The spring term started in April, and as I got out of the limo Papa sends me back to Spencer Academy in every Sunday night—even though I’m perfectly capable of taking the train—I couldn’t help but feel a little bubble of optimism deep inside. Call me corny, but the news that Vanessa Talbot and Brett Loyola had broken up just before spring break had made the last ten days the happiest I’d had since my parents split up. Even flying to Veracruz, courtesy of Papa’s frequent flyer miles, and being introduced to my mother’s boyfriend hadn’t put a dent in it.
Ugh. Okay, I lied. So not going there.
Thinking about Brett now. Dark, romantic eyes. Curly dark hair, cut short because he’s the captain of the rowing team. Broad shoulders. Fabulous clothes he wears as if he doesn’t care where he got them.
Oh, yeah. Much better.
Lost in happy plans for how I’d finally get his attention (I was signing up to be a chem tutor first thing because, let’s face it, he needs me), I pushed open the door to my room and staggered in with my duffel bags.
My hands loosened and I dropped everything with a thud.
There were Vuitton suitcases all over the room. Enough for an entire family. In fact, the trunk was so big you could put a family in it—the kids, at least.
“Close the door, why don’t you?” said a bored British voice, with a barely noticeable roll on the r. A girl stepped out from behind the wardrobe door.
Red hair in an explosion of curls.
Fishnet stockings to here and glossy Louboutin ankle boots.
Blue eyes that grabbed you and made you wonder why she was so . . . not interested in whether you took another breath.
Ever.
How come no one had told me I was getting a roommate? And who could have prepared me for this, anyway?
“Who are you?”
“Mac,” she said, returning to the depths of the wardrobe. Most people would have said, “What’s your name?” back. She didn’t.
“I’m Carly.” Did I feel lame or what?
She looked around the door. “Pleasure. Looks like we’re to be roommates.” Then she went back to hanging things up.
There was no point in restating the obvious. I gathered my scattered brains and tried to remember what Mama had taught me that a good hostess was supposed to do. “Did someone show you where the dining room is? Supper is between five and six-thirty, and I usually—”
“Carrie. I expected my own room,” she said, as if I hadn’t been talking. “Whom do I speak to?”
“It’s Carly. And Ms. Tobin’s the dorm mistress for this floor.”
“Fine. What were you saying about tea?”
I took a breath and remembered that one of us was what my brother calls couth. As opposed to un. “You’re welcome to come with me and my friends if you want.”
Pop! went the latches on the trunk. She threw up the lid and looked at me over the top of it, her reddish eyebrows lifting in amusement.
“Thanks so much. But I’ll pass.”
Okay, even I have my limits. I picked up my duffel, dropped it on the end of my bed, and left her to it. Maybe by the time I got back from tea—er, supper—she’d have convinced Ms. Tobin to give her a room in another dorm.
The way things looked, this chica would probably demand the headmistress’s suite.
* * *
“What a mo guai nuer,” Gillian said over her tortellini and asparagus. “I can’t believe she snubbed you like that.”
“You of all people,” Lissa agreed, “who wouldn’t hurt someone’s feelings for anything.”
“I wanted to—if I could have come up with something scathing.” Lissa looked surprised, as if I’d shocked her. Well, I may not put my feelings out there for everyone to see, like Gillian does, but I’m still entitled to have them. “But you know how you freeze when you realize you’ve just been cut off at the knees?”
“What happened to your knees?” Jeremy Clay put his plate of linguine down and slid in next to Gillian. They traded a smile that made me feel sort of hollow inside—not the way I’d felt after Mac’s little setdown, but . . . like I was missing out on something. Like they had a secret and weren’t telling.
You know what? Feeling sorry for yourself is not the way to start off a term. I smiled at Jeremy. “Nothing. How was your break? Did you get up to New York the way you guys had planned?”
He glanced at Gillian. “Yeah, I did.”
Argh. Men. Never ask them a yes/no question. “And? Did you have fun? Shani said she had a blast after the initial shock.”
Gillian grinned at me. “That’s a nice way of saying that my grandmother scared the stilettos off her. At first. But then Nai-Nai realized Shani could eat anyone under the table, even my brothers, no matter what she put in front of her, so after that they were best friends.”
“My grandmother’s like that, too,” I said, nodding in sympathy. “She thinks I’m too thin, so she’s always making pots of mole and stuff. Little does she know.”
It’s a fact that I have way too much junk in my trunk. Part of the reason my focus is in history, with as many fashion design electives as I can get away with, is that when I make my own clothes, I can drape and cut to accentuate the positive and make people forget that big old negative following me around.
“You aren’t too thin or too fat.” Lissa is a perfect four. She’s also the most loyal friend in the world. “You’re just right. If I had your curves, I’d be a happy woman.”
Time to change the subject. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about my body in front of a guy, even if he belonged to someone else. “So, did you guys get to see Pride and Prejudice—The Musical? Shani said you were bribing someone to get tickets.”
“Close,” Gillian said. “My mom is on the orchestra’s board, so we got seats in the first circle. You’d have loved it. Costume heaven.”
“I would have.” I sighed. “Why did I have to go to Veracruz for spring break? How come I couldn’t have gone to New York, too?”
I hoped I sounded rhetorical. The truth was, there wasn’t any money for trips to New York to see the hottest musical on Broadway with my friends. Or for the clothes to wear once I got there—unless I made them myself.
“That’s it, then.” Gillian waved a grape tomato on the end of her fork. “Next break, you and Lissa are coming to see me. Not in the summer—no one in their right mind stays in the city in July. But at Christmas.”
“Maybe we’ll go to Veracruz,” Lissa suggested. “Or you guys can come to Santa Barbara and I’ll teach you to surf.”
“That sounds perfect,” I said. Either of Lissa’s options wouldn’t cost very much. New York, on the other hand, would. “I like warm places for my winter holidays.”
“Good point,” Gillian conceded. “So do I.”
“Notice how getting through the last term of junior year isn’t even on your radar?” Jeremy asked no one in particular. “It’s all about vacations with you guys.”
“Vacations are our reward,” Gillian informed him. “You have to have something to get you through finals.”
“Right, like you have to worry,” he scoffed, bumping shoulders with her in a chummy way.
“She does,” Lissa said. “She has to get me through finals.”
While everyone laughed, I got up and walked over to the dessert bar. Crème brulée, berry parfaits, and German chocolate cake. You know you’re depressed when even Dining Services’ crème brulée—which puts a dreamy look in the eyes of just about everyone who goes here—doesn’t get you excited.
I had to snap out of it. Thinking about all the things I didn’t have and all the things I couldn’t do would get me precisely nowhere. I had to focus on the good things.
My friends.
How lucky I was to have won the scholarship that got me into Spencer.
And how much luckier I was that in two terms, no one had figured out I was a scholarship kid. Okay, so Gillian is a scholarship kid, too, but her dad is the president of a multinational bank. She thinks it’s funny that he made her practice the piano so hard all those years, and that’s what finally got her away from him. Who is my father? No one. Just a hardworking guy. He was so proud of me when that acceptance letter came that I didn’t have the heart to tell him there was more to succeeding here than filling a minority quota and getting good grades.
Stop it. Just because you can’t flit off to New York to catch a show or order up the latest designs from Fashion Week doesn’t mean your life is trash. Get ahold of your sense of proportion.
I took a berry parfait—blueberries have lots of antioxidants—and turned back to the table just as the dining room doors opened. They seemed to pause in their arc, giving my new roommate plenty of time to stroll through before they practically genuflected closed behind her. She’d changed out of the fishnets into heels and a black sweater tossed over a simple leaf-green dress that absolutely screamed Paris—Rue Cambon, to be exact. Number 31, to be even more exact. Chanel Couture.
My knees nearly buckled with envy.
“Is that Carly’s roommate?” I heard Lissa ask.
Mac seemed completely unaware that everyone in the dining room was watching her as she floated across the floor like a runway model, collected a plate of Portobello mushroom ravioli and salad, and sat at the empty table next to the big window that faced out onto the quad.
Lissa was still gazing at her, puzzled. “I know I’ve seen her before.”
I hardly heard her.
Because not only had the redhead cut into line ahead of Vanessa Talbot, Dani Lavigne, and Emily Overton, she’d also invaded their prime real estate. No one sat at that table unless they’d sacrificed a freshman at midnight, or whatever it was that people had to do to be friends with them.
When Vanessa turned with her plate, I swear I could hear the collective intake of breath as her gaze locked on the stunning interloper sitting with her back to the window, calmly cutting her ravioli with the edge of her fork.
“Uh oh,” Gillian murmured. “Let the games begin.”
© 2008 by Shelley Adina.
Used by permission of the author and Hachette Book Group USA.
I used to think that was the dumbest saying ever. I mean, when you wish for something, by definition it’s wonderful, right? Like a new dress for a party. Or a roommate as cool as Gillian Chang or Lissa Mansfield. Or a guy noticing you after six months of being invisible. Before last term, of course I wanted those wishes to come true.
I should have been more careful.
Let me back up a little. My name is Carolina Isabella Aragon Velasquez . . . but that doesn’t fit on school admission forms, so when I started first grade, it got shortened up to Carolina Aragon—Carly to my friends. Up until I was a sophomore, I lived with my mother and father, my older sister Alana and little brother Antony in a huge house in Monte Sereno, just south of Silicon Valley. Papa’s company invented some kind of security software for stock exchanges, and he and everyone who worked for him got rich.
Then came Black Thursday and the stock market crash, and suddenly my mom was leaving him and going to live with her parents in Veracruz, Mexico, to be an artist and find herself. Alana finished college and moved to Austin, Texas, where we have lots of relatives. Antony, Papa, and I moved to a condo about the size of our old living room, and since Papa spends so much time on the road, where I’ve found myself since September is boarding school.
The spring term started in April, and as I got out of the limo Papa sends me back to Spencer Academy in every Sunday night—even though I’m perfectly capable of taking the train—I couldn’t help but feel a little bubble of optimism deep inside. Call me corny, but the news that Vanessa Talbot and Brett Loyola had broken up just before spring break had made the last ten days the happiest I’d had since my parents split up. Even flying to Veracruz, courtesy of Papa’s frequent flyer miles, and being introduced to my mother’s boyfriend hadn’t put a dent in it.
Ugh. Okay, I lied. So not going there.
Thinking about Brett now. Dark, romantic eyes. Curly dark hair, cut short because he’s the captain of the rowing team. Broad shoulders. Fabulous clothes he wears as if he doesn’t care where he got them.
Oh, yeah. Much better.
Lost in happy plans for how I’d finally get his attention (I was signing up to be a chem tutor first thing because, let’s face it, he needs me), I pushed open the door to my room and staggered in with my duffel bags.
My hands loosened and I dropped everything with a thud.
There were Vuitton suitcases all over the room. Enough for an entire family. In fact, the trunk was so big you could put a family in it—the kids, at least.
“Close the door, why don’t you?” said a bored British voice, with a barely noticeable roll on the r. A girl stepped out from behind the wardrobe door.
Red hair in an explosion of curls.
Fishnet stockings to here and glossy Louboutin ankle boots.
Blue eyes that grabbed you and made you wonder why she was so . . . not interested in whether you took another breath.
Ever.
How come no one had told me I was getting a roommate? And who could have prepared me for this, anyway?
“Who are you?”
“Mac,” she said, returning to the depths of the wardrobe. Most people would have said, “What’s your name?” back. She didn’t.
“I’m Carly.” Did I feel lame or what?
She looked around the door. “Pleasure. Looks like we’re to be roommates.” Then she went back to hanging things up.
There was no point in restating the obvious. I gathered my scattered brains and tried to remember what Mama had taught me that a good hostess was supposed to do. “Did someone show you where the dining room is? Supper is between five and six-thirty, and I usually—”
“Carrie. I expected my own room,” she said, as if I hadn’t been talking. “Whom do I speak to?”
“It’s Carly. And Ms. Tobin’s the dorm mistress for this floor.”
“Fine. What were you saying about tea?”
I took a breath and remembered that one of us was what my brother calls couth. As opposed to un. “You’re welcome to come with me and my friends if you want.”
Pop! went the latches on the trunk. She threw up the lid and looked at me over the top of it, her reddish eyebrows lifting in amusement.
“Thanks so much. But I’ll pass.”
Okay, even I have my limits. I picked up my duffel, dropped it on the end of my bed, and left her to it. Maybe by the time I got back from tea—er, supper—she’d have convinced Ms. Tobin to give her a room in another dorm.
The way things looked, this chica would probably demand the headmistress’s suite.
* * *
“What a mo guai nuer,” Gillian said over her tortellini and asparagus. “I can’t believe she snubbed you like that.”
“You of all people,” Lissa agreed, “who wouldn’t hurt someone’s feelings for anything.”
“I wanted to—if I could have come up with something scathing.” Lissa looked surprised, as if I’d shocked her. Well, I may not put my feelings out there for everyone to see, like Gillian does, but I’m still entitled to have them. “But you know how you freeze when you realize you’ve just been cut off at the knees?”
“What happened to your knees?” Jeremy Clay put his plate of linguine down and slid in next to Gillian. They traded a smile that made me feel sort of hollow inside—not the way I’d felt after Mac’s little setdown, but . . . like I was missing out on something. Like they had a secret and weren’t telling.
You know what? Feeling sorry for yourself is not the way to start off a term. I smiled at Jeremy. “Nothing. How was your break? Did you get up to New York the way you guys had planned?”
He glanced at Gillian. “Yeah, I did.”
Argh. Men. Never ask them a yes/no question. “And? Did you have fun? Shani said she had a blast after the initial shock.”
Gillian grinned at me. “That’s a nice way of saying that my grandmother scared the stilettos off her. At first. But then Nai-Nai realized Shani could eat anyone under the table, even my brothers, no matter what she put in front of her, so after that they were best friends.”
“My grandmother’s like that, too,” I said, nodding in sympathy. “She thinks I’m too thin, so she’s always making pots of mole and stuff. Little does she know.”
It’s a fact that I have way too much junk in my trunk. Part of the reason my focus is in history, with as many fashion design electives as I can get away with, is that when I make my own clothes, I can drape and cut to accentuate the positive and make people forget that big old negative following me around.
“You aren’t too thin or too fat.” Lissa is a perfect four. She’s also the most loyal friend in the world. “You’re just right. If I had your curves, I’d be a happy woman.”
Time to change the subject. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about my body in front of a guy, even if he belonged to someone else. “So, did you guys get to see Pride and Prejudice—The Musical? Shani said you were bribing someone to get tickets.”
“Close,” Gillian said. “My mom is on the orchestra’s board, so we got seats in the first circle. You’d have loved it. Costume heaven.”
“I would have.” I sighed. “Why did I have to go to Veracruz for spring break? How come I couldn’t have gone to New York, too?”
I hoped I sounded rhetorical. The truth was, there wasn’t any money for trips to New York to see the hottest musical on Broadway with my friends. Or for the clothes to wear once I got there—unless I made them myself.
“That’s it, then.” Gillian waved a grape tomato on the end of her fork. “Next break, you and Lissa are coming to see me. Not in the summer—no one in their right mind stays in the city in July. But at Christmas.”
“Maybe we’ll go to Veracruz,” Lissa suggested. “Or you guys can come to Santa Barbara and I’ll teach you to surf.”
“That sounds perfect,” I said. Either of Lissa’s options wouldn’t cost very much. New York, on the other hand, would. “I like warm places for my winter holidays.”
“Good point,” Gillian conceded. “So do I.”
“Notice how getting through the last term of junior year isn’t even on your radar?” Jeremy asked no one in particular. “It’s all about vacations with you guys.”
“Vacations are our reward,” Gillian informed him. “You have to have something to get you through finals.”
“Right, like you have to worry,” he scoffed, bumping shoulders with her in a chummy way.
“She does,” Lissa said. “She has to get me through finals.”
While everyone laughed, I got up and walked over to the dessert bar. Crème brulée, berry parfaits, and German chocolate cake. You know you’re depressed when even Dining Services’ crème brulée—which puts a dreamy look in the eyes of just about everyone who goes here—doesn’t get you excited.
I had to snap out of it. Thinking about all the things I didn’t have and all the things I couldn’t do would get me precisely nowhere. I had to focus on the good things.
My friends.
How lucky I was to have won the scholarship that got me into Spencer.
And how much luckier I was that in two terms, no one had figured out I was a scholarship kid. Okay, so Gillian is a scholarship kid, too, but her dad is the president of a multinational bank. She thinks it’s funny that he made her practice the piano so hard all those years, and that’s what finally got her away from him. Who is my father? No one. Just a hardworking guy. He was so proud of me when that acceptance letter came that I didn’t have the heart to tell him there was more to succeeding here than filling a minority quota and getting good grades.
Stop it. Just because you can’t flit off to New York to catch a show or order up the latest designs from Fashion Week doesn’t mean your life is trash. Get ahold of your sense of proportion.
I took a berry parfait—blueberries have lots of antioxidants—and turned back to the table just as the dining room doors opened. They seemed to pause in their arc, giving my new roommate plenty of time to stroll through before they practically genuflected closed behind her. She’d changed out of the fishnets into heels and a black sweater tossed over a simple leaf-green dress that absolutely screamed Paris—Rue Cambon, to be exact. Number 31, to be even more exact. Chanel Couture.
My knees nearly buckled with envy.
“Is that Carly’s roommate?” I heard Lissa ask.
Mac seemed completely unaware that everyone in the dining room was watching her as she floated across the floor like a runway model, collected a plate of Portobello mushroom ravioli and salad, and sat at the empty table next to the big window that faced out onto the quad.
Lissa was still gazing at her, puzzled. “I know I’ve seen her before.”
I hardly heard her.
Because not only had the redhead cut into line ahead of Vanessa Talbot, Dani Lavigne, and Emily Overton, she’d also invaded their prime real estate. No one sat at that table unless they’d sacrificed a freshman at midnight, or whatever it was that people had to do to be friends with them.
When Vanessa turned with her plate, I swear I could hear the collective intake of breath as her gaze locked on the stunning interloper sitting with her back to the window, calmly cutting her ravioli with the edge of her fork.
“Uh oh,” Gillian murmured. “Let the games begin.”
© 2008 by Shelley Adina.
Used by permission of the author and Hachette Book Group USA.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Just when you think you've whipped the mom thing into shape
I almost had a great mommy day.
Got up, fixed the kiddos eggs, cleaned up the house a bit, had the kids pick up some toys, and then told them to get dressed so we could run errands.
Proud mommy moment... little princess dresses herself in one of her princess dresses. Usually, I groan and say, "sorry honey, this isn't what I had in mind," and make her change. Not today. Not when I'm being good mommy. I decide to embrace her individuality and accept her for the bling bling princess she is. I even help her get her hair just right... as in super princess-y.
I'm telling you, I'm such a good mom.
We arrive at my FIL's, because I'm driving some friends down to the Springs tonight to visit a friend, and I thought I'd have him give the old car a once-over- check the tires, oil, etc. Don't want to kill my friends.
So then, little princess decides to climb the big cottonwood in his back yard. Personally, I'm not all that fond of my children climbing trees. That whole safety thing. But hubby thinks it's great and character building and all that. So I decide again, I'm going to be good mommy. I'm going to let go of my fears of my child breaking her neck, and I say nothing as she's climbing the tree in her princess dress and ballerina shoes.
Once she's about ten feet up, I notice something rather horrifying. She's not wearing underwear.
I call up to her and ask her, "why aren't you wearing underwear?"
"I didn't feel like it. And I couldn't find any princess ones."
Lovely. I'm now wondering if I have an adult entertainment star in the making. This, after I'd just told her that her name means pure. But, because I'm being good mommy, I embrace this aspect of her personality. She's only four. I can teach her that wearing underwear is a good thing, and help her to make sure she always has plenty of princess panties on hand. Or, I can just institute a mandatory underwear check.
Right.
We finish our errands, leaving the final chore: taking them to the library. Personally, I hate our library. It's very cold and uninviting. I really wish they'd make the children's section of libraries warm, fun, and interesting. Plus, it smells funny. Very unlibrarylike. But I digress.
So we walk the sidewalk towards the library. Princess is bouncing and skipping, because that, as my friend the preschooler teacher tells me, is what four year olds do. I'm trying to embrace this aspect of my princess, except with each bounce, her dress flies up, showing off her girl parts. So I very calmly, very politely, tell her that she must walk carefully and not let her dress fly up so no one can see what's underneath. And she semi complies.
We walk through the main library area into the children's area. The girls race off, ready to find their books. I'm trying to remain nonchalant about the fact that my daughter isn't wearing underwear. In public. I notice the librarian staring at my princess. I start to worry that she's flashed someone and we're going to be kicked out for indecent exposure.
As she sashayes into the next row, I realize something horrible. During the tree climbing expedition, she's torn the back of her dress. So regardless of how she walks or stands, everyone who can view her backside gets the view of a very bare butt, covered only by a wisp of very see-through fabric. Picture something mommy might wear for daddy at night. Yep. That's about what my daughter looked like from behind.
Good mommy got drop kicked to the other side of the universe. I grabbed the little one with one hand, scooped up enough loose material to cover her backside, and yelled... yes I yelled in the library... for my other daughter to hurry up and get over here. We raced through the library, grabbing random books for the kiddos to read so I could say that I kept my promise of going to the library and checking things out, and then we got the heck out of Dodge.
For the record, I am never again going to try to be good mommy. I am not going to understand the quirks of their personalities and I am not going to let them leave the house without making sure they are wearing something appropriate and that their girl parts are fully covered. Yes, underwear checks for all.
I should have taken pictures. By the time I'd overcome the horror that my daughter has flashed every little boy in the known world, thus forcing moms everywhere to have a certain talk with their sons before they were ready, we'd gone home, did not pass go, and put some bright yellow, you'll wear them princess or not, underwear on her little butt.
However, I will be telling this story to every prospective husband. Scratch that. Probably not the best thing for a guy to know about a girl he's looking to date. "Hey did you know that she doesn't like wearing underwear?" "Really? Cool!" Uh, no. Not cool. Not my daughter, thank you very much. But rest assured. This story will get out. And I will make sure to tell it in the most embarrassing place so she never, ever goes without underwear again!
Got up, fixed the kiddos eggs, cleaned up the house a bit, had the kids pick up some toys, and then told them to get dressed so we could run errands.
Proud mommy moment... little princess dresses herself in one of her princess dresses. Usually, I groan and say, "sorry honey, this isn't what I had in mind," and make her change. Not today. Not when I'm being good mommy. I decide to embrace her individuality and accept her for the bling bling princess she is. I even help her get her hair just right... as in super princess-y.
I'm telling you, I'm such a good mom.
We arrive at my FIL's, because I'm driving some friends down to the Springs tonight to visit a friend, and I thought I'd have him give the old car a once-over- check the tires, oil, etc. Don't want to kill my friends.
So then, little princess decides to climb the big cottonwood in his back yard. Personally, I'm not all that fond of my children climbing trees. That whole safety thing. But hubby thinks it's great and character building and all that. So I decide again, I'm going to be good mommy. I'm going to let go of my fears of my child breaking her neck, and I say nothing as she's climbing the tree in her princess dress and ballerina shoes.
Once she's about ten feet up, I notice something rather horrifying. She's not wearing underwear.
I call up to her and ask her, "why aren't you wearing underwear?"
"I didn't feel like it. And I couldn't find any princess ones."
Lovely. I'm now wondering if I have an adult entertainment star in the making. This, after I'd just told her that her name means pure. But, because I'm being good mommy, I embrace this aspect of her personality. She's only four. I can teach her that wearing underwear is a good thing, and help her to make sure she always has plenty of princess panties on hand. Or, I can just institute a mandatory underwear check.
Right.
We finish our errands, leaving the final chore: taking them to the library. Personally, I hate our library. It's very cold and uninviting. I really wish they'd make the children's section of libraries warm, fun, and interesting. Plus, it smells funny. Very unlibrarylike. But I digress.
So we walk the sidewalk towards the library. Princess is bouncing and skipping, because that, as my friend the preschooler teacher tells me, is what four year olds do. I'm trying to embrace this aspect of my princess, except with each bounce, her dress flies up, showing off her girl parts. So I very calmly, very politely, tell her that she must walk carefully and not let her dress fly up so no one can see what's underneath. And she semi complies.
We walk through the main library area into the children's area. The girls race off, ready to find their books. I'm trying to remain nonchalant about the fact that my daughter isn't wearing underwear. In public. I notice the librarian staring at my princess. I start to worry that she's flashed someone and we're going to be kicked out for indecent exposure.
As she sashayes into the next row, I realize something horrible. During the tree climbing expedition, she's torn the back of her dress. So regardless of how she walks or stands, everyone who can view her backside gets the view of a very bare butt, covered only by a wisp of very see-through fabric. Picture something mommy might wear for daddy at night. Yep. That's about what my daughter looked like from behind.
Good mommy got drop kicked to the other side of the universe. I grabbed the little one with one hand, scooped up enough loose material to cover her backside, and yelled... yes I yelled in the library... for my other daughter to hurry up and get over here. We raced through the library, grabbing random books for the kiddos to read so I could say that I kept my promise of going to the library and checking things out, and then we got the heck out of Dodge.
For the record, I am never again going to try to be good mommy. I am not going to understand the quirks of their personalities and I am not going to let them leave the house without making sure they are wearing something appropriate and that their girl parts are fully covered. Yes, underwear checks for all.
I should have taken pictures. By the time I'd overcome the horror that my daughter has flashed every little boy in the known world, thus forcing moms everywhere to have a certain talk with their sons before they were ready, we'd gone home, did not pass go, and put some bright yellow, you'll wear them princess or not, underwear on her little butt.
However, I will be telling this story to every prospective husband. Scratch that. Probably not the best thing for a guy to know about a girl he's looking to date. "Hey did you know that she doesn't like wearing underwear?" "Really? Cool!" Uh, no. Not cool. Not my daughter, thank you very much. But rest assured. This story will get out. And I will make sure to tell it in the most embarrassing place so she never, ever goes without underwear again!
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Thursday Thirteen #74: Discarded thoughts
So the official Thursday Thirteen is gone... sniff sniff... But a few folks are trying to keep it alive, and I guess as long as I remember to do it, I'm game.
Couldn't think of anything to blog about, so here are my discarded thoughts.
1. It's New Year's Day, and I suppose I should blog about something New Years-y. Not in the mood.
2. Resolutions. Don't have the resolve, otherwise, I'd be doing it.
3. Chuck. Just got into the show, thanks to my lovely friend Jen.
4. Hulu.com. I can catch up on TV and movies for free. Thanks to my lovely friend Mo.
5. I took a really long nap today. Not sure if that's a good thing, or even blog worthy, but there it is.
6. The dog. He thinks I'm the Queen of the Universe.
7. I have a headache. I slept funny on the couch during my nap.
8. I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, don't know how to catch up, and not really sure what I'm supposed to be catching up on.
9. I should probably be writing, but I don't know what to work on.
10. My TBR shelf is out of control, and I don't really know where to start in catching up.
11. I'm also debating about what to study next in the Bible.
12. My word for the year. Check out Marilynn Griffith's blog to understand what I mean.
13. The whole get in shape idea and how my lack of time is really stressing me out.
I probably will blog about some of these things. But not now. I think I'm going to go watch Chuck on Hulu.
Couldn't think of anything to blog about, so here are my discarded thoughts.
1. It's New Year's Day, and I suppose I should blog about something New Years-y. Not in the mood.
2. Resolutions. Don't have the resolve, otherwise, I'd be doing it.
3. Chuck. Just got into the show, thanks to my lovely friend Jen.
4. Hulu.com. I can catch up on TV and movies for free. Thanks to my lovely friend Mo.
5. I took a really long nap today. Not sure if that's a good thing, or even blog worthy, but there it is.
6. The dog. He thinks I'm the Queen of the Universe.
7. I have a headache. I slept funny on the couch during my nap.
8. I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, don't know how to catch up, and not really sure what I'm supposed to be catching up on.
9. I should probably be writing, but I don't know what to work on.
10. My TBR shelf is out of control, and I don't really know where to start in catching up.
11. I'm also debating about what to study next in the Bible.
12. My word for the year. Check out Marilynn Griffith's blog to understand what I mean.
13. The whole get in shape idea and how my lack of time is really stressing me out.
I probably will blog about some of these things. But not now. I think I'm going to go watch Chuck on Hulu.
Havah by Tosca Lee
It is time to play a Wild Card! Every now and then, a book that I have chosen to read is going to pop up as a FIRST Wild Card Tour. Get dealt into the game! (Just click the button!) Wild Card Tours feature an author and his/her book's FIRST chapter!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
NavPress Publishing Group (October 10, 2008)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tosca Lee is the author of the critically acclaimed Demon: A Memoir (2007), a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Silver Award winner, American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year nominee, and Christy award finalist. Her eagerly-awaited second novel, Havah: The Story of Eve, released October 2008 to high praise, including a starred review from Publishers Weekly.A sought-after speaker and first runner-up to Mrs. United States 1998, Tosca works as a Senior Consultant for the Gallup Organization. She received her B.A. in English and International Relations from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She also studied at Oxford University.
In her spare time, Tosca enjoys travel, cooking, history and theology. She currently resides in Nebraska.
Visit the author's website and blog.
My Review:
I LOVED LOVED LOVED this book. I read it when it came out in '08 and it's definitely one of the top books of the year for me. So go read it already. :)
Product Details:
List Price: $ 14.99
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: NavPress Publishing Group (October 10, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1600061249
ISBN-13: 978-1600061240
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Prologue
I have seen paradise and ruin. I have known bliss and terror.
I have walked with God.
And I know that God made the heart the most fragile and resilient of organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber.
I still recall my first moment of consciousness—an awareness I’ve never seen in the eyes of any of my own children at birth: the sheer ignorance and genius of consciousness, when we know nothing and accept everything.
Of course, the memory of that waking moment is fainter now, like the smell of the soil of that garden, like the leaves of the fig tree in Eden after dawn—dew and leaf green. It fades with that sense of something once tasted on the tip of the tongue, savored now in memory, replaced by the taste of something similar but never quite the same.
His breath a lost sough, the scent of earth and leaf mold that was his sweaty skin has faded too quickly. So like an Eden dawn—dew on fig leaves.
His eyes were blue, my Adam’s.
How I celebrated that color, shrouded now in shriveled eyelids—he who was never intended to have even a wrinkle! But even as I bend to smooth his cheek, my hair has become a white waterfall upon his Eden—flesh and loins that gave life to so many.
I think for a moment that I hear the One and that he is weeping. It is the first time I have heard him in so long, and my heart cries out: He is dead! My father, my brother, my love!
I envy the earth that envelopes him. I envy the dust that comes of him and my children who sow and eat of it.
This language of Adam’s—the word that meant merely “man” before it was his name—given him by God himself, is now mine. And this is my love song. I will craft these words into the likeness of the man before I, too, return to the earth of Adam’s bosom.
My story has been told in only the barest of terms. It is time you heard it all. It is my testament to the strength of the heart, which has such capacity for joy, such space for sorrow, like a vessel that fills and fills without bursting.
My seasons are nearly as many as a thousand. So now listen, sons, and hear me, daughters. I, Havah, fashioned by God of Adam say this:
In the beginning, there was God . . .
But for me, there was Adam.
The Garden
Chapter 1
A whisper in my ear: Wake!
Blue. A sea awash with nothing but a drifting bit of down, flotsam on an invisible current. I closed my eyes. Light illuminated the thin tissues of my eyelids.
A bird trilled. Near my ear: the percussive buzz of an insect. Overhead, tree boughs stirred in the warming air.
I lay on a soft bed of herbs and grass that tickled my cheek, my shoulders, and the arch of my foot, whispering sibilant secrets up to the trees.
From here, I felt the thrum of the sap in the stem; the pulsing veins of the vine; the beat of my heart in euphony with hundreds more around me; the movement of the earth a thousand miles beneath.
I sighed as one returning to sleep, to retreat to the place I had been before, the realm of silence and bliss—wherever that is.
Wake!
I opened my eyes again upon the milling blue, saw it spliced by the flight of a bird, chevron in the sky.
This time, the voice came not to my ear, but directly to my stirring mind: Wake!
There was amusement in it.
I knew nothing of where or what I was, did not understand the polyphony around me or the wide expanse like a blue eternity before me.
But I woke and knew I was alive.
A rustle, a groan practically in my ear. I twitched at a stirring against my hip. A moment later, a touch drifted across a belly I did not yet know I owned, soft as a leaf skittering along the ground.
A face obscured my vision. I screamed. Not with fear—I was no acquaintance of fear—nor with startlement, because I had been aware of the presence already, but because it was the only statement that came to lips as artless as mine.
The face disappeared and returned, blinking into my own, the blue above captured in twin pools . Then, like a gush of water from a rock, gladness thrilled my heart. But its source was not me.
At last! It came, unspoken—a different source than the voice before—the words thrust jubilantly to the sky: “At last!”
He was up on legs like the trunks of sturdy saplings, beating at the earth with his feet. He thumped his chest and shouted to the sun and clapped his hands. “At last!” he cried, his laughter like warm clay between the toes. He shook his shoulders and stomped the grass, slapping his chest as he shouted again and again. Though I did not understand the utterance, I knew its meaning at once: joy and exultation at something longed for suddenly found.
I tried to mimic his sound; it came out as a squawk and then a panting laugh. Overhead, a lark chattered an extravagant address. I squeaked a shrill reply. The face lowered to mine, and the man’s arms wrapped, womb-tight, around me.
“Flesh of my flesh,” he whispered, hot against my ear. His fingers drifted from my hair to my body, roaming like the goat on the hills of the Sacred Mount. I sighed, expelling the last remnants of that first air from my lungs—the last of the breath in them not drawn by me alone.
He was high-cheeked, this adam, his lower lip dipping down like a folded leaf that drips sweet water to thirsty mouths. His brow was a hawk, soaring above the high cliffs, his eyes blue lusters beneath the fan of his lashes. But it was his mouth that I always came back to, where my eyes liked best to fasten after taking in the shock of those eyes. Shadow ran along his jaw, obsidian dust clinging to the curve of it, drawing my eye to the plush flesh of his lips, again, again, again.
He touched my face and traced my mouth. I bit his finger. He gathered my hands and studied them, turning them over and back. He smelled my hair and lingered at my breasts and gazed curiously at the rest of me. When he was finished, he began all over again, tasting my cheek and the salt of my neck, tracing the instep of my foot with a fingertip.
Finally, he gathered me up, and my vision tilted to involve an altogether new realm: the earth and my brown legs upon it. I clutched at him. I seemed a giant, towering above the earth—a giant as tall as he. My first steps stuttered across the ground as the deer in the hour of its birth, but then I pushed his hands away. My legs, coltish and lean, found their vigor as he urged me, walking far too fast, to keep up. He made for the orchard, and I bolted after him with a surge of strength and another of my squawking sounds. Then we were running—through grasses and over fledgling sloes, the dark wool of my hair flying behind me.
We raced across the valley floor, and my new world blurred around me: hyssop and poppy, anemone, narcissus, and lily. Roses grew on the foothills amidst the caper and myrtle.
A blur beside me: the long-bodied great cat. I slowed, distracted by her fluidity, the smooth curve of her head as she tilted it to my outstretched hand. I fell to the ground, twining my arms around her, fingers sliding along her pelt. Her tongue was rough—unlike the adam’s—and she rumbled as she rolled against me.
Far ahead, the adam called. Overhead, a hawk circled for a closer look. The fallow deer at a nearby stream lifted her head.
The adam called again, wordlessly: longing and exuberance. I got up and began to run, the lioness at my heels. I was fast—nearly as fast as she. Exhilaration rose from my lungs in quick pants—in laughter. Then, with a burst, she was beyond me.
She was gone by the time the adam caught me up in his arms. His hands stroked my back, his lips, my shoulder. I marveled at his skin—how smooth, how very warm it was.
“You are magnificent,” he said, burying his face against me. “Ah, Isha—woman, taken from man!”
I said nothing; although I understood his meaning, I did not know his words. I knew with certainty and no notion of conceit, though, that he was right.
At the river he showed me how he cupped his hands to drink, and then cupped them again for me. I lowered my head and drank as a carp peered baldy from the shallows up at me.
We entered the water. I gasped as it tickled the backs of my knees and hot hairs under my arms, swirling about my waist as though around a staunch rock as our toes skimmed a multitude of pebbles. I wrapped my arm around his shoulders.
“All of this: water,” he said, grunting a little bit as he swam toward the middle of the river where it widened into a broad swath across the valley floor. “Here—the current.”
“Water,” I said, understanding in the moment I spoke it the element in all its forms—from the lake fed by the river to the high springs that flow from the abyss of the Mount. I felt the pull of it as though it had a gravity all its own—as though it could sweep me out to the cold depths of the lake and lull me by the tides of the moon.
From the river I could see the high walls of our cradle: the great southern Mount rising to heaven, and to the north, the foothills that became the long spine of a range that arched toward the great lake to the west.
I knew even then that this was a place set apart from the unseen lands to the north, the alluvial plain to the south, the great waters to the east and far to the west.
It was set apart solely because we dwelt in it.
But we were not alone. I could see them, after a time, even as we left the river and lay upon its banks. I saw them in sidelong glances when I looked at something else: a sunspot caught in the eye, a ripple in the air, a shock of light where there should be only shadow. And so I knew there were other beings, too.
The adam, who studied me, said nothing. We did not know their names.
The first voice I heard urging me to wake had not been the man’s. Now I felt the presence of it near me, closer than the air, than even the adam’s arms around me.
I returned the man’s strange amazement, taken by his smooth, dark skin, the narrowness of his hips, his strange sex. He was warmer than I, as though he had absorbed the heat of the sun, and I laid my cheek against his flat breasts and listened to the changeling beat of his heart. My limbs, so fresh to me, grew heavy. As languor overtook me, I retreated from the sight of my lovely, alien world.
Perhaps in closing my eyes, I would return to the place I had been before.
For the first time since waking, I hoped not.
I slept to the familiar thrum of his heart as insects made sounds like sleepy twitches through the waning day.
When I woke, his cheek was resting against the top of my head. Emotion streamed from his heart, though his lips were silent.
Gratitude.
I am the treasure mined from the rock, the gem prized from the mount.
He stirred only when I did and released me with great reluctance. By then the sun had moved along the length of our valley. My stomach murmured.
He led me to the orchard and fed me the firm flesh of plums, biting carefully around the pits and feeding the pieces to me until juice ran down our chins and bees came to sample it. He kissed my fingers and hands and laid his cheek against my palms.
That evening we lay in a bower of hyssop and rushes—a bower, I realized, that he must have made it on a day before this one.
A day before I existed.
We observed together the changing sky as it cooled gold and russet and purple, finally anointing the clay earth red.
Taken from me. Flesh of my flesh. At last. I heard the timbre of his voice in my head in my last waking moment. Marvel and wonder were upon his lips as he kissed my closing eyes.
I knew then he would do anything for me.
That night I dreamed of blackness. Black, greater than the depths of the river or the great abyss beneath the lake.
From within that nothingness there came a voice that was not a voice, that was neither sound nor word but volition and command and genesis. And from the voice, a word that was no word but the language of power and genesis and fruition.
There! A mote spark—a light first so small as the tip of a pine needle. It exploded past the periphery of my dreaming vision, obliterating the dark. The heavens were vast in an instant, stretching without cease to the edges of eternity.
I careened past new bodies that tugged me in every direction; even the tiniest particles possessed their own gravity. From each of them came the same concert, that symphony of energy and light.
I came to stand upon the earth. It was a great welter of water, the surface of it ablaze with the refracted light of heavens upon heavens. It shook my every fiber, like a string that is plucked and allowed to resonate forever.
I was galvanized, made anew, thrumming that inaugural sound: the yawning of eternity.
Amidst it all came the unmistakable command:
Wake!
I have seen paradise and ruin. I have known bliss and terror.
I have walked with God.
And I know that God made the heart the most fragile and resilient of organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber.
I still recall my first moment of consciousness—an awareness I’ve never seen in the eyes of any of my own children at birth: the sheer ignorance and genius of consciousness, when we know nothing and accept everything.
Of course, the memory of that waking moment is fainter now, like the smell of the soil of that garden, like the leaves of the fig tree in Eden after dawn—dew and leaf green. It fades with that sense of something once tasted on the tip of the tongue, savored now in memory, replaced by the taste of something similar but never quite the same.
His breath a lost sough, the scent of earth and leaf mold that was his sweaty skin has faded too quickly. So like an Eden dawn—dew on fig leaves.
His eyes were blue, my Adam’s.
How I celebrated that color, shrouded now in shriveled eyelids—he who was never intended to have even a wrinkle! But even as I bend to smooth his cheek, my hair has become a white waterfall upon his Eden—flesh and loins that gave life to so many.
I think for a moment that I hear the One and that he is weeping. It is the first time I have heard him in so long, and my heart cries out: He is dead! My father, my brother, my love!
I envy the earth that envelopes him. I envy the dust that comes of him and my children who sow and eat of it.
This language of Adam’s—the word that meant merely “man” before it was his name—given him by God himself, is now mine. And this is my love song. I will craft these words into the likeness of the man before I, too, return to the earth of Adam’s bosom.
My story has been told in only the barest of terms. It is time you heard it all. It is my testament to the strength of the heart, which has such capacity for joy, such space for sorrow, like a vessel that fills and fills without bursting.
My seasons are nearly as many as a thousand. So now listen, sons, and hear me, daughters. I, Havah, fashioned by God of Adam say this:
In the beginning, there was God . . .
But for me, there was Adam.
The Garden
Chapter 1
A whisper in my ear: Wake!
Blue. A sea awash with nothing but a drifting bit of down, flotsam on an invisible current. I closed my eyes. Light illuminated the thin tissues of my eyelids.
A bird trilled. Near my ear: the percussive buzz of an insect. Overhead, tree boughs stirred in the warming air.
I lay on a soft bed of herbs and grass that tickled my cheek, my shoulders, and the arch of my foot, whispering sibilant secrets up to the trees.
From here, I felt the thrum of the sap in the stem; the pulsing veins of the vine; the beat of my heart in euphony with hundreds more around me; the movement of the earth a thousand miles beneath.
I sighed as one returning to sleep, to retreat to the place I had been before, the realm of silence and bliss—wherever that is.
Wake!
I opened my eyes again upon the milling blue, saw it spliced by the flight of a bird, chevron in the sky.
This time, the voice came not to my ear, but directly to my stirring mind: Wake!
There was amusement in it.
I knew nothing of where or what I was, did not understand the polyphony around me or the wide expanse like a blue eternity before me.
But I woke and knew I was alive.
A rustle, a groan practically in my ear. I twitched at a stirring against my hip. A moment later, a touch drifted across a belly I did not yet know I owned, soft as a leaf skittering along the ground.
A face obscured my vision. I screamed. Not with fear—I was no acquaintance of fear—nor with startlement, because I had been aware of the presence already, but because it was the only statement that came to lips as artless as mine.
The face disappeared and returned, blinking into my own, the blue above captured in twin pools . Then, like a gush of water from a rock, gladness thrilled my heart. But its source was not me.
At last! It came, unspoken—a different source than the voice before—the words thrust jubilantly to the sky: “At last!”
He was up on legs like the trunks of sturdy saplings, beating at the earth with his feet. He thumped his chest and shouted to the sun and clapped his hands. “At last!” he cried, his laughter like warm clay between the toes. He shook his shoulders and stomped the grass, slapping his chest as he shouted again and again. Though I did not understand the utterance, I knew its meaning at once: joy and exultation at something longed for suddenly found.
I tried to mimic his sound; it came out as a squawk and then a panting laugh. Overhead, a lark chattered an extravagant address. I squeaked a shrill reply. The face lowered to mine, and the man’s arms wrapped, womb-tight, around me.
“Flesh of my flesh,” he whispered, hot against my ear. His fingers drifted from my hair to my body, roaming like the goat on the hills of the Sacred Mount. I sighed, expelling the last remnants of that first air from my lungs—the last of the breath in them not drawn by me alone.
He was high-cheeked, this adam, his lower lip dipping down like a folded leaf that drips sweet water to thirsty mouths. His brow was a hawk, soaring above the high cliffs, his eyes blue lusters beneath the fan of his lashes. But it was his mouth that I always came back to, where my eyes liked best to fasten after taking in the shock of those eyes. Shadow ran along his jaw, obsidian dust clinging to the curve of it, drawing my eye to the plush flesh of his lips, again, again, again.
He touched my face and traced my mouth. I bit his finger. He gathered my hands and studied them, turning them over and back. He smelled my hair and lingered at my breasts and gazed curiously at the rest of me. When he was finished, he began all over again, tasting my cheek and the salt of my neck, tracing the instep of my foot with a fingertip.
Finally, he gathered me up, and my vision tilted to involve an altogether new realm: the earth and my brown legs upon it. I clutched at him. I seemed a giant, towering above the earth—a giant as tall as he. My first steps stuttered across the ground as the deer in the hour of its birth, but then I pushed his hands away. My legs, coltish and lean, found their vigor as he urged me, walking far too fast, to keep up. He made for the orchard, and I bolted after him with a surge of strength and another of my squawking sounds. Then we were running—through grasses and over fledgling sloes, the dark wool of my hair flying behind me.
We raced across the valley floor, and my new world blurred around me: hyssop and poppy, anemone, narcissus, and lily. Roses grew on the foothills amidst the caper and myrtle.
A blur beside me: the long-bodied great cat. I slowed, distracted by her fluidity, the smooth curve of her head as she tilted it to my outstretched hand. I fell to the ground, twining my arms around her, fingers sliding along her pelt. Her tongue was rough—unlike the adam’s—and she rumbled as she rolled against me.
Far ahead, the adam called. Overhead, a hawk circled for a closer look. The fallow deer at a nearby stream lifted her head.
The adam called again, wordlessly: longing and exuberance. I got up and began to run, the lioness at my heels. I was fast—nearly as fast as she. Exhilaration rose from my lungs in quick pants—in laughter. Then, with a burst, she was beyond me.
She was gone by the time the adam caught me up in his arms. His hands stroked my back, his lips, my shoulder. I marveled at his skin—how smooth, how very warm it was.
“You are magnificent,” he said, burying his face against me. “Ah, Isha—woman, taken from man!”
I said nothing; although I understood his meaning, I did not know his words. I knew with certainty and no notion of conceit, though, that he was right.
At the river he showed me how he cupped his hands to drink, and then cupped them again for me. I lowered my head and drank as a carp peered baldy from the shallows up at me.
We entered the water. I gasped as it tickled the backs of my knees and hot hairs under my arms, swirling about my waist as though around a staunch rock as our toes skimmed a multitude of pebbles. I wrapped my arm around his shoulders.
“All of this: water,” he said, grunting a little bit as he swam toward the middle of the river where it widened into a broad swath across the valley floor. “Here—the current.”
“Water,” I said, understanding in the moment I spoke it the element in all its forms—from the lake fed by the river to the high springs that flow from the abyss of the Mount. I felt the pull of it as though it had a gravity all its own—as though it could sweep me out to the cold depths of the lake and lull me by the tides of the moon.
From the river I could see the high walls of our cradle: the great southern Mount rising to heaven, and to the north, the foothills that became the long spine of a range that arched toward the great lake to the west.
I knew even then that this was a place set apart from the unseen lands to the north, the alluvial plain to the south, the great waters to the east and far to the west.
It was set apart solely because we dwelt in it.
But we were not alone. I could see them, after a time, even as we left the river and lay upon its banks. I saw them in sidelong glances when I looked at something else: a sunspot caught in the eye, a ripple in the air, a shock of light where there should be only shadow. And so I knew there were other beings, too.
The adam, who studied me, said nothing. We did not know their names.
The first voice I heard urging me to wake had not been the man’s. Now I felt the presence of it near me, closer than the air, than even the adam’s arms around me.
I returned the man’s strange amazement, taken by his smooth, dark skin, the narrowness of his hips, his strange sex. He was warmer than I, as though he had absorbed the heat of the sun, and I laid my cheek against his flat breasts and listened to the changeling beat of his heart. My limbs, so fresh to me, grew heavy. As languor overtook me, I retreated from the sight of my lovely, alien world.
Perhaps in closing my eyes, I would return to the place I had been before.
For the first time since waking, I hoped not.
I slept to the familiar thrum of his heart as insects made sounds like sleepy twitches through the waning day.
When I woke, his cheek was resting against the top of my head. Emotion streamed from his heart, though his lips were silent.
Gratitude.
I am the treasure mined from the rock, the gem prized from the mount.
He stirred only when I did and released me with great reluctance. By then the sun had moved along the length of our valley. My stomach murmured.
He led me to the orchard and fed me the firm flesh of plums, biting carefully around the pits and feeding the pieces to me until juice ran down our chins and bees came to sample it. He kissed my fingers and hands and laid his cheek against my palms.
That evening we lay in a bower of hyssop and rushes—a bower, I realized, that he must have made it on a day before this one.
A day before I existed.
We observed together the changing sky as it cooled gold and russet and purple, finally anointing the clay earth red.
Taken from me. Flesh of my flesh. At last. I heard the timbre of his voice in my head in my last waking moment. Marvel and wonder were upon his lips as he kissed my closing eyes.
I knew then he would do anything for me.
That night I dreamed of blackness. Black, greater than the depths of the river or the great abyss beneath the lake.
From within that nothingness there came a voice that was not a voice, that was neither sound nor word but volition and command and genesis. And from the voice, a word that was no word but the language of power and genesis and fruition.
There! A mote spark—a light first so small as the tip of a pine needle. It exploded past the periphery of my dreaming vision, obliterating the dark. The heavens were vast in an instant, stretching without cease to the edges of eternity.
I careened past new bodies that tugged me in every direction; even the tiniest particles possessed their own gravity. From each of them came the same concert, that symphony of energy and light.
I came to stand upon the earth. It was a great welter of water, the surface of it ablaze with the refracted light of heavens upon heavens. It shook my every fiber, like a string that is plucked and allowed to resonate forever.
I was galvanized, made anew, thrumming that inaugural sound: the yawning of eternity.
Amidst it all came the unmistakable command:
Wake!
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
I am not the Queen of the Universe
Does that depress you as much as it depresses me?
Right.
So I'm the only one who thinks I should be the Queen of the Universe.
Can I just ask why I wasn't included when they started taking applications? And who are "they" anyway? And do "they" really know who is suitable to be Queen of the Universe?
I think not.
Otherwise, I would be the Queen of the Universe.
Which means I would get everything I wanted, right?
But would that make me have responsibilities and stuff?
Maybe I'll have to think about this Queen of the Universe thing, just in case "they" finally get around to nominating me.
Right.
So I'm the only one who thinks I should be the Queen of the Universe.
Can I just ask why I wasn't included when they started taking applications? And who are "they" anyway? And do "they" really know who is suitable to be Queen of the Universe?
I think not.
Otherwise, I would be the Queen of the Universe.
Which means I would get everything I wanted, right?
But would that make me have responsibilities and stuff?
Maybe I'll have to think about this Queen of the Universe thing, just in case "they" finally get around to nominating me.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Meaning
I've been trying to think of something to blog since Christmas and am coming up flat. Ugh. For a writer, I feel like a failure. The idea pool is dried up. I just can't think of anything meaningful to share with anyone.
At the moment, I'm pretty ashamed of the fact that I've made no progress on anything of significance over the past few days. Well, except for the fact that my house is clean, which was only accomplished by screaming like a shrew at everyone in the house and having to sit and cry in my bedroom because I felt so sorry for myself at having to live with such pigs. Charming, I know. But that's my winning personality.
Mostly, though, I've done nothing. Tried to knit a few times, but am really irritated at the fact that I can't make this one stitch look right, so I've knitted and torn out this piece about fifty times. And no, that's not an exaggeration, it's a sign of what an obsessive perfectionist I am. Which is why, if I decide to make something for someone, I'll tell them when I give it to them, and not before, so they don't expect it anytime soon. At this rate, I'll have the scarf I'm knitting done sometime before the second coming.
I've also brewed a few pots of tea in my new teapot. LOVE it, except I've realized that I need a tea cozy to keep it warm. Which means I need to drastically improve my knitting skills, because the patterns are a little more complicated than I have ability for.
I've written a couple of workshop proposals, put together some marketing and planning stuff for work, played a little Crackrat (which is so irritating with the tickets and XL garbage), walked the dog (twice!), taught a tax class (and let's not go into what a total snafu that was, thanks to the tech team forgetting that I still have another two weeks of class), tried to research why my little one has such bad eczema all of a sudden, brought yummies to the neighbors, stressed over the paperwork nightmare I still have to sort, thought about putting things together to refinance the house, and sat very firmly on my backside, making the Danica's butt shaped impression in the couch even more noticeable.
And in it, I have absolutely no satisfaction, because when it all comes down to it, none of it matters. This time next year, when I'm sitting in my even more butt-shaped spot on the couch, will I even remember any of this junk? Will anyone? And no, this isn't some, oh I'm so depressed thing. It's not that I'm depressed. I just wish I could be doing something more valuable right now.
This afternoon, I laid on on the couch with the girlies watching a My Little Pony movie. Riveting stuff. I pondered my whole "why aren't I doing something more meaningful" dilemma. I napped for a bit, until the little one woke me up, saying, "Mom! You're supposed to be watching with us, not sleeping." And as I stood corrected, I realized that right now, the most meaningful thing I need to be doing is sitting right here, watching this cheesy movie, and letting my little girls know that I am fully present in their lives.
When I was a little girl, the thing I wanted most was to have a mom and dad who were active in my life. They were there, sure, but I don't ever remember doing anything with my mom. She was always too busy. My dad lived on the other side of the country, so my time with him was limited. All I wanted was to be known and loved by them.
And so here I am, looking at my two little girls, mad because I haven't done anything of significance lately, and I realized that I've done some of the most meaningful things anyone can do with a person. During my knitting nightmare, the little one sat on my lap with her own needles and yarn, trying to make the mother of all baby blankets for her dollies. She saw me try, fail, and try again. We shared some of my special tea. I gave her a bath with oatmeal in it, hoping to ease the eczema (didn't work), and then, because her new Barbies had to have a bath with her, helped her clean all the oatmeal out of their hair. I made curlies in her hair, which meant we had dinner a little later than I'd planned, but it made her feel so pretty. I listened to the girls talk at dinner about the animal games they'd made up. I wore the ugly and extremely itchy bead necklace my little one made out of pipe cleaners and plastic beads because she thought it would make me a beautiful mommy princess.
What is the meaning of what I do? What am I accomplishing?
I used to have grand dreams of all the great things I was going to do. Sometimes I get frustrated because I'm not doing any of it. Occasionally, the voice of the college administrator rings in the back of my head as I hear her condescendingly tell me that I'm wasting my education.
But as I look at the little girl sleeping next to me, all of those voices stop making me so crazy. What does it matter if I save the world only to lose the most precious thing on earth?
I heard someone say somewhere that your calling is to do the thing that God has put into your life at that moment to the very best of your ability. Right now, God has put a couple of little girls in my life. He made me to be their mommy. I was created to be their mom. I keep saying that with a high level of awe, because really, it's about the most awesome thing I can think of. A very clear something that God has said, "here, do this."
And maybe, despite my earlier lamentations about having nothing meaningful to share, I've just shared the most meaningful thing God has shown me in a long time.
At the moment, I'm pretty ashamed of the fact that I've made no progress on anything of significance over the past few days. Well, except for the fact that my house is clean, which was only accomplished by screaming like a shrew at everyone in the house and having to sit and cry in my bedroom because I felt so sorry for myself at having to live with such pigs. Charming, I know. But that's my winning personality.
Mostly, though, I've done nothing. Tried to knit a few times, but am really irritated at the fact that I can't make this one stitch look right, so I've knitted and torn out this piece about fifty times. And no, that's not an exaggeration, it's a sign of what an obsessive perfectionist I am. Which is why, if I decide to make something for someone, I'll tell them when I give it to them, and not before, so they don't expect it anytime soon. At this rate, I'll have the scarf I'm knitting done sometime before the second coming.
I've also brewed a few pots of tea in my new teapot. LOVE it, except I've realized that I need a tea cozy to keep it warm. Which means I need to drastically improve my knitting skills, because the patterns are a little more complicated than I have ability for.
I've written a couple of workshop proposals, put together some marketing and planning stuff for work, played a little Crackrat (which is so irritating with the tickets and XL garbage), walked the dog (twice!), taught a tax class (and let's not go into what a total snafu that was, thanks to the tech team forgetting that I still have another two weeks of class), tried to research why my little one has such bad eczema all of a sudden, brought yummies to the neighbors, stressed over the paperwork nightmare I still have to sort, thought about putting things together to refinance the house, and sat very firmly on my backside, making the Danica's butt shaped impression in the couch even more noticeable.
And in it, I have absolutely no satisfaction, because when it all comes down to it, none of it matters. This time next year, when I'm sitting in my even more butt-shaped spot on the couch, will I even remember any of this junk? Will anyone? And no, this isn't some, oh I'm so depressed thing. It's not that I'm depressed. I just wish I could be doing something more valuable right now.
This afternoon, I laid on on the couch with the girlies watching a My Little Pony movie. Riveting stuff. I pondered my whole "why aren't I doing something more meaningful" dilemma. I napped for a bit, until the little one woke me up, saying, "Mom! You're supposed to be watching with us, not sleeping." And as I stood corrected, I realized that right now, the most meaningful thing I need to be doing is sitting right here, watching this cheesy movie, and letting my little girls know that I am fully present in their lives.
When I was a little girl, the thing I wanted most was to have a mom and dad who were active in my life. They were there, sure, but I don't ever remember doing anything with my mom. She was always too busy. My dad lived on the other side of the country, so my time with him was limited. All I wanted was to be known and loved by them.
And so here I am, looking at my two little girls, mad because I haven't done anything of significance lately, and I realized that I've done some of the most meaningful things anyone can do with a person. During my knitting nightmare, the little one sat on my lap with her own needles and yarn, trying to make the mother of all baby blankets for her dollies. She saw me try, fail, and try again. We shared some of my special tea. I gave her a bath with oatmeal in it, hoping to ease the eczema (didn't work), and then, because her new Barbies had to have a bath with her, helped her clean all the oatmeal out of their hair. I made curlies in her hair, which meant we had dinner a little later than I'd planned, but it made her feel so pretty. I listened to the girls talk at dinner about the animal games they'd made up. I wore the ugly and extremely itchy bead necklace my little one made out of pipe cleaners and plastic beads because she thought it would make me a beautiful mommy princess.
What is the meaning of what I do? What am I accomplishing?
I used to have grand dreams of all the great things I was going to do. Sometimes I get frustrated because I'm not doing any of it. Occasionally, the voice of the college administrator rings in the back of my head as I hear her condescendingly tell me that I'm wasting my education.
But as I look at the little girl sleeping next to me, all of those voices stop making me so crazy. What does it matter if I save the world only to lose the most precious thing on earth?
I heard someone say somewhere that your calling is to do the thing that God has put into your life at that moment to the very best of your ability. Right now, God has put a couple of little girls in my life. He made me to be their mommy. I was created to be their mom. I keep saying that with a high level of awe, because really, it's about the most awesome thing I can think of. A very clear something that God has said, "here, do this."
And maybe, despite my earlier lamentations about having nothing meaningful to share, I've just shared the most meaningful thing God has shown me in a long time.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Merry Christmas!
With one hour and four minutes left to the holiday, I feel like I can still make this post to wish all my blog friends a very Merry Christmas.
This year, our family had one of the best Christmases ever.
Absolutely nothing special happened.
Which is why I think it was the best.
Christmas Eve, we stayed home and had a simple and quiet candlelit dinner. I made potted beef, which is a traditional meal my Italian grandmother used to make for Christmas. I can't confirm it's an actual Italian dish, and in fact, can't find a recipe that matches what we make, so I have no idea what it would be called. Still, it was really wonderful to enjoy a family tradition from my side of the family. Then, we read the Christmas story from the Bible and had communion for the first time as a family. It was really wonderful. My eight year old loved it and the four year old sang Christmas carols about Jesus being on fire. But that's pretty typical for our family and I think that was part of the charm.
Then, we let the girls open one gift each, and they both ended up pulling out gifts they loved. We were bratty to the 8 year old and had wrapped a stuffed dragon with the tail sticking out of the box, and it was fun messing with them over the present.
After the girls played with the new toys, they went to bed and I worked on cleaning the rest of the house. This was the first Christmas I can remember where I wasn't up until midnight wrapping gifts. Number one because we bought less, number two because we weren't traveling (wrapped gifts take up more space), and number three because I've been doing more wrapping as I go. Believe it or not, cleaning house was really relaxing for me... it felt really good to do something nice for myself. And to realize that I was going to wake up in the morning and do nothing more than enjoy our time as a family. I even pre-prepped breakfast so all I'd have to do is pop it into the oven.
Oddly enough, I couldn't sleep Christmas Eve. Partially because I was so excited to see the kids and how they'd react to their gifts. Mostly because I drank half a Dr. Pepper and caffeine at night is never a good idea for me.
The kiddos got up before the sun. Those of you who know me well know this, in my opinion, is worse than Chinese water torture. But I got up anyway, and it was super cool to see how much they loved their presents. We took our time, savoring the unwrapping of the gifts. We really hadn't spent all that much money... most of the gifts were super on sale or secondhand. I buy throughout the year, so I'd gotten most of my shopping done early. But the girls loved them and thought they were the best ever. Love that!
I did get a nap in, talked to the out of town fam, and only had to make a few items to take to my FIL's girlfriend's house for the family dinner. She has cats, so the kiddo and I had to mega dose on allergy meds, but it was worth it. We had a delicious, simple dinner that everyone made a small portion of, so it wasn't a lot of work for anyone.
The gifts were great, and it was fun to see how much everyone loved them... my FIL and I have talked a lot about more intentional gift giving and de-junking our lives. It was so cool to see how everyone accomplished that. I got two amazing presents that bear mentioning. One is a teapot with built in tea press and some loose tea. I've been wanting something like that for a long time, so I'm really excited about it. The other was from my SIL. This year, when I took up knitting, she got excited because she's also a knitter. She gave me a beautiful knitting basket (and I've been thinking of buying myself one at an after Christmas sale) filled with all sorts of knitting stuff. I've already read the knitting book, am using one of the patterns to knit a scarf with the yarn and needles she bought me.
I did have a mild allergy attack, but the meds really kept it from being horrible, and once I got home, had a cup of tea, and took a bath, I'm feeling 100%, and ready to get a little shut eye.
I am convinced that because our family took so much time to simply our holiday, we made it a really enjoyable time. I think this is going to be our new Christmas tradition. The productions most of us turn it into is just too much. And really, it's so not worth it. The girls got a number of lovely gifts, all things they wanted, but how can they play with them all at once? Watching them with their one gift Christmas Eve, it was apparent that they really are just as happy with one really good gift as they are with a hundred. I'd even be so bold as to argue that the one gift meant a lot more than getting just a bunch of stuff.
I'm not sure what your holiday looked like. But I hope it was as lovely as ours.
This year, our family had one of the best Christmases ever.
Absolutely nothing special happened.
Which is why I think it was the best.
Christmas Eve, we stayed home and had a simple and quiet candlelit dinner. I made potted beef, which is a traditional meal my Italian grandmother used to make for Christmas. I can't confirm it's an actual Italian dish, and in fact, can't find a recipe that matches what we make, so I have no idea what it would be called. Still, it was really wonderful to enjoy a family tradition from my side of the family. Then, we read the Christmas story from the Bible and had communion for the first time as a family. It was really wonderful. My eight year old loved it and the four year old sang Christmas carols about Jesus being on fire. But that's pretty typical for our family and I think that was part of the charm.
Then, we let the girls open one gift each, and they both ended up pulling out gifts they loved. We were bratty to the 8 year old and had wrapped a stuffed dragon with the tail sticking out of the box, and it was fun messing with them over the present.
After the girls played with the new toys, they went to bed and I worked on cleaning the rest of the house. This was the first Christmas I can remember where I wasn't up until midnight wrapping gifts. Number one because we bought less, number two because we weren't traveling (wrapped gifts take up more space), and number three because I've been doing more wrapping as I go. Believe it or not, cleaning house was really relaxing for me... it felt really good to do something nice for myself. And to realize that I was going to wake up in the morning and do nothing more than enjoy our time as a family. I even pre-prepped breakfast so all I'd have to do is pop it into the oven.
Oddly enough, I couldn't sleep Christmas Eve. Partially because I was so excited to see the kids and how they'd react to their gifts. Mostly because I drank half a Dr. Pepper and caffeine at night is never a good idea for me.
The kiddos got up before the sun. Those of you who know me well know this, in my opinion, is worse than Chinese water torture. But I got up anyway, and it was super cool to see how much they loved their presents. We took our time, savoring the unwrapping of the gifts. We really hadn't spent all that much money... most of the gifts were super on sale or secondhand. I buy throughout the year, so I'd gotten most of my shopping done early. But the girls loved them and thought they were the best ever. Love that!
I did get a nap in, talked to the out of town fam, and only had to make a few items to take to my FIL's girlfriend's house for the family dinner. She has cats, so the kiddo and I had to mega dose on allergy meds, but it was worth it. We had a delicious, simple dinner that everyone made a small portion of, so it wasn't a lot of work for anyone.
The gifts were great, and it was fun to see how much everyone loved them... my FIL and I have talked a lot about more intentional gift giving and de-junking our lives. It was so cool to see how everyone accomplished that. I got two amazing presents that bear mentioning. One is a teapot with built in tea press and some loose tea. I've been wanting something like that for a long time, so I'm really excited about it. The other was from my SIL. This year, when I took up knitting, she got excited because she's also a knitter. She gave me a beautiful knitting basket (and I've been thinking of buying myself one at an after Christmas sale) filled with all sorts of knitting stuff. I've already read the knitting book, am using one of the patterns to knit a scarf with the yarn and needles she bought me.
I did have a mild allergy attack, but the meds really kept it from being horrible, and once I got home, had a cup of tea, and took a bath, I'm feeling 100%, and ready to get a little shut eye.
I am convinced that because our family took so much time to simply our holiday, we made it a really enjoyable time. I think this is going to be our new Christmas tradition. The productions most of us turn it into is just too much. And really, it's so not worth it. The girls got a number of lovely gifts, all things they wanted, but how can they play with them all at once? Watching them with their one gift Christmas Eve, it was apparent that they really are just as happy with one really good gift as they are with a hundred. I'd even be so bold as to argue that the one gift meant a lot more than getting just a bunch of stuff.
I'm not sure what your holiday looked like. But I hope it was as lovely as ours.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Winter of Candy Canes by Debbie Viguié
It is time to play a Wild Card! Every now and then, a book that I have chosen to read is going to pop up as a FIRST Wild Card Tour. Get dealt into the game! (Just click the button!) Wild Card Tours feature an author and his/her book's FIRST chapter!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Zondervan (October 1, 2008)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Debbie Viguié has been writing for most of her life. She has experimented with poetry and nonfiction, but her true passion lies in writing novels.She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing from UC Davis. While at Davis she met her husband, Scott, at auditions for a play. It was love at first sight.
Debbie and Scott now live on the island of Kauai. When Debbie is not writing and Scott has time off they love to indulge their passion for theme parks.
The Sweet Seasons Novels:
The Summer of Cotton Candy
The Fall of Candy Corn
The Winter of Candy Canes
The Spring of Candy Apples
Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $ 9.99
Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Zondervan (October 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0310717523
ISBN-13: 978-0310717522
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Candace Thompson was once again eye-to-eye with Lloyd Peterson, hiring manager for The Zone theme park. This time, though, she felt far more confident. She had already spent her summer working as a cotton candy vendor, and she had worked one of the mazes for the annual Halloween event. She had even saved the park from saboteurs.
Now she was back, and this time she was interviewing for a job working the Christmas events at the park. Surely after everything she had done for the Scare event, she had nothing to worry about. She tucked a strand of red hair back behind her ear as she gazed intently at the man across from her.
“So you want to work Holly Daze?” he asked.
She nodded. Christmas at The Zone was a big deal, and the park began its official celebrations the day after Thanksgiving.
“You keep hiring on for short bursts of time and then leaving. Do you have some sort of problem committing to things?” he asked, staring hard at her.
She was stunned, but answered, “I don’t have any problem with commitment. I signed on to do specific things, and the jobs ended. That’s not my fault. I didn’t quit.”
“So, you plan on making a habit of this?” he demanded. “Are you going to show up here again in a -couple of months expecting me to give you some kind of job for spring break?”
“No, I — ”
“I know your type,” he said, standing up abruptly. “You’re just a party girl. No commitments . . . no cares . . . just grab some quick cash and get out. You think you can handle Holly Daze? Well, you can’t! You’re weak and a quitter. You’re going to bail on me as soon as your school vacation starts, and then what? Well, let me tell you, missy. You aren’t wanted here. So just pack your bags and get out!”
By the end of his tirade, he was shouting, eyes bulging behind his glasses and tie swinging wildly as he shook his finger under her nose. Candace recoiled, sure that he had finally flipped out. I’m going to end up as a headline: Girl Murdered by Stressed-Out Recruiter, she thought wildly. Well, I’m not going down without a fight! She jumped to her feet and put some distance between her and the wildly wagging finger.
“You need to calm down!” she said, projecting her voice like her drama teacher had taught her. Her voice seemed to boom in the tiny office. “Pull yourself together. You’re a representative of this theme park, and there is no call to insult me. Furthermore, I’m not a quitter. I’ll work for the entire Christmas season. Then the next time I come in here, I’ll expect you to treat me with some respect. Do you even realize what I’ve done for this park so far? Seriously. Take a chill pill.”
She stopped speaking when she realized that he had gone completely quiet. She held her breath, wondering when the next explosion was going to come. Instead, he sat down abruptly and waved her back to her chair.
“Very good. You passed the test,” he said, picking up a pen.
“What test?” she asked, edging her way back into the chair.
“The ultimate test. You’re going to be one of Santa’s elves.”
“Doesn’t Santa, you know, have his own elves?” she asked, still not sure that he was completely in charge of his senses.
“Of course Santa has his own elves. However, when he’s here at The Zone we supply him with courtesy elves so that they can continue making toys at the North Pole,” Mr. Peterson told her.
“So, I’m going to be a courtesy elf?” she asked.
He nodded and handed her a single sheet of paper. “Sign this.”
She took it. “What? Just one thing to sign?” She had expected another huge stack of forms that would leave her hand cramped for hours afterward.
He nodded curtly. “You’re now in our system as a regular seasonal employee. All of your other paperwork transfers.”
“Regular seasonal” sounded like some kind of contradiction to her, but she was still not entirely convinced his outburst had been a test. She scanned it, signed her name, and then handed it back to him.
“Good. Report to wardrobe on Saturday for your costume fitting,” he said.
“Okay, thank you,” she said, standing up and backing toward the door.
“Welcome back, Candy,” he said, smiling faintly.
“Thanks,” she said, before bolting out the door.
As soon as she was outside the building, she whipped out her cell phone and called her friend Josh, a fellow employee of The Zone.
“Well?” he asked when he picked up.
“I think Mr. Peterson has seriously lost it,” she said. “He totally flipped out on me.”
Josh laughed. “Let me guess. You’re going to be an elf.”
“So he was serious? That was some whacked-out test?”
“Yeah. Elves are considered a class-one stress position, and it can get pretty intense.”
“How hard can it be to be an elf?” she asked.
She was rewarded by a burst of laughter on the other end.
“Josh, what is it you’re not telling me?”
He just kept laughing.
“Okay, seriously. You were the one who convinced me to work Holly Daze. I think it’s only fair you tell me whatever it is I need to know.”
“Sorry!” he gasped. She wasn’t sure if he was apologizing or refusing to tell her.
A girl bounced around the corner and slammed into Candace.
“Josh, I’ll call you later,” she said, hanging up.
“Sorry,” Becca apologized.
Becca was one of Candace’s other friends from the park, one who had some sort of bizarre allergy to sugar that made her uncontrollably hyper. Candace looked suspiciously at Becca. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were glistening, and she was hopping from one foot to the other.
“You didn’t have sugar, did you?” Candace asked, fear ripping through her.
“No! Promise,” Becca said.
“Then what gives?”
“Roger made me laugh really hard,” Becca explained.
Roger had a crush on Becca and had wanted to ask her out since Halloween. It hadn’t happened yet.
“Oh,” was all Candace could think to say.
“So, are you working Holly Daze?” Becca asked.
“Yeah. I’m going to be an elf.”
Suddenly, Becca went completely still, and the smile left her face. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why?” Candace asked.
Becca just shook her head. “I’ve gotta get back to the Muffin Mansion. I’ll catch you later.”
She hurried off, and Candace watched her go. Okay, now I know there’s something -people aren’t telling me.
She debated about following Becca and forcing her to spill, but instead she headed for the parking lot where her best friend Tamara was waiting. She walked through the Exploration Zone, one of the several themed areas in the park.
The Zone theme park was created and owned by John
Hanson, a former professional quarterback who believed in healthy competition at work and play. His theme park had several areas, or zones, where -people could compete with each other and themselves at just about anything. Almost everyone who worked at The Zone was called a referee. The exceptions were the costumed characters called mascots. Most of them, including Candace’s boyfriend, Kurt, were to be found in the History Zone. -People visiting the park were called players, and the areas of the park they could reach were called on field. Only refs could go off field.
Candace cut through an off field area to get to the referee parking lot. She waved at a few other -people she recognized from her time spent working there. Finally, she slid into her friend’s waiting car.
“So are you going to be the Christmas queen?” Tamara asked.
“What am I, Lucy VanPelt? There’s no Christmas queen in Charlie Brown’s Christmas play, and there’s no Christmas queen in The Zone,” Candace said.
Tamara fake pouted. “Are you sure? I think I’d make a beautiful Christmas queen.”
Candace laughed. Tamara was gorgeous, rich, and fun. Her whole family practically redefined the word wealthy, and, with her dark hair and olive skin, Tamara was usually the prettiest girl in any room. She didn’t let it go to her head, though. Anybody who knew Tamara would vote for her as Christmas queen.
“Although I think you would, they’re only hiring elves.”
“You’re going to be an elf?” Tamara smirked.
“Hey, it beats being a food cart vendor,” Candace said.
“But you’re so good at it. Cotton candy, candy corn . . . you can sell it all.”
“Thanks, I think. So, what are we doing tonight? Kurt’s going to swing by at six to pick us up.” Just mentioning her boyfriend’s name was enough to make Candace smile. She closed her eyes for just a minute and pictured him as she had first seen him — wearing a Lone Ranger costume. With his charm and piercing blue eyes, she had fallen for him right away.
“You told him my house, right?” Tamara said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Yeah. So, who’s this guy you’re taking?”
Tamara sighed. “Mark.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“Remember my cousin Tina?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she broke up with him over the summer, and he’s been all shattered since then. He won’t date other girls; he just mopes over her.”
“Attractive,” Candace said sarcastically.
“Tell me about it. Well, Tina asked me if I could help him get his confidence back and get over her or something.”
“A pity date? Are you kidding me? You want Kurt and I to double date with you on a pity date?”
“You don’t think I’m about to go by myself, do you? No way. That’s the best-friend creed. When you’re happy, I’m happy. When I’m miserable, you have to be too.”
“Great,” Candace said, rolling her eyes. “So, where are we going?”
“That’s the problem. I was thinking dinner, but then we’d have to talk, and frankly, I don’t want to hear him go on about Tina. Then I thought we could see a movie.”
“You wouldn’t have to talk to him,” Candace confirmed.
“Yeah, but what if — ”
“He tries to grab a hand or put his arm around you.”
“Exactly, and I don’t think me giving him a black eye was what Tina had in mind.”
“I guess that also rules out any kind of concert possibilities?” Candace asked wistfully.
“Yup. Sorry.”
“So, what did you come up with?”
“I was thinking . . . theme park?”
“No way. Kurt doesn’t like to spend his downtime there.”
“I thought he took you to that romantic dinner there over the summer.”
“It was the nicest restaurant he knew, and he got an employee discount.”
“Charming,” Tamara said.
“Plus, ever since we got trapped in there overnight, he’s been even more adamant about avoiding it when he’s off work.”
“I can’t believe you two get to be the stuff of urban legend, and you don’t even appreciate it.”
Candace sighed. It was true that she and Kurt had spent one of the most miserable nights of their relationship trapped inside the theme park. Urban legend, though, had since transformed the story so that they were supposedly chased through the park by a psycho killer. It was still embarrassing to have -people point at her and say that she was the one. Around Halloween she had given up trying to correct -people. They were going to believe what they wanted.
“Earth to Candace. Helloooo?”
“Sorry. So, what does that leave us with? Shopping?”
“No need to torture both our dates,” Tamara said.
“Then what?”
“I don’t — miniature golf!” Tamara suddenly shrieked, so loudly that Candace jumped and slammed her head into the roof of the car.
“Tam! Don’t scare me like that.”
“Sorry. Miniature golf. What do you think? Built-in talking points, lots of movement, and zero grabby potential.”
“I like it. I’ll have to borrow one of your jackets though.”
“At least you’ll have an actual excuse this time,” Tamara teased.
A few minutes later they were at Tamara’s house and upstairs raiding her wardrobe. As Tamara considered and discarded a fifth outfit, Candace threw up her hands.
“Maybe if you’d tell me what you’re looking for, I could help.”
“I’m looking for something, you know, nunlike.”
Candace stared at her friend for a moment before she burst out laughing. She fell to the floor, clutching her stomach as tears streamed down her face. Tamara crossed her arms and tapped her foot, and Candace just laughed harder.
“I don’t know why you think that’s so funny. You know I don’t go past kissing.”
“Tam, nuns can’t even do that. And if you’re looking for something that will completely hide your body, then you’re going to have to go to the mall instead of the closet. You don’t own anything that doesn’t say ‘look at me.’ I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
“Really? Maybe we should go to your house. Think I could find what I’m looking for in your closet?”
“Not since I started dating and mom made me throw out all my old camp T-shirts,” Candace said with a grin.
“Then hello, you’ve got no call to laugh.”
Candace stood up, stomach still aching from laughing so hard. “Tam, I’m not criticizing. I’m just telling you, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”
Tam reached into the closet. “Oh, yeah, what about this?” she asked, producing jeans and a black turtleneck.
“If you’re going for the secret agent look, it’s a good choice.”
Tamara threw the jeans at her, and Candace ducked.
“I could wear some black pants with this. Would that be too funereal?
“For a pity date? Go for it.”
Candace opted to borrow Tamara’s discarded jeans instead of wearing the skirt she had brought with her. They turned out to be slightly tighter on her than they were on Tam, and she had to admit when she paired them with her red scoop-neck top that she looked really good.
When Kurt arrived a few minutes later, he whistled when he saw her.
“Keep the jeans,” Tamara whispered to her. “Obviously, they work for you.”
Kurt then looked at Tamara and frowned slightly. “Did you just come from a funeral?”
“No, but thank you for thinking so,” Tamara said with a smirk.
“I don’t — ”
Candace put her finger over his lips. “Don’t ask,” she advised him.
He smiled and kissed her finger, which made her giggle.
The doorbell rang again, and Candace turned, eager to see the infamous Mark.
Tamara opened the door, and Candace sucked in her breath. Mark was gorgeous. He had auburn hair, piercing green eyes, and model-perfect features. He was almost as tall as Kurt, and he was stunning in khaki Dockers and a green Polo shirt.
“Hi,” he said, smiling.
Tamara glanced at her and rolled her eyes.
“Hi, Mark.”
Kurt drove, and Candace was quick to slide into the front seat with him, leaving Tamara and Mark to the back. She shook her head. Mark was not her idea of a pity date in any sense of the word. Maybe Tamara would come around if she actually talked to him.
They made it to the miniature golf course and were soon on the green. Candace got a hole in one on the first time up to putt, and Kurt gave her a huge reward kiss.
When they moved on to the next hole, Tamara whispered in her ear, “Thanks a lot. This is supposed to be a no grabby zone. Now Mark will be getting ideas.”
“Tam, you really need to relax a little.”
They made it through the course in record time, and Kurt gave Candace another kiss for winning by one stroke. After turning in their clubs, the guys headed inside to order pizza while Candace and Tamara went to the restroom.
“This date is the worst,” Tamara groaned once they were alone.
“What’s wrong with you? He’s gorgeous.”
“Really? I guess I just can’t see past the Tina mope.”
“What mope? He hasn’t even mentioned her, and he’s done nothing but smile all night. You should totally take him to Winter Formal.”
“No way. This is a one-date-only kind of thing. I’m not taking him to Winter Formal.”
“Fine. Suit yourself. I’m just telling you that if it weren’t for Kurt, I’d be taking him to Winter Formal.”
Tamara laughed.
“As if. There’s no way you’d ask a guy out.”
“I don’t know. You might be surprised.”
“It’s a moot point anyway. I’ll find someone to take.”
“You could always take Josh,” Candace suggested.
“You’re not setting me up with Josh, so just forget it.”
“Fine.”
“Find out for me, though, if Santa needs a Mrs. Claus,” Tamara said.
“You’re going to find some way to be the Christmas queen, aren’t you?” Candace asked.
“Even if I have to marry old Saint Nick.”
They both laughed.
Now she was back, and this time she was interviewing for a job working the Christmas events at the park. Surely after everything she had done for the Scare event, she had nothing to worry about. She tucked a strand of red hair back behind her ear as she gazed intently at the man across from her.
“So you want to work Holly Daze?” he asked.
She nodded. Christmas at The Zone was a big deal, and the park began its official celebrations the day after Thanksgiving.
“You keep hiring on for short bursts of time and then leaving. Do you have some sort of problem committing to things?” he asked, staring hard at her.
She was stunned, but answered, “I don’t have any problem with commitment. I signed on to do specific things, and the jobs ended. That’s not my fault. I didn’t quit.”
“So, you plan on making a habit of this?” he demanded. “Are you going to show up here again in a -couple of months expecting me to give you some kind of job for spring break?”
“No, I — ”
“I know your type,” he said, standing up abruptly. “You’re just a party girl. No commitments . . . no cares . . . just grab some quick cash and get out. You think you can handle Holly Daze? Well, you can’t! You’re weak and a quitter. You’re going to bail on me as soon as your school vacation starts, and then what? Well, let me tell you, missy. You aren’t wanted here. So just pack your bags and get out!”
By the end of his tirade, he was shouting, eyes bulging behind his glasses and tie swinging wildly as he shook his finger under her nose. Candace recoiled, sure that he had finally flipped out. I’m going to end up as a headline: Girl Murdered by Stressed-Out Recruiter, she thought wildly. Well, I’m not going down without a fight! She jumped to her feet and put some distance between her and the wildly wagging finger.
“You need to calm down!” she said, projecting her voice like her drama teacher had taught her. Her voice seemed to boom in the tiny office. “Pull yourself together. You’re a representative of this theme park, and there is no call to insult me. Furthermore, I’m not a quitter. I’ll work for the entire Christmas season. Then the next time I come in here, I’ll expect you to treat me with some respect. Do you even realize what I’ve done for this park so far? Seriously. Take a chill pill.”
She stopped speaking when she realized that he had gone completely quiet. She held her breath, wondering when the next explosion was going to come. Instead, he sat down abruptly and waved her back to her chair.
“Very good. You passed the test,” he said, picking up a pen.
“What test?” she asked, edging her way back into the chair.
“The ultimate test. You’re going to be one of Santa’s elves.”
“Doesn’t Santa, you know, have his own elves?” she asked, still not sure that he was completely in charge of his senses.
“Of course Santa has his own elves. However, when he’s here at The Zone we supply him with courtesy elves so that they can continue making toys at the North Pole,” Mr. Peterson told her.
“So, I’m going to be a courtesy elf?” she asked.
He nodded and handed her a single sheet of paper. “Sign this.”
She took it. “What? Just one thing to sign?” She had expected another huge stack of forms that would leave her hand cramped for hours afterward.
He nodded curtly. “You’re now in our system as a regular seasonal employee. All of your other paperwork transfers.”
“Regular seasonal” sounded like some kind of contradiction to her, but she was still not entirely convinced his outburst had been a test. She scanned it, signed her name, and then handed it back to him.
“Good. Report to wardrobe on Saturday for your costume fitting,” he said.
“Okay, thank you,” she said, standing up and backing toward the door.
“Welcome back, Candy,” he said, smiling faintly.
“Thanks,” she said, before bolting out the door.
As soon as she was outside the building, she whipped out her cell phone and called her friend Josh, a fellow employee of The Zone.
“Well?” he asked when he picked up.
“I think Mr. Peterson has seriously lost it,” she said. “He totally flipped out on me.”
Josh laughed. “Let me guess. You’re going to be an elf.”
“So he was serious? That was some whacked-out test?”
“Yeah. Elves are considered a class-one stress position, and it can get pretty intense.”
“How hard can it be to be an elf?” she asked.
She was rewarded by a burst of laughter on the other end.
“Josh, what is it you’re not telling me?”
He just kept laughing.
“Okay, seriously. You were the one who convinced me to work Holly Daze. I think it’s only fair you tell me whatever it is I need to know.”
“Sorry!” he gasped. She wasn’t sure if he was apologizing or refusing to tell her.
A girl bounced around the corner and slammed into Candace.
“Josh, I’ll call you later,” she said, hanging up.
“Sorry,” Becca apologized.
Becca was one of Candace’s other friends from the park, one who had some sort of bizarre allergy to sugar that made her uncontrollably hyper. Candace looked suspiciously at Becca. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were glistening, and she was hopping from one foot to the other.
“You didn’t have sugar, did you?” Candace asked, fear ripping through her.
“No! Promise,” Becca said.
“Then what gives?”
“Roger made me laugh really hard,” Becca explained.
Roger had a crush on Becca and had wanted to ask her out since Halloween. It hadn’t happened yet.
“Oh,” was all Candace could think to say.
“So, are you working Holly Daze?” Becca asked.
“Yeah. I’m going to be an elf.”
Suddenly, Becca went completely still, and the smile left her face. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why?” Candace asked.
Becca just shook her head. “I’ve gotta get back to the Muffin Mansion. I’ll catch you later.”
She hurried off, and Candace watched her go. Okay, now I know there’s something -people aren’t telling me.
She debated about following Becca and forcing her to spill, but instead she headed for the parking lot where her best friend Tamara was waiting. She walked through the Exploration Zone, one of the several themed areas in the park.
The Zone theme park was created and owned by John
Hanson, a former professional quarterback who believed in healthy competition at work and play. His theme park had several areas, or zones, where -people could compete with each other and themselves at just about anything. Almost everyone who worked at The Zone was called a referee. The exceptions were the costumed characters called mascots. Most of them, including Candace’s boyfriend, Kurt, were to be found in the History Zone. -People visiting the park were called players, and the areas of the park they could reach were called on field. Only refs could go off field.
Candace cut through an off field area to get to the referee parking lot. She waved at a few other -people she recognized from her time spent working there. Finally, she slid into her friend’s waiting car.
“So are you going to be the Christmas queen?” Tamara asked.
“What am I, Lucy VanPelt? There’s no Christmas queen in Charlie Brown’s Christmas play, and there’s no Christmas queen in The Zone,” Candace said.
Tamara fake pouted. “Are you sure? I think I’d make a beautiful Christmas queen.”
Candace laughed. Tamara was gorgeous, rich, and fun. Her whole family practically redefined the word wealthy, and, with her dark hair and olive skin, Tamara was usually the prettiest girl in any room. She didn’t let it go to her head, though. Anybody who knew Tamara would vote for her as Christmas queen.
“Although I think you would, they’re only hiring elves.”
“You’re going to be an elf?” Tamara smirked.
“Hey, it beats being a food cart vendor,” Candace said.
“But you’re so good at it. Cotton candy, candy corn . . . you can sell it all.”
“Thanks, I think. So, what are we doing tonight? Kurt’s going to swing by at six to pick us up.” Just mentioning her boyfriend’s name was enough to make Candace smile. She closed her eyes for just a minute and pictured him as she had first seen him — wearing a Lone Ranger costume. With his charm and piercing blue eyes, she had fallen for him right away.
“You told him my house, right?” Tamara said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Yeah. So, who’s this guy you’re taking?”
Tamara sighed. “Mark.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“Remember my cousin Tina?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she broke up with him over the summer, and he’s been all shattered since then. He won’t date other girls; he just mopes over her.”
“Attractive,” Candace said sarcastically.
“Tell me about it. Well, Tina asked me if I could help him get his confidence back and get over her or something.”
“A pity date? Are you kidding me? You want Kurt and I to double date with you on a pity date?”
“You don’t think I’m about to go by myself, do you? No way. That’s the best-friend creed. When you’re happy, I’m happy. When I’m miserable, you have to be too.”
“Great,” Candace said, rolling her eyes. “So, where are we going?”
“That’s the problem. I was thinking dinner, but then we’d have to talk, and frankly, I don’t want to hear him go on about Tina. Then I thought we could see a movie.”
“You wouldn’t have to talk to him,” Candace confirmed.
“Yeah, but what if — ”
“He tries to grab a hand or put his arm around you.”
“Exactly, and I don’t think me giving him a black eye was what Tina had in mind.”
“I guess that also rules out any kind of concert possibilities?” Candace asked wistfully.
“Yup. Sorry.”
“So, what did you come up with?”
“I was thinking . . . theme park?”
“No way. Kurt doesn’t like to spend his downtime there.”
“I thought he took you to that romantic dinner there over the summer.”
“It was the nicest restaurant he knew, and he got an employee discount.”
“Charming,” Tamara said.
“Plus, ever since we got trapped in there overnight, he’s been even more adamant about avoiding it when he’s off work.”
“I can’t believe you two get to be the stuff of urban legend, and you don’t even appreciate it.”
Candace sighed. It was true that she and Kurt had spent one of the most miserable nights of their relationship trapped inside the theme park. Urban legend, though, had since transformed the story so that they were supposedly chased through the park by a psycho killer. It was still embarrassing to have -people point at her and say that she was the one. Around Halloween she had given up trying to correct -people. They were going to believe what they wanted.
“Earth to Candace. Helloooo?”
“Sorry. So, what does that leave us with? Shopping?”
“No need to torture both our dates,” Tamara said.
“Then what?”
“I don’t — miniature golf!” Tamara suddenly shrieked, so loudly that Candace jumped and slammed her head into the roof of the car.
“Tam! Don’t scare me like that.”
“Sorry. Miniature golf. What do you think? Built-in talking points, lots of movement, and zero grabby potential.”
“I like it. I’ll have to borrow one of your jackets though.”
“At least you’ll have an actual excuse this time,” Tamara teased.
A few minutes later they were at Tamara’s house and upstairs raiding her wardrobe. As Tamara considered and discarded a fifth outfit, Candace threw up her hands.
“Maybe if you’d tell me what you’re looking for, I could help.”
“I’m looking for something, you know, nunlike.”
Candace stared at her friend for a moment before she burst out laughing. She fell to the floor, clutching her stomach as tears streamed down her face. Tamara crossed her arms and tapped her foot, and Candace just laughed harder.
“I don’t know why you think that’s so funny. You know I don’t go past kissing.”
“Tam, nuns can’t even do that. And if you’re looking for something that will completely hide your body, then you’re going to have to go to the mall instead of the closet. You don’t own anything that doesn’t say ‘look at me.’ I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
“Really? Maybe we should go to your house. Think I could find what I’m looking for in your closet?”
“Not since I started dating and mom made me throw out all my old camp T-shirts,” Candace said with a grin.
“Then hello, you’ve got no call to laugh.”
Candace stood up, stomach still aching from laughing so hard. “Tam, I’m not criticizing. I’m just telling you, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”
Tam reached into the closet. “Oh, yeah, what about this?” she asked, producing jeans and a black turtleneck.
“If you’re going for the secret agent look, it’s a good choice.”
Tamara threw the jeans at her, and Candace ducked.
“I could wear some black pants with this. Would that be too funereal?
“For a pity date? Go for it.”
Candace opted to borrow Tamara’s discarded jeans instead of wearing the skirt she had brought with her. They turned out to be slightly tighter on her than they were on Tam, and she had to admit when she paired them with her red scoop-neck top that she looked really good.
When Kurt arrived a few minutes later, he whistled when he saw her.
“Keep the jeans,” Tamara whispered to her. “Obviously, they work for you.”
Kurt then looked at Tamara and frowned slightly. “Did you just come from a funeral?”
“No, but thank you for thinking so,” Tamara said with a smirk.
“I don’t — ”
Candace put her finger over his lips. “Don’t ask,” she advised him.
He smiled and kissed her finger, which made her giggle.
The doorbell rang again, and Candace turned, eager to see the infamous Mark.
Tamara opened the door, and Candace sucked in her breath. Mark was gorgeous. He had auburn hair, piercing green eyes, and model-perfect features. He was almost as tall as Kurt, and he was stunning in khaki Dockers and a green Polo shirt.
“Hi,” he said, smiling.
Tamara glanced at her and rolled her eyes.
“Hi, Mark.”
Kurt drove, and Candace was quick to slide into the front seat with him, leaving Tamara and Mark to the back. She shook her head. Mark was not her idea of a pity date in any sense of the word. Maybe Tamara would come around if she actually talked to him.
They made it to the miniature golf course and were soon on the green. Candace got a hole in one on the first time up to putt, and Kurt gave her a huge reward kiss.
When they moved on to the next hole, Tamara whispered in her ear, “Thanks a lot. This is supposed to be a no grabby zone. Now Mark will be getting ideas.”
“Tam, you really need to relax a little.”
They made it through the course in record time, and Kurt gave Candace another kiss for winning by one stroke. After turning in their clubs, the guys headed inside to order pizza while Candace and Tamara went to the restroom.
“This date is the worst,” Tamara groaned once they were alone.
“What’s wrong with you? He’s gorgeous.”
“Really? I guess I just can’t see past the Tina mope.”
“What mope? He hasn’t even mentioned her, and he’s done nothing but smile all night. You should totally take him to Winter Formal.”
“No way. This is a one-date-only kind of thing. I’m not taking him to Winter Formal.”
“Fine. Suit yourself. I’m just telling you that if it weren’t for Kurt, I’d be taking him to Winter Formal.”
Tamara laughed.
“As if. There’s no way you’d ask a guy out.”
“I don’t know. You might be surprised.”
“It’s a moot point anyway. I’ll find someone to take.”
“You could always take Josh,” Candace suggested.
“You’re not setting me up with Josh, so just forget it.”
“Fine.”
“Find out for me, though, if Santa needs a Mrs. Claus,” Tamara said.
“You’re going to find some way to be the Christmas queen, aren’t you?” Candace asked.
“Even if I have to marry old Saint Nick.”
They both laughed.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Assaulted by Joy by Stephen W. Simpson
It is time to play a Wild Card! Every now and then, a book that I have chosen to read is going to pop up as a FIRST Wild Card Tour. Get dealt into the game! (Just click the button!) Wild Card Tours feature an author and his/her book's FIRST chapter!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Zondervan (October 1, 2008)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stephen W. Simpson has a PhD in clinical psychology and an MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. The coauthor of What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew about Sex, he teaches psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary and also has a private psychotherapy practice. Stephen and his wife, Shelley, live with their four children in Pasadena, California.Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $ 14.99
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Zondervan (October 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0310283779
ISBN-13: 978-0310283775
My Review:
I'm only about 1/3 the way through, but I'm really enjoying this book so far. I can definitely relate to him, and his style is very engaging. Definitely worth picking up!
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Introduction: Assaulted by Joy
I’m returning from a four-mile run at 8:30 a.m. on a Friday. A chorus of “Dada!” greets me as soon as I open the door. Hayley looks up at my baseball cap and shouts, “Daddy wear funny hat!” and breaks out laughing. A court jester had replaced the docile little girl of only a few months before.
My wife Shelley scurries past me, carrying a laundry basket.
“Are you ready to take over?” she asks.
“Let me change shirts,” I answer. “I’m pretty sweaty.”
In confirmation of this, Ella points at my shirt and proclaims, “Daddy all wet. Daddy sticky mess!”
“Right you are, El –Belle,” I say, kissing her on the forehead before rushing off to change clothes.
At one year and three months, the children can walk without falling, but they have yet to develop the speed and agility that will turn them into a roaming toddler hit squad. They are coordinated but not dangerous. Thus, we can now care for our children without the assistance of the National Guard. I can even take care of them by myself sometimes, though it isn’t easy. At first, I was petrified whenever Shelley left me alone with the kids. I thought that one wrong move would land somebody in the hospital. Now I’m learning that the stakes aren’t so high. I take one-hour shifts before I go to work in the morning. Friday mornings are the best because I get up early and run first. The exercise wakes me up and elevates my mood. That way, the children get to spend time with their father instead of some monstrosity that needs two cans of Red Bull before he can do more than grunt.
I emerge from my bedroom wearing a clean shirt and a fresh coat of deodorant. As soon as I walk out of the door, my son Jordan barrels into my legs. He stretches out his arms for me to pick him up. He points to the light switch on the wall and shouts, “Lights!” I hold him up to the switch and he flicks it on and off, laughing with delight. When he’s finished, I put him the ground and he bolts down the hallway like he’s running the hundred-yard dash. Jordan regards walking as a poor substitute for sprinting. Since he’s built like a cinderblock, it’s like having a miniature locomotive in our house.
I walk into the living room and see our daughter Emma sitting in the corner playing with big Leggo blocks. I kiss her on the top of her head and she giggles. Then I notice something odd about the Leggos. She isn’t stacking them like she usually does. When I realize what Emma’s doing, I gasp and call Shelley.
My wife, Shelley, darted down the hallway and into the living room. She had a worried look on her face, because I usually only call her when there’s trouble.
“Look at what Emma did,” I say.
Shelley looks. Then she squeals with delight.
“Emma!” she shouts. “You’re so smart! I am so proud of you.”
At only fifteen months of age, Emma has arranged the Leggos according to size and color. One row had large green blocks. The next had small green blocks. Then there was a row of large red blocks, followed by a small red row, and so on.
Shelley gives Emma a hug and Emma basks in her mother’s affection. Then she picks up the blocks and starts making a tower.
I head to the kitchen to grab a bowl of cereal, but Ella stops me with a large cardboard book in her hands.
“Read book?”
Breakfast can wait.
I sit on the on the ground, put Ella in my lap, and start reading. Ella repeats everything I say. Then someone accosts me from behind. It’s Emma, tickling me and laughing so hard you’d think I was tickling her. No one is safe from a tickling ambush while Emma’s around. I let out a desperate laugh until Emma is satisfied that she’s subdued her father with mirth. I return my attention to Ella and the book, unaware that Hayley is about to take a nosedive off the couch.
Thud.
I jump up, making sure not to topple Ella, and rush over to Hayley. She’s face down on the ground.
“Hayley Rose! Precious, are you okay?”
For a few seconds, she’s silent. Then I hear, “Heh heh heh heh . . .”
I roll her over to find a big, mischievous grin.
“Kaboom!” she shouts.
“You little rascal!” I say and started to tickle her. She rolls around on the floor, squealing with delight.
Hayley’s quiet demeanor during her first few months of life was nothing but an act. She was waiting in the wings, observing her audience before she took center stage. She is now a bona fide ham and the biggest comedian in the family. The sinister thing about this is that she knows how to make her father crack up on cue.
The next thing I know, all my children are on me at once. I submit and collapse to the floor on my back. Everyone crawls on top of me, laughing. They are all trying to put their face on top of mine. I kiss each one of them and they kiss me back, laughing. We frolic around on the floor like this until Shelley, walks in.
“Why aren’t the kids dressed yet?” she asks.
“Because I’ve been waylaid by Lilliputians!” I shout. The tired look on Shelley’s disappears as she shakes her head and smiles.
Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize what I see. Where did the angry young man go? Who is this father and husband gazing back at me with crows feet at the corners of his eyes and thin lines on edge of his smile? But then I take a second look and realize that I know him, but it’s been a while since we’ve hung out. He’s reemerging from years of cynicism that are being chiseled away by grace.
You see, I’m a jerk. That’s the first thing you have to understand. The second thing you have to understand is that you probably are too sometimes, and we both enjoy it too much. We get a little tickle inside when someone ignores our advice and screws up as a result. We like shutting down people who get in our way and avoiding people who annoy us. We watch Benny Hinn for entertainment value, congratulating ourselves for being too smart to buy what he’s selling. We disregard people who don’t get our jokes and we don’t suffer fools gladly. We’re not evil or even malicious most of the time – just jerks. We have compassion and love, but it doesn’t take much for us to roll our eyes and mumble something sarcastic under our breath.
I’m probably more of jerk than you are. It drives me nuts if something interferes with my life. I don’t like being bothered and I don’t want any help. If you catch me when I’m in the mood to socialize, you’ll love me. Work with my schedule and I’ll deliver the sun and the moon. Otherwise, I hate being told what to do and I have problems with authority. I’m short-tempered when I’m under stress or in a hurry. I start yelling inside my car when another driver cuts me off. As a bonus, I have Attention Deficit Disorder, which means I get impatient, irritated, and bored faster than normal people do.
I am not the guy you’d pick to be the father of quadruplets. But we’ll get to that later.
I became a Christian when I was seven years old. I always thought my story would be boring because I met Jesus as a child. Turns out I was wrong. The scary and suspenseful stuff happened after I became a Christian. Sometimes, it happened because I was a Christian. In C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, his conversion to Christianity comes at the end of the book. The first time I read it, I felt a little cheated by the last page when Lewis realizes that he’s a Christian while riding a bus. I wanted to know what happened next. I couldn’t relate to a story that ends with becoming a Christian. In my experience, that’s where the story begins.
When I walked down the aisle of a Baptist church as a boy to receive Christ as my Savior, nobody told me that being a Christian is difficult, dangerous even. That information must have been in the fine print. The way I understood it, the closer you were to God, the happier you would be. The less you sinned and the more you followed God’s Word, the more your life would be meaningful, happy, and complete. In my years as a follower of Christ, however, I’ve discovered that the opposite is often true. Don’t get me wrong—the most ecstatic, victorious moments of my life resulted from having relationship with Jesus, but so have the most aggravating and painful ones. Only now am I learning to live in this tension and discover that it can’t be any other way.
I think most Christians know this, but don’t like to talk about it because such confessions don’t make for the neat, linear success stories that we like to hear. Telling people that being in a relationship with Christ can be maddening and exasperating isn’t effective evangelism. You wouldn’t put it in a tract or a revival brochure. But I wish someone had told me at some point. They didn’t have to tell me when I was seven, but they could have clued me in around age fourteen when my theological roof started to cave in. If they had, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me decades to figure out that a relationship with God involves a lot of scary twists and turns.
If you’ve been a Christian for a while, your relationship with God has probably frustrated and frightened you more than once. Maybe you’ve been confused, angry, or afraid. Maybe nobody told you that was part of the deal when you opened the door of your heart and let Jesus walk in. You also probably didn’t realize that some of your brothers and sisters in Christ were going to drive you insane, doing and saying things you find appalling. It’s hard to live with all that frustration and confusion when you thought that becoming a Christian guaranteed a life of love and peace.
When I discovered that a relationship with Christ wasn’t always warm and fuzzy, I became frightened. Then I got mad. Then I stopped caring. God gave me plenty of opportunities to pursue joy, but cynicism always felt safer. So, instead of offering me joy, he assaulted me with it. When he brought quadruplets to the fight, I had no choice but to shout, “Uncle!” and submit. That’s when the brown and God made the brown, stagnate rivers in my life flow with golden wine. I drank deep and was born again . . . again.
Chapter 1: Rock and Roll Rebel
“There’s no such thing as Christian rock,” said Brother Jeff. “It’s all the devil’s music.” Was he throwing out such inanities just to make me crazy? Did he want me to lose my temper so he could kick me out of youth group?
“How can you say that?” I asked Brother Jeff. “There’s nothing about it in the Bible.”
My words echoed off the white walls and cardboard ceiling tiles. I could hear the neon lights in the ceiling humming from behind foggy Plexiglas panes. Everyone in the junior high youth group sat in tense silence. Some just stared at the faded green carpet, averting their eyes from the conflict. Others slumped down into the old, overstuffed couches, venturing sheepish glances as they clutched throw pillows. Most of my pubescent peers, however, were the edge of their seats, transfixed as the forty year-old associate pastor and I, the fourteen year-old youth group president, tried to bludgeon each other with words.
“Rock roll is the music of rebellion,” said Brother Jeff. “Even if the lyrics are supposedly Christian, the music makes people lustful and contentious.” His mouth was smiling but his eyes were narrow.
“But it doesn’t say that in the Bible!” I shouted. Brother Jeff was wearing me down with edicts that sounded authoritative but made no sense. Every time I presented a reasonable argument, Brother Jeff shot back with something asinine wrapped in a mature, patronizing tone. I was about to pop a blood vessel, but Brother Jeff was as agitated as I was. His face bore a pleasant smile, but the pale, freckled skin beneath his fiery red hair was getting pinker by the second.
“Psalms 98 talks about making all kinds of loud noises before the Lord,” I said. “That sounds a lot like Christian rock to me.”
“You are perverting God’s holy word with that interpretation.”
“I absolutely refuse to accept that,” I said.
“Then you need to ask God for wisdom,” he said with an eerie calm. “You need to respect the leaders God has given you. After God, you must respect and obey your parents. After them, you must respect and obey your church authorities. That means me.”
Then he turned to the rest of the kids and said, “If you don’t believe that rock music makes people rebellious, just look at who’s rebelling.” Then he laughed. I heard somebody in the back whisper, “Oooo . . .”, the universal confirmation that you’ve just received a verbal smack down.
I gritted my teeth and lurched forward. I might have even growled. One of my friends put a hand on my arm and eased me back in my chair. I had lost this battle, but the war was just beginning.
*****
I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. On the surface, Lexington is about three things: basketball, horses, and shopping centers. Children are breast-fed on the first two. If you meet someone from Lexington whom you find shy and reserved, ask him or her about horseracing or University of Kentucky basketball. You’ll hear more than you ever wanted about Secretariat and Seattle Slew, including their bloodlines and the farms where they were bred and trained. You’ll be informed that Keeneland racetrack is far superior to that tourist slum, Churchill Downs. Want to see a real live nervous breakdown? Just bring up the game winning shot by Duke’s Christian Laettner in the 1992 East Regional Finals of the NCAA tournament. It halted UK’s run to the Final Four and sent the entire state into a coma. That game is the Alamo for Wildcat fans and no one in the Bluegrass State has ever recovered.
The shopping centers you won’t hear about. While I was growing up, Lexington spilled over its borders, swallowing up farms and turning them into parking lots encircled by Wal-Marts, Blockbusters, Payless Shoe Stores, and frozen yogurt bars. Stick an Applebee’s in the middle and you’ve got the building block of Lexington consumerism: the high-fat, middle-class strip mall.
Downtown Lexington, however, stands steadfast amidst the city’s suburban sprawl. Stately stone buildings from the early 20th century line Main Street and Vine in solid indifference to the commercial aspirations of the periphery. The two skyscrapers look like an afterthought, gaudy glass trees in a baroque stone garden. The neighborhoods downtown have housing projects, historic brownstones, and beautiful houses that are eighty years old. Artists, black folks, students, and college professors reside in these, politely ignoring the rest of the city. Attempts to put in chain restaurants or big retail stores usually fail, while small businesses thrive. The best food, the most exotic clothes, and the only art that isn’t a painting of a horse or a sketch of basketball jersey can be found downtown.
The horse farms rest just outside town, where the suburbs surrender to green fields cascading over rolling hills. White and black picked fences create boundaries for the dark, gleaming horses that sustain all this beauty. Majestic barns – more opulent than any house I’ll ever own – sit atop hills like castles of feudal kingdoms. Out there, the culture clash between urban and suburban becomes irrelevant. Out there, you just feel lucky to live in Kentucky.
Though I loved the horse farms and found downtown fascinated and alluring, I was a child of the suburbs. I spent my youth running through manicured subdivisions and shopping centers. The suburbs were also the place where big churches popped up like mushrooms. Evangelical Christianity was the second largest religion in Lexington, right behind basketball. My family attended a mammoth Baptist church that, like many, had moved away from downtown so it could swell and spread on the edge of town. My parents started attending the church because of its large, vital youth program. They wanted my two sisters and I to have a place where we could grow in the love and knowledge of the Lord. And that’s what happened.
When I was seven years old, I began a journey with God that would be the source of more frustration and fear and more joy and wonder than I could imagine. The high school choir had returned from their summer tour to perform a homecoming concert. This was a big deal at my church. The youth choir practiced all year long and toured the country for two weeks every summer. The congregation welcomed them back as conquering heroes and the homecoming concert was one of the major events of the year. There was always a lot of laughing, crying, and hugging, the climax of which was an invitation to receive Christ that went on for at least thirty minutes. We sang “Just as I Am” ten times in a row, the organist doing her best to mix things up as she reached the seventh chorus. But nobody seemed to mind. People, mostly teenagers (some from the choir, even), flocked down front to accept Jesus as their savior.
Despite all the commotion, I was bored and fidgety. I spent most of the concert drawing pictures on the offering envelopes. I drew everything from spaceships to army men to Batman giving the Joker a much deserved beat down. But when the invitation began, something happened. I had feelings I didn’t understand and couldn’t name. Looking back, I’m pretty sure the Holy Spirit was at work. It had to be, because, before the invitation, I was only thinking about when the service would be over. All of a sudden, I felt a strange urge to become closer to God. It wasn’t about salvation or avoiding hell—for a reason I can’t explain, I wanted to graduate to higher level of faith. I wanted that relationship with Jesus that I’d heard so much about.
When I told my parents that I wanted to go down front, they looked surprised. They must have wondered why the fidgety kid defacing church bulletins all of a sudden wanted a religious experience. My mother wore a floral dress with a shiny broach and my father had on sport coat but no tie because it was the evening service. Mom looked at me with her trademark sideways gaze beneath raised eyebrows. When she saw I was serious about going down front, she smiled. Dad leaned in close and said, “Do you understand what this means?”
I nodded my head. He put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder.
“All right, buddy,” he said. “Go ahead.”
I scurried down front and the pastor took my small hand in his gigantic one. It was red and warm, like my father’s. He asked me if I was certain that I wanted to receive Christ as my Lord and Savior. I told him that I was. He told me to sit up front with one of the deacons until after the service.
After the concert, the pastor took me back to his office. There was shiny wood everywhere and more books than I’d ever seen outside of a library. I sat in a chair that was too big for me and the pastor sat down across from me, leaning in close.
“Do you understand what it means to commit your life to Christ?” he said, his voice deep and rolling. It felt weird to hear him speaking to me alone instead of the whole congregation.
“I think so,” I said. “It means I become a Christian.”
“Yes,” said the pastor. “But that means you ask Jesus to forgive you of your sins and come and live inside your heart forever. Are you ready to do that?”
To my seven year-old brain, having Jesus live inside my heart sounded like just about the coolest thing in the world.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready to accept Jesus into my heart.”
The pastor led me in prayer, asking me to repeat after him. When we were finished, he told me that I was a Christian now. He said that I was going to heaven and that God loved me. It felt like I had joined a special club. When I left the pastor’s office, my parents were waiting for me. I started prattling about going to heaven and having Jesus inside my heart. My father said that he was proud. My mother kept asking me what lead me to make this decision. Was it the sermon? The music? But I couldn’t tell her. I just knew that I wanted to become a Christian and now I was one. I was elated
We left church went to Shoney’s. My stomach started to growl at first sight of the twenty foot Big Boy, with his wide-eyed smile and red and white checkered overalls. I got a burger as big as my hand with cheddar cheese dripping down the side, accompanied by fries that were thick and salty. I cleaned my plate and felt good about it. As I got into bed that night, I felt safe, full, and warm.
For the next seven years, I went to church whenever the doors were open. I loved not only the people, but the building itself. It was big, austere, and mysterious. It contained dozens of secret places—kitchens, alcoves, storage closets, baptismal pools, and large meeting halls. I explored every one of them. The building was almost a metaphor for God—large and strong with endless mysteries to investigate.
I also read the Bible constantly and pestered adults with a million of questions about God. I wanted to be involved in everything and adults described me as “wise beyond my years” and “a young Bible scholar.
Now, before you start thinking I was a budding young saint, let me explain the other reason I loved church. I didn’t have many friends at school. I was fat (I weighed more at age 14 than I do right now) with bucked teeth, and the most severe case of acne in the history of Western Civilization. Making matters worse, my pituitary gland went off like a hand grenade at age eleven, dragging me into adolescence two years ahead of my peers. I shot up a dozen inches over my friends, but I didn’t get any thinner. Instead, my acne got worse and I developed body odor. I started shaving with my Dad’s electric razor in sixth grade. This produced a red razor burn across my neck that made me look like I’d been hanging from a noose. Oh yeah, and my eyebrows grew together, creating a uni-brow.
The prepubescent world did not react kindly to a massive, hairy man-child with skin like a leper. Kids called me fatso, pizza face, lard butt, and the like. I hung around other unpopular kids at school, arguing about who would win in a fight between Luke Skywalker and Superman. The only consolation was that nobody tired to beat me up since I was the size of a duplex.
At church, however, things were different. From the time I was ten until I was sixteen, everything at church revolved around two things: The Bible and singing. By the time I was twelve, I knew more about the Bible than most of the adults at the church. During Sunday School and Bible Study, I felt smart and important instead of fat and ugly. When we weren’t studying the Bible, we were in choir practice. Our church had a large, active music ministry and they started asking you to sing not long after you could walk. I’m not Pavarotti or even Barry Manilow, but I sing pretty well. Sometimes I was even asked to fill in for someone in the adult choir if they couldn’t make a Sunday morning. I was singing solos by the time I was thirteen. So, between my Bible IQ and my vocal chords, I almost passed for cool at church.
God had granted me a place to escape the pain of the world outside and fall in love with him. Heaven and earth merged as I studied the Bible and spent every spare minute at church. The people at church took care of me. I loved them, we all loved God, and everyone was happy. The solution to life’s problems could be found in each other, the Bible, and a God who could do anything and save anybody. Life was perfect and I believed it would stay that way for eternity.
I was wrong.
* * *
When I was almost fourteen, my parents and I moved to a new house and they ceded the entire basement to me. My sisters, eleven and fourteen years older, had long since moved away, so there was no competition for space. That basement became my escape from the rest of the world, albeit a very loud one.
By eighth grade, I had constructed a massive stereo system. The components were mismatches from different eras of technology. It was an ugly, hulking thing that leaned forward like some aluminum tower of Piza. But it sounded good. And it was loud. I had four speakers in my den and strung wire under the brown shag carpet to juice up two more in my bedroom. All around the basement, rock and roll spewed forth from trembling woofers behind black mesh screens encased in particleboard.
I had enough music down in that hole to wait out a nuclear winter. When I was a teenager, the digital age was still twenty years away, so I had albums. Stacks of albums. At $7 a pop, my allowance and money from part-time jobs helped me buy four or five records a month. By the time I was sixteen, I had over two hundred rock albums. Old records, new records, imported records, used records, and bootleg records stood in teetering columns around my basement. I spent hours listening to them while gazing in wonder at the artwork on the sleeve and pouring over the liner notes. Whenever my father told me what a waste of money it all was, I just looked at him like he was out of his mind.
The basement’s seclusion from the rest of the house gave me solitude, but the music made it my sanctuary. Music was my elixir, the only other thing than prayer and the Bible that made me feel quiet inside. One night at a party, I saw a girl on whom I had an obsessive crush kissing another guy. I returned home shaking with rage and sadness. But that same night MTV televised a concert that the radio was broadcasting at the same time. This was before every TV in the world offered hi-fi sound, so hearing music from television in stereo over 100 watt speakers seemed like a miracle. And, by a divine stroke, my favorite band was performing: Queen. While not the most morally pure band in the world, their music was amazing. Freddie Mercury pranced around the 20” screen while the speakers hummed to life with the sound of Brian May’s guitar. I knew every song by heart and lip-synced the words, dancing around the room in a hypermasculine imitation of Freddie. By the third song, I had forgotten that nasty kiss. When the concert was over, I went to bed fell into a deep sleep without dreams.
You’d think rock and roll fanaticism wouldn’t go over well in a fundamentalist Baptist church, but that wasn’t the case. Though our leaders had evangelical fervor, they weren’t legalistic. They encouraged us to be obedient to God and were quick to correct us when we got out of line, but they weren’t rigid or heavy-handed. Brother Rob was our youth pastor back then and he was a man of passion and talent. He nurtured everyone’s gifts and took an interest in our lives. On a bus ride once, Brother Rob sat next to me and listened to several Queen songs in a row as I prattled on about the intricacies of the music. He did his best to seem interested, poor guy. He cheered along with everyone else on the bus as I played air guitar during “We Will Rock You,” looking like wooly mammoth having a seizure. Brother Rob and our other leaders were conservative fundamentalists, but, as long as God remained top priority, they didn’t sweat the small stuff.
They even knew how to disagree with me. They expressed concern about some of the music I listened to, like AC/DC (hard to argue with that one), but they always listened to my perspective. One year, our church went through the inevitable “spinning records backwards to unmask the devil” phase. I watched in horror as beloved leaders spun records backwards and told us that the resulting gobbledygook said things about worshipping the devil. Though it drove me nuts, it was also one of the most exciting times I had in church because my leaders allowed me to debate them. They let me lead an entire youth meeting providing an alternative perspective on rock and roll and all this back-masking nonsense. They didn’t always agree with me, but they respected my right to challenge them. They let me play almost anything I wanted to on summer mission trips as long as the lyrics weren’t too sketchy. And I could play Christian rock all day long. The music might sound like someone murdering cats with chainsaws, but as long as the lyrics were about Jesus, they didn’t care.
But Brother Jeff cared. He cared a lot.
Brother Jeff became the associate pastor of my church when I was in the eighth grade. In addition to his administrative duties, he was in charge of the youth program. On his first day, the youth and their parents gathered in the gymnasium to meet him.
The senior pastor walked in to the gym escorting the thinnest adult male I had ever seen. He had a comical head of curly red, almost orange, hair. His freckles gave the rest of his skin a similar orangish glow. He looked like a carrot.
“God bless you,” said Jeff the Carrot. “I have been praying for this church, praying that God will guide me and continue his great work with the young people of this congregation.” He talked for over an hour in a nasal southern drawl about his vision for the youth program. He told us “God’s gonna do this” and “God’s gonna do that” and “God’s gonna bless y’all.” I still knew next to nothing about Jeff except that he looked like a carrot in a red clown wig that talked like it was yanked out of the dirt somewhere in South Georgia. The only relevant thing he told us was that the youth were allowed to call him by his first name. How magnanimous.
The adults asked questions first. “What is your vision for our youth ministry?” “What are your outreach plans?” “What’s your philosophy on Biblical teachings for teens?” Blah, blah, blah. No one in the room under twenty cared about any of this. The “young people” only cared about one thing. Could we hang out with this guy? Was he cool? I don’t mean “cool” like hip or even youthful. Nothing is more embarrassing than an old guy trying to act young. We wanted to know if he was someone we could trust. I took it upon myself to find out.
I raised my hand and the senior pastor recognized me.
“What’s your favorite Christian rock band?”
Though a silly question, I wanted to give Brother Jeff an easy way to connect with the youth in the room. The question got a few chuckles, which lighten the mood in the room.
But Brother Jeff did anything but laugh or connect with the youth. He breathed a heavy, affected sigh and rolled his eyes toward the heavens.
“Stephen, or is it Stevie?” he asked without waiting for the answer. “I’m afraid you might not care for my answer, which saddens me. But ultimately I answer to God and not to you or any of you other wonderful young people. My answer to your question is this: None. I think Christian rock is an abomination of all the other wonderful music that God has given us. Those rancid screeching guitars and that horrid pounding beat are, I believe, unleashed from the pit of hell. I despise Christian rock. Secular rock is worse, of course. I will abide none of it on my watch. No form of rock music will be played at any of our activities.”
He looked me in the eye and said, “I’m sorry”
My stomach lurched upward as I tried to comprehend what was happening.
Jeff inundated us with a whole new list of prohibitions, ones of which I had never heard nor imagined despite years of fundamentalist religion: no card playing (a sure-fire gateway to gambling), no ghost stories (a guaranteed way to conjure demons), no celebration of Halloween (more demons), and no movies unless they were rated “G.” He also forbade us to wear shorts, even though our mission trips visited states such as Georgia and Louisiana in the middle of August on a bus with no air conditioning. When I heard that, I could contain myself no longer. Without raising my hand I blurted out, “No shorts on our summer mission trips? The bus has no air-conditioning. We’ll all melt. And we’ll stink!”
That got a lot of laughs, but His Carrotness didn’t back down.
“I know it will be uncomfortable. But that’s nothing compared to the discomfort Christ experienced dying for our sins. Our mission trips will be the most important time for us to set an example to the pagan world and we will not be wearing shorts.”
A low whistle of amazement came from the back of the gym. Jeff’s eyes darted around looking for the culprit before he regained his composure and flashed an ultra-white smile.
No one asked any more questions after that. The senior pastor smiled and said something about us having plenty of time to get to know each other. He said it like it was a good thing.
I thought I was going to puke right on the gym floor. I had fought a long and hard battle for rock and roll at my church and finally gotten my mentors to listen. Now some guy shows up and, with a wave of his hand, banishes all music featuring guitars that plugged in, along with all other benign comforts of the flesh. I was in the middle of a bad dream.
Most teenagers would have stopped coming to youth group or just paid lip service to the new rules and gone about the time-honored practice of rebelling in secret. But not me. I declared war. This was my church. Church was the only place where I felt safe, understood, and respected. It was the only place I had fun. Now some dogmatic cleric was trying to ruin it for me. Over my dead body.
Poor Brother Jeff had no idea who he was up against. In a Southern Baptist Church, the Bible is the litmus test for everything. Ever since I’d walked down the aisle at age seven and taken the pastor’s hand, I’d been reading the Bible. I didn’t just listen to what my teachers told me about the Bible in Sunday school, I studied the thing. By age thirteen, I’d read the entire Bible (well, almost—I got the K.O. from Numbers in Chapter Three). I knew that Biblical support for Brother Jeff’s list of “don’ts” was thin at best and I wielded the word like a sword in our theological debates. I was certain that my knowledge of scripture would help me triumph over this new regime of the absurd.
I debated Jeff steadily for the next year, always using what I regarded as solid Biblical arguments. I prayed for him and for our church. I did my best to be a good example and a solid leader so that my disagreements with Jeff didn’t look like reckless defiance. I tangled with Jeff in public, in private, and in writing. I fought my war with prayerful diligence and refused to back down. For a long time, I thought I was winning. There was no way that this man could continue imposing ridiculous rules that were Biblically unsound, not to mention wildly unpopular. Well, at least they were unpopular at first . . .
One day I was talking to another guy in the youth group whom I liked and respected. He was a couple of years older and I’d always considered him cool. He was had introduced me to Christian rock, telling me about bands like Petra and Servant. We went to Christian rock concerts together and danced and sang and went bananas in the name of the Lord.
One day I commiserated with him, “It’s not right that Brother Jeff won’t let us listen to Christian rock.”
“There’s no such thing as Christian rock,” he said with a blank expression. “It’s all of the devil.” He didn’t elaborate, just looked at me in mute finality. I didn’t say anything because, in that moment, I realized that there was nothing to say. It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong about rock music, wearing shorts, playing cards, or whether the earth was round or flat. My friend’s mind was made up. The validity of my arguments was irrelevant. Brother Jeff had given an edict and my friend accepted it without question.
For the first time in my life, I felt nervous and alone at church. That might not have been so bad if I didn’t feel nervous and alone every place else.
* * *
On the first day of school in ninth grade, a cute girl cute called me “piggy” without provocation. I gave her a dirty look, but that night I lay in bed crying. Jeff had invaded my last safe haven, abandoning me to a place where pretty girls likened me to swine. Life couldn’t continue like this. Drastic times called for drastic measures.
First, I started taking the medication Acutane, a drug that eliminates acne with the gentleness of atomic radiation. I endured nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, and wisps of hair falling out until the medication ran its course and my face no longer resembled a map of the Himalayas. Next, I lost weight. I dropped fifty pounds in six months. Despite my girth, I’d always been strong and athletic. I could outrun kids half my size, and I could bench press 200 pounds by age fourteen. I lost weight mainly through running long distances and cutting out sweets. As a result, I lost more fat than I did muscle. By the last day of ninth grade, I had changed from an acne-covered behemoth into lean, muscular jock with unblemished skin.
That summer, I went to a Christian camp with one of my friends from church named Gordon Green. Gordy was a stud. He was good looking, smooth, and had no trouble with the ladies. On our first night at camp, Gordon spotted a brunette he found attractive. He dispatched one of our female friends to inform the young lady of his affections and ascertain her level of interest in him. Ten minutes later, our friend returned with the verdict.
“So, does she like me?”
“She says that you’re cute,” the emissary replied as a Casanova grin spread across Gordon’s face.
“But she thinks Steve is cuter.”
Gordon was speechless; I was thunderstruck.
“Could you repeat that?” I said, partly because I wanted to make sure I heard her right, but mostly because I just wanted to hear it again.
Despite the nice ego boost, I entered high school in the fall with my head down. I looked different but I still didn’t have many friends. The first day of high school is hard for anyone, but going through it alone is anxious drudgery. I zipped through the hallways avoiding eye contact with everyone. On my way to second period, someone grabbed my shoulder and spun me around.
“Lookin’ good, Simpson. Looks like you’ll be ready to wrestle this year,” said Mac Wood, a senior on the wrestling team with me. That was the first time he’d said anything nice to me.
“Thanks,” I said, wondering if I was supposed to say something cocky or funny instead.
“See you in practice,” he said and disappeared.
In third period Biology, a popular member of the football team took a seat next to me.
At lunch I sat down alone, but my friend Bill asked me to sit with him and four of his friends who’d never talked to me before. Later that week, we all played basketball at Bill’s house. By Christmas, we were sitting together on the bus. By springtime, we were hanging out over the weekend.
It was surreal. I figured that losing pounds and zits would make things easier I didn’t know that it would make me need church a whole lot less.
* * *
In March of my tenth grade year, I told my mother that I didn’t want to go to youth group anymore. She said that she didn’t care; I was going anyway.
“You don’t forsake the Body of Christ just because you don’t like one it’s parts. Is Jesus still the most important thing in your life?”
“Yes, mom,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Following him isn’t always easy. Sometimes we have to show Christ’s love to people we don’t like.”
I knew she was right, but I didn’t like it. My father’s take on the situation made sticking with church a little easier.
“If you think Brother Jeff is wrong, you need to stick to your guns. If you leave youth group, that means he wins. You’ve let him chase you off. Stick around and stand up for what you believe.
Now that I could do, though perhaps not in the way Dad imagined.
That summer, I went on the youth mission trip as I had every year. Since Brother Jeff wouldn’t let us wear shorts, I boarded the bus wearing mesh, see-through sweat pants over my shorts, obeying the letter of the law while gleefully defying the spirit. When Jeff saw me, he just shook his head, frustrated but impotent because I’d conformed to his rules. I whispered ghost stories to the other kids just because it wasn’t allowed. I organized card games at the back of the bus. Whenever Brother Jeff wandered back, we’d chuck the Jacks and Queens, whip out a deck of Uno, and beam at him like little cherubs. But the real coup de tat was smuggling rock and roll onto the bus.
I stuffed a bunch of socks with cassette tapes and hid them in the bottom of my luggage. Thus, the 1985 youth mission trip rolled out of town carrying every album by Queen and U2, along with a strong sampling of The Who, The Clash, Rush, Van Halen, and anything else that sounded like something Brother Jeff would hate. My buddy Gordon was the only person I told about it, which turned out to be a big mistake.
After eating lunch at a Cracker Barrell, we got back on the bus and discovered Gordon sitting in my seat holding my boom box. Ozzy Osbourne’s “Revelation Mother Earth” blasted out of the speakers at about 5,000 decibels. One of the adult volunteers told Gordon to turn it off. Gordon protested, saying that he thought the music sounded awesome. I shot Gordon a look that said, “I am going to kill you with my bare hands.” He turned the music off and apologized. Gordon didn’t rat me out, but he didn’t have to. It wasn’t hard for anyone to figure out who snuck Ozzy on bus.
When Brother Jeff found out, he gave me a look of contempt … and nothing more. I expected dire consequences, confiscation of my tapes at the minimum. But he didn’t do anything.
The next day, we had three hours to wander around in Jefferson City, Missouri. The place was filled with novelty shops, theme restaurants, and other attractions that teenagers live for. They also happened to have a palm reader, which piqued my interest.
At a Cub Scout Halloween party in second grade, somebody’s mom dressed up like a gypsy and read our palms. The whole thing was a joke, but the palm reader said something that stuck with me. She said I was going to marry a girl named Jenny. It just so happened that I’d had a crush on a girl named Jenny since seventh grade. Jenny was with me that day in Jefferson City as we passed a palm reader’s hut adorned with flashing astrological symbols.
I had told Jenny about the palm reader back was when I’d been fat and ugly. That was when she’d told me she liked me, “as a friend,” the label that every adolescent suitor regards as a curse. But things were different now. Jenny had been flirting with me lately. Maybe it was time to reintroduce the subject.
“Hey, Jenny, remember the story I told you about that palm reader saying I would marry a girl named Jenny,” I said, pointing to the palm reader’s hut.
Jenny flashed a feline grin and said, “I remember. Maybe you should get a second opinion.”
I needed nothing more. Without a second thought, I ducked in to the palm reader’s lair.
Five minutes later and five dollars poorer, I had no new information regarding the name of my bride to be. (For the record, my wife’s name is not Jenny and her parents never even considered that name.) I laughed it off as confirmation that palm reading was a bunch of hooey.
Since I have a big mouth, I told half a dozen people about the palm reader. Someone tattled. At our next stop, Brother Jeff and one of the volunteers cornered me. They took me into the sanctuary of the church that was putting us up for the night. Brother Jeff suggested we sit in the choir loft. It felt like being in the penalty box at a hockey game.
“Steve, the fact that you went to a palm reader grieves me, but I hate to say that I’m not surprised,” began Brother Jeff as the volunteer frowned and nodded in agreement. “I have sensed this sort of lawlessness in you from the first time we met almost three years ago. In those three years, things seem to have only gotten worse. What on earth gave you the notion of going to a palm reader?”
I told him the story about the gypsy at Cub Scouts and Jenny. I didn’t want to, but I thought Jeff would cut me some slack if I humiliated myself.
Jeff furrowed his brow and nodded.
“It’s all starting to make sense now. If you went to a palm reader in Cub Scouts, that would have opened you to demonic influence at a vulnerable age. That’s probably the reason you’re so obsessed with rock music. It explains your contentious nature.”
That just made me mad. I forgot about trying to get out of this unscathed.
“I told you that the palm reader at Cub Scouts was just a joke. I went to the palm reader today just as a stunt to impress Jenny. I promise you, Jeff, no demons were involved.”
“The Prince of Lies wants you to think that.”
I rolled my eyes. Bad move.
“You might not care about your own spiritual welfare, but I care about this youth group. You have opened the whole youth group to demonic oppression through this act. We have to intervene with prayer.”
So far Jeff had said nothing about calling my parents or sending me home. My worst fear was that he would make my parents come and take me home. This would result in nothing less than being thrown in a dungeon and forced to eat spiders until I was forty-five. So when Jeff told me that all he wanted to do is pray, my insides broke into applause. I let prudence prevail.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s pray.”
We bowed our heads. Jeff and the volunteer were silent for a few seconds. Then they started doing that humming thing. Not speaking in tongues, just a lot of “Hmm . . . yes, lord . . .” When Jeff finally started to form complete sentences, I thought it might have been better to be sent home.
“Demon of divination, demon of rebellion, demon of contentiousness . . .”
Was he talking to me? I hoped that he was just using hyperbole and not-
“We cast you out of Stephen in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and by the power of the blood of the Lamb.”
Oh. No. He. Didn’t.
“Dear Jesus we ask that, through the power of your precious blood, you release Stephen from demonic oppression and set him upon a righteous path. Bring him back into your glorious light and renew his heart and mind. Please build a hedge around this youth group. Send your angels to protect us from any demonic influence that this palm reader may have introduced.”
The volunteer said “Hmmm . . .” so many times that he sounded like a bathroom fan. I was trying not to scream, “Are you out of your mind?” at the top of my lungs. But, since I didn’t want go get pinned me to the floor and doused with Holy Water, I started saying my own silent prayer instead.
This is stupid, Lord. You know that I don’t have any demons inside me. I’m sorry for doing something wrong to impress a girl. I thought of it as a joke but I should have been more serious. But demons? You gotta be kidding me! I’ll tell you what, God. If I really am under demonic influence, make that clear to me right now. Give me a sign and I’ll go with this. I ask it in Jesus name.
I felt nothing. No physical, spiritual, or emotional signs that I was possessed. I felt convicted over committing a sin. I even felt bad about upsetting Brother Jeff. Other than that, nothing. I stopped praying and returned my attention to Jeff, who was still casting out demons.
Something started to freeze inside me. My anger drained away, replaced by cool apathy. I no longer wanted to debate Jeff. I didn’t even want to rebel against him. The absurdity of what was happening was too much. There was no way to change Jeff’s mind. The only sensible thing to do was stop caring.
* * *
In that moment, a cynic was born, but it’s not Brother Jeff’s fault. It’s mine.
I chose to handle my anger and pain by killing off the passion that created it. I had my nice, safe little Christian world and I threw a fit when someone changed things. I couldn’t handle it when I didn’t get my way. I couldn’t accept the fact things weren’t perfect anymore, so I made Brother Jeff the enemy. For years, well into adulthood, I imagined Brother Jeff as an evil despot who stomped on a vibrant faith with legalistic oppression. That’s what cynicism does—it splits the truth in half. In your preoccupation with the things that hurt you, you forget the things that nurtured you.
Cynicism begins as passion. This is especially true for Christians who fall in love with Jesus when they’re young. We give our lives to something beautiful and pure, believing that it will never be tarnished. We embrace our church and the warmth and love of its people. We experience spiritual highs that set us ablaze with fervor for Christ. We want to tell other people in hopes that discover this same joy. We pray, study the Bible, and become enraptured by our relationship with God and his church. For a little while, it’s like walking in Eden with God.
Then a serpent shows up and tells us about a fruit that will make us smarter. In a moment of selfishness and fear, we take a bite. Then everything changes. We see that the leaders we idealize are flawed and broken. We look around the garden and see hypocrisy and deceit. We see people twisting our beloved Scripture to bully people who disagree with them. People we love and trust hurt us, sometimes through malice, but more often weakness. Our peaceful, perfect garden becomes a forest filled with monsters, and we flee.
Beneath the surly and sarcastic exterior of a cynic lies a broken heart. Most cynics once believed in something with all their heart and mind. Then that same thing causes pain and disappointment. It’s so terrible that we vow never to let it happen again. We stop trusting, We suspect anyone who proclaims simple truths. We think that pat answers are for suckers, because we’ve been the sucker before. So we stop going to church or, if we do, we don’t get involved. We don’t just question religious authority, we mock it. We refuse to be vulnerable and embrace the love we once knew because we’re terrified that it will leave us again.
Oscar Wilde wrote,“A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” A cynic can tell you all about the painful cost of religion, but they no longer know the joy of depending on God and others. After I became a cynic, I still longed for the passion I once felt, but I refused to be fooled again. I refused to be hurt again.
The story about Brother Jeff is one-sided. I told the truth, but it was the cynical truth. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell you the whole story. I left out something really important, because it’s painful to think about: Brother Jeff loved me.
For years I imagined that our former leader, Brother Rob, was the one really cared for me. That’s not true. Brother Rob was great, but Jeff nurtured me more. Yes, we fought a lot, but Jeff took an incredible interest in my life. He was legalistic and stubborn, but there is no question that he cared about me. We didn’t always argue. We would talk about God, the Bible, or just chew the fat about topics that didn’t lead to an argument. Even when were fighting, Jeff invested time and energy in my life. The guy spent hours of his personal time debating a pimple-faced punk about music.
The guy was also a Bible scholar. He taught us things about early Christian history, Greek, and Hebrew that helped me see the Bible in the whole new light. He could give rousing, sincere sermons that inspired and convicted. Despite my anger at Brother Jeff’s rules, my knowledge and love of the Lord grew under his leadership.
And the guy was funny. He was a great practical joker with a lightening fast wit. He was open and gregarious most of the time. He even made fun of his appearance, saying that his red hair and freckled skin made him look like a reject from the Partridge Family. He could be cocky, but he could also show humility and confess his sins. For years, I didn’t allow myself to remember that. The cynic could never admit that his enemy was so friendly and so much fun. I was too busy judging him. In other words, I was too busy sinning against him.
I stopped going to youth group after the palm-reading/exorcism incident. I still attended Sunday morning services because my mother would have shaved her head otherwise. Then, in the spring of my junior year, I visited Methodist church down the road because a cute girl invited me. The youth group was almost identical to my old one—passionately evangelical, active, big choir, summer trips—except for Jeff’s rules. I got to listen to all the rock and roll I wanted, wear shorts, play cards, and nobody tried to pluck any demons out of me. My new youth pastor, Allen, was a wise and gentle mentor. He got past my suspicions, helped me assimilate into my new group, and became a trusted friend. He was exactly the kind of tender, listening leader that I needed to help me recover from the pain of losing the church of my childhood.
But I hadn’t heard the last of Brother Jeff. The summer between my junior and senior year, I got a letter from him, though I hadn’t seen him in months. In the letter, Brother Jeff asked me to return to youth group. His words bore no condemnation or judgment. He just said that things weren’t the same without me and he wanted me to come back. He invited me to go on the summer mission trip. He wrote, “Just call me up and say, ‘Jeff, I’m going.’ You don’t have to say anything more than that and you’ll be welcome to come. Otherwise, who’s going to ask the tough questions? Who’s going to keep me in line?”
Who’s going to keep me in line? This maniac was inviting the very thing that I thought he hated about me?
Jeff, I’m going. That’s all have to say? After so much strife, three words will set things right again?
Despite Jeff’s vulnerability and courage, his words rolled off me. I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t tolerate the idea that I was important to him. I couldn’t believe that I’d impacted his life. He drove me crazy, but he cared enough about me that I drove him crazy, too. That’s danger of passion. The things we love, the things that bring us the most joy, make us crazy. Whether it’s God, a person, a church, or a cause, to love something is to sacrifice peace. The world and all the people in it are broken. Love cannot exist without pain. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said, “I came not to bring peace but the sword” (Matthew 10:34). I doubt that he was war mongering or undercutting pacifism. Maybe he meant giving your life to something results in strife. You cannot have passion for something and be free from pain.
This was a lesson I would not learn for a very long time. I’m still not sure I get it. God’s tried to teach me again and again, but I have difficulty accepting it. But I’ve got to get used to it, because the other option is despair. It’s the way of the cynic, who sneers and makes a stone of his heart because passion is too dangerous. Being a Christian is supposed to be dangerous. It means being vulnerable, taking risks, and having communities of imperfect people. It means leaving our comfort zone and kissing it goodbye forever. Being a Christian means exchanging comfort for something so much better: joy. Comfort is nothing more than a lack of pain and aggravation. It’s about what isn’t there instead of what is. Joy comes from passion, love, and commitment to something and Someone bigger than you. Passion, love, and commitment come at a price (just ask Jesus), but it’s a price worth paying, because God’s joy provides a sense of meaning and a depth of feeling you can’t get any other way.
I never wrote Jeff back and I never saw him again. Caring was too difficult, so I stopped. I wasn’t willing to walk the dangerous path that leads to joy
I’m returning from a four-mile run at 8:30 a.m. on a Friday. A chorus of “Dada!” greets me as soon as I open the door. Hayley looks up at my baseball cap and shouts, “Daddy wear funny hat!” and breaks out laughing. A court jester had replaced the docile little girl of only a few months before.
My wife Shelley scurries past me, carrying a laundry basket.
“Are you ready to take over?” she asks.
“Let me change shirts,” I answer. “I’m pretty sweaty.”
In confirmation of this, Ella points at my shirt and proclaims, “Daddy all wet. Daddy sticky mess!”
“Right you are, El –Belle,” I say, kissing her on the forehead before rushing off to change clothes.
At one year and three months, the children can walk without falling, but they have yet to develop the speed and agility that will turn them into a roaming toddler hit squad. They are coordinated but not dangerous. Thus, we can now care for our children without the assistance of the National Guard. I can even take care of them by myself sometimes, though it isn’t easy. At first, I was petrified whenever Shelley left me alone with the kids. I thought that one wrong move would land somebody in the hospital. Now I’m learning that the stakes aren’t so high. I take one-hour shifts before I go to work in the morning. Friday mornings are the best because I get up early and run first. The exercise wakes me up and elevates my mood. That way, the children get to spend time with their father instead of some monstrosity that needs two cans of Red Bull before he can do more than grunt.
I emerge from my bedroom wearing a clean shirt and a fresh coat of deodorant. As soon as I walk out of the door, my son Jordan barrels into my legs. He stretches out his arms for me to pick him up. He points to the light switch on the wall and shouts, “Lights!” I hold him up to the switch and he flicks it on and off, laughing with delight. When he’s finished, I put him the ground and he bolts down the hallway like he’s running the hundred-yard dash. Jordan regards walking as a poor substitute for sprinting. Since he’s built like a cinderblock, it’s like having a miniature locomotive in our house.
I walk into the living room and see our daughter Emma sitting in the corner playing with big Leggo blocks. I kiss her on the top of her head and she giggles. Then I notice something odd about the Leggos. She isn’t stacking them like she usually does. When I realize what Emma’s doing, I gasp and call Shelley.
My wife, Shelley, darted down the hallway and into the living room. She had a worried look on her face, because I usually only call her when there’s trouble.
“Look at what Emma did,” I say.
Shelley looks. Then she squeals with delight.
“Emma!” she shouts. “You’re so smart! I am so proud of you.”
At only fifteen months of age, Emma has arranged the Leggos according to size and color. One row had large green blocks. The next had small green blocks. Then there was a row of large red blocks, followed by a small red row, and so on.
Shelley gives Emma a hug and Emma basks in her mother’s affection. Then she picks up the blocks and starts making a tower.
I head to the kitchen to grab a bowl of cereal, but Ella stops me with a large cardboard book in her hands.
“Read book?”
Breakfast can wait.
I sit on the on the ground, put Ella in my lap, and start reading. Ella repeats everything I say. Then someone accosts me from behind. It’s Emma, tickling me and laughing so hard you’d think I was tickling her. No one is safe from a tickling ambush while Emma’s around. I let out a desperate laugh until Emma is satisfied that she’s subdued her father with mirth. I return my attention to Ella and the book, unaware that Hayley is about to take a nosedive off the couch.
Thud.
I jump up, making sure not to topple Ella, and rush over to Hayley. She’s face down on the ground.
“Hayley Rose! Precious, are you okay?”
For a few seconds, she’s silent. Then I hear, “Heh heh heh heh . . .”
I roll her over to find a big, mischievous grin.
“Kaboom!” she shouts.
“You little rascal!” I say and started to tickle her. She rolls around on the floor, squealing with delight.
Hayley’s quiet demeanor during her first few months of life was nothing but an act. She was waiting in the wings, observing her audience before she took center stage. She is now a bona fide ham and the biggest comedian in the family. The sinister thing about this is that she knows how to make her father crack up on cue.
The next thing I know, all my children are on me at once. I submit and collapse to the floor on my back. Everyone crawls on top of me, laughing. They are all trying to put their face on top of mine. I kiss each one of them and they kiss me back, laughing. We frolic around on the floor like this until Shelley, walks in.
“Why aren’t the kids dressed yet?” she asks.
“Because I’ve been waylaid by Lilliputians!” I shout. The tired look on Shelley’s disappears as she shakes her head and smiles.
Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize what I see. Where did the angry young man go? Who is this father and husband gazing back at me with crows feet at the corners of his eyes and thin lines on edge of his smile? But then I take a second look and realize that I know him, but it’s been a while since we’ve hung out. He’s reemerging from years of cynicism that are being chiseled away by grace.
You see, I’m a jerk. That’s the first thing you have to understand. The second thing you have to understand is that you probably are too sometimes, and we both enjoy it too much. We get a little tickle inside when someone ignores our advice and screws up as a result. We like shutting down people who get in our way and avoiding people who annoy us. We watch Benny Hinn for entertainment value, congratulating ourselves for being too smart to buy what he’s selling. We disregard people who don’t get our jokes and we don’t suffer fools gladly. We’re not evil or even malicious most of the time – just jerks. We have compassion and love, but it doesn’t take much for us to roll our eyes and mumble something sarcastic under our breath.
I’m probably more of jerk than you are. It drives me nuts if something interferes with my life. I don’t like being bothered and I don’t want any help. If you catch me when I’m in the mood to socialize, you’ll love me. Work with my schedule and I’ll deliver the sun and the moon. Otherwise, I hate being told what to do and I have problems with authority. I’m short-tempered when I’m under stress or in a hurry. I start yelling inside my car when another driver cuts me off. As a bonus, I have Attention Deficit Disorder, which means I get impatient, irritated, and bored faster than normal people do.
I am not the guy you’d pick to be the father of quadruplets. But we’ll get to that later.
I became a Christian when I was seven years old. I always thought my story would be boring because I met Jesus as a child. Turns out I was wrong. The scary and suspenseful stuff happened after I became a Christian. Sometimes, it happened because I was a Christian. In C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, his conversion to Christianity comes at the end of the book. The first time I read it, I felt a little cheated by the last page when Lewis realizes that he’s a Christian while riding a bus. I wanted to know what happened next. I couldn’t relate to a story that ends with becoming a Christian. In my experience, that’s where the story begins.
When I walked down the aisle of a Baptist church as a boy to receive Christ as my Savior, nobody told me that being a Christian is difficult, dangerous even. That information must have been in the fine print. The way I understood it, the closer you were to God, the happier you would be. The less you sinned and the more you followed God’s Word, the more your life would be meaningful, happy, and complete. In my years as a follower of Christ, however, I’ve discovered that the opposite is often true. Don’t get me wrong—the most ecstatic, victorious moments of my life resulted from having relationship with Jesus, but so have the most aggravating and painful ones. Only now am I learning to live in this tension and discover that it can’t be any other way.
I think most Christians know this, but don’t like to talk about it because such confessions don’t make for the neat, linear success stories that we like to hear. Telling people that being in a relationship with Christ can be maddening and exasperating isn’t effective evangelism. You wouldn’t put it in a tract or a revival brochure. But I wish someone had told me at some point. They didn’t have to tell me when I was seven, but they could have clued me in around age fourteen when my theological roof started to cave in. If they had, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me decades to figure out that a relationship with God involves a lot of scary twists and turns.
If you’ve been a Christian for a while, your relationship with God has probably frustrated and frightened you more than once. Maybe you’ve been confused, angry, or afraid. Maybe nobody told you that was part of the deal when you opened the door of your heart and let Jesus walk in. You also probably didn’t realize that some of your brothers and sisters in Christ were going to drive you insane, doing and saying things you find appalling. It’s hard to live with all that frustration and confusion when you thought that becoming a Christian guaranteed a life of love and peace.
When I discovered that a relationship with Christ wasn’t always warm and fuzzy, I became frightened. Then I got mad. Then I stopped caring. God gave me plenty of opportunities to pursue joy, but cynicism always felt safer. So, instead of offering me joy, he assaulted me with it. When he brought quadruplets to the fight, I had no choice but to shout, “Uncle!” and submit. That’s when the brown and God made the brown, stagnate rivers in my life flow with golden wine. I drank deep and was born again . . . again.
Chapter 1: Rock and Roll Rebel
“There’s no such thing as Christian rock,” said Brother Jeff. “It’s all the devil’s music.” Was he throwing out such inanities just to make me crazy? Did he want me to lose my temper so he could kick me out of youth group?
“How can you say that?” I asked Brother Jeff. “There’s nothing about it in the Bible.”
My words echoed off the white walls and cardboard ceiling tiles. I could hear the neon lights in the ceiling humming from behind foggy Plexiglas panes. Everyone in the junior high youth group sat in tense silence. Some just stared at the faded green carpet, averting their eyes from the conflict. Others slumped down into the old, overstuffed couches, venturing sheepish glances as they clutched throw pillows. Most of my pubescent peers, however, were the edge of their seats, transfixed as the forty year-old associate pastor and I, the fourteen year-old youth group president, tried to bludgeon each other with words.
“Rock roll is the music of rebellion,” said Brother Jeff. “Even if the lyrics are supposedly Christian, the music makes people lustful and contentious.” His mouth was smiling but his eyes were narrow.
“But it doesn’t say that in the Bible!” I shouted. Brother Jeff was wearing me down with edicts that sounded authoritative but made no sense. Every time I presented a reasonable argument, Brother Jeff shot back with something asinine wrapped in a mature, patronizing tone. I was about to pop a blood vessel, but Brother Jeff was as agitated as I was. His face bore a pleasant smile, but the pale, freckled skin beneath his fiery red hair was getting pinker by the second.
“Psalms 98 talks about making all kinds of loud noises before the Lord,” I said. “That sounds a lot like Christian rock to me.”
“You are perverting God’s holy word with that interpretation.”
“I absolutely refuse to accept that,” I said.
“Then you need to ask God for wisdom,” he said with an eerie calm. “You need to respect the leaders God has given you. After God, you must respect and obey your parents. After them, you must respect and obey your church authorities. That means me.”
Then he turned to the rest of the kids and said, “If you don’t believe that rock music makes people rebellious, just look at who’s rebelling.” Then he laughed. I heard somebody in the back whisper, “Oooo . . .”, the universal confirmation that you’ve just received a verbal smack down.
I gritted my teeth and lurched forward. I might have even growled. One of my friends put a hand on my arm and eased me back in my chair. I had lost this battle, but the war was just beginning.
*****
I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. On the surface, Lexington is about three things: basketball, horses, and shopping centers. Children are breast-fed on the first two. If you meet someone from Lexington whom you find shy and reserved, ask him or her about horseracing or University of Kentucky basketball. You’ll hear more than you ever wanted about Secretariat and Seattle Slew, including their bloodlines and the farms where they were bred and trained. You’ll be informed that Keeneland racetrack is far superior to that tourist slum, Churchill Downs. Want to see a real live nervous breakdown? Just bring up the game winning shot by Duke’s Christian Laettner in the 1992 East Regional Finals of the NCAA tournament. It halted UK’s run to the Final Four and sent the entire state into a coma. That game is the Alamo for Wildcat fans and no one in the Bluegrass State has ever recovered.
The shopping centers you won’t hear about. While I was growing up, Lexington spilled over its borders, swallowing up farms and turning them into parking lots encircled by Wal-Marts, Blockbusters, Payless Shoe Stores, and frozen yogurt bars. Stick an Applebee’s in the middle and you’ve got the building block of Lexington consumerism: the high-fat, middle-class strip mall.
Downtown Lexington, however, stands steadfast amidst the city’s suburban sprawl. Stately stone buildings from the early 20th century line Main Street and Vine in solid indifference to the commercial aspirations of the periphery. The two skyscrapers look like an afterthought, gaudy glass trees in a baroque stone garden. The neighborhoods downtown have housing projects, historic brownstones, and beautiful houses that are eighty years old. Artists, black folks, students, and college professors reside in these, politely ignoring the rest of the city. Attempts to put in chain restaurants or big retail stores usually fail, while small businesses thrive. The best food, the most exotic clothes, and the only art that isn’t a painting of a horse or a sketch of basketball jersey can be found downtown.
The horse farms rest just outside town, where the suburbs surrender to green fields cascading over rolling hills. White and black picked fences create boundaries for the dark, gleaming horses that sustain all this beauty. Majestic barns – more opulent than any house I’ll ever own – sit atop hills like castles of feudal kingdoms. Out there, the culture clash between urban and suburban becomes irrelevant. Out there, you just feel lucky to live in Kentucky.
Though I loved the horse farms and found downtown fascinated and alluring, I was a child of the suburbs. I spent my youth running through manicured subdivisions and shopping centers. The suburbs were also the place where big churches popped up like mushrooms. Evangelical Christianity was the second largest religion in Lexington, right behind basketball. My family attended a mammoth Baptist church that, like many, had moved away from downtown so it could swell and spread on the edge of town. My parents started attending the church because of its large, vital youth program. They wanted my two sisters and I to have a place where we could grow in the love and knowledge of the Lord. And that’s what happened.
When I was seven years old, I began a journey with God that would be the source of more frustration and fear and more joy and wonder than I could imagine. The high school choir had returned from their summer tour to perform a homecoming concert. This was a big deal at my church. The youth choir practiced all year long and toured the country for two weeks every summer. The congregation welcomed them back as conquering heroes and the homecoming concert was one of the major events of the year. There was always a lot of laughing, crying, and hugging, the climax of which was an invitation to receive Christ that went on for at least thirty minutes. We sang “Just as I Am” ten times in a row, the organist doing her best to mix things up as she reached the seventh chorus. But nobody seemed to mind. People, mostly teenagers (some from the choir, even), flocked down front to accept Jesus as their savior.
Despite all the commotion, I was bored and fidgety. I spent most of the concert drawing pictures on the offering envelopes. I drew everything from spaceships to army men to Batman giving the Joker a much deserved beat down. But when the invitation began, something happened. I had feelings I didn’t understand and couldn’t name. Looking back, I’m pretty sure the Holy Spirit was at work. It had to be, because, before the invitation, I was only thinking about when the service would be over. All of a sudden, I felt a strange urge to become closer to God. It wasn’t about salvation or avoiding hell—for a reason I can’t explain, I wanted to graduate to higher level of faith. I wanted that relationship with Jesus that I’d heard so much about.
When I told my parents that I wanted to go down front, they looked surprised. They must have wondered why the fidgety kid defacing church bulletins all of a sudden wanted a religious experience. My mother wore a floral dress with a shiny broach and my father had on sport coat but no tie because it was the evening service. Mom looked at me with her trademark sideways gaze beneath raised eyebrows. When she saw I was serious about going down front, she smiled. Dad leaned in close and said, “Do you understand what this means?”
I nodded my head. He put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder.
“All right, buddy,” he said. “Go ahead.”
I scurried down front and the pastor took my small hand in his gigantic one. It was red and warm, like my father’s. He asked me if I was certain that I wanted to receive Christ as my Lord and Savior. I told him that I was. He told me to sit up front with one of the deacons until after the service.
After the concert, the pastor took me back to his office. There was shiny wood everywhere and more books than I’d ever seen outside of a library. I sat in a chair that was too big for me and the pastor sat down across from me, leaning in close.
“Do you understand what it means to commit your life to Christ?” he said, his voice deep and rolling. It felt weird to hear him speaking to me alone instead of the whole congregation.
“I think so,” I said. “It means I become a Christian.”
“Yes,” said the pastor. “But that means you ask Jesus to forgive you of your sins and come and live inside your heart forever. Are you ready to do that?”
To my seven year-old brain, having Jesus live inside my heart sounded like just about the coolest thing in the world.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready to accept Jesus into my heart.”
The pastor led me in prayer, asking me to repeat after him. When we were finished, he told me that I was a Christian now. He said that I was going to heaven and that God loved me. It felt like I had joined a special club. When I left the pastor’s office, my parents were waiting for me. I started prattling about going to heaven and having Jesus inside my heart. My father said that he was proud. My mother kept asking me what lead me to make this decision. Was it the sermon? The music? But I couldn’t tell her. I just knew that I wanted to become a Christian and now I was one. I was elated
We left church went to Shoney’s. My stomach started to growl at first sight of the twenty foot Big Boy, with his wide-eyed smile and red and white checkered overalls. I got a burger as big as my hand with cheddar cheese dripping down the side, accompanied by fries that were thick and salty. I cleaned my plate and felt good about it. As I got into bed that night, I felt safe, full, and warm.
For the next seven years, I went to church whenever the doors were open. I loved not only the people, but the building itself. It was big, austere, and mysterious. It contained dozens of secret places—kitchens, alcoves, storage closets, baptismal pools, and large meeting halls. I explored every one of them. The building was almost a metaphor for God—large and strong with endless mysteries to investigate.
I also read the Bible constantly and pestered adults with a million of questions about God. I wanted to be involved in everything and adults described me as “wise beyond my years” and “a young Bible scholar.
Now, before you start thinking I was a budding young saint, let me explain the other reason I loved church. I didn’t have many friends at school. I was fat (I weighed more at age 14 than I do right now) with bucked teeth, and the most severe case of acne in the history of Western Civilization. Making matters worse, my pituitary gland went off like a hand grenade at age eleven, dragging me into adolescence two years ahead of my peers. I shot up a dozen inches over my friends, but I didn’t get any thinner. Instead, my acne got worse and I developed body odor. I started shaving with my Dad’s electric razor in sixth grade. This produced a red razor burn across my neck that made me look like I’d been hanging from a noose. Oh yeah, and my eyebrows grew together, creating a uni-brow.
The prepubescent world did not react kindly to a massive, hairy man-child with skin like a leper. Kids called me fatso, pizza face, lard butt, and the like. I hung around other unpopular kids at school, arguing about who would win in a fight between Luke Skywalker and Superman. The only consolation was that nobody tired to beat me up since I was the size of a duplex.
At church, however, things were different. From the time I was ten until I was sixteen, everything at church revolved around two things: The Bible and singing. By the time I was twelve, I knew more about the Bible than most of the adults at the church. During Sunday School and Bible Study, I felt smart and important instead of fat and ugly. When we weren’t studying the Bible, we were in choir practice. Our church had a large, active music ministry and they started asking you to sing not long after you could walk. I’m not Pavarotti or even Barry Manilow, but I sing pretty well. Sometimes I was even asked to fill in for someone in the adult choir if they couldn’t make a Sunday morning. I was singing solos by the time I was thirteen. So, between my Bible IQ and my vocal chords, I almost passed for cool at church.
God had granted me a place to escape the pain of the world outside and fall in love with him. Heaven and earth merged as I studied the Bible and spent every spare minute at church. The people at church took care of me. I loved them, we all loved God, and everyone was happy. The solution to life’s problems could be found in each other, the Bible, and a God who could do anything and save anybody. Life was perfect and I believed it would stay that way for eternity.
I was wrong.
* * *
When I was almost fourteen, my parents and I moved to a new house and they ceded the entire basement to me. My sisters, eleven and fourteen years older, had long since moved away, so there was no competition for space. That basement became my escape from the rest of the world, albeit a very loud one.
By eighth grade, I had constructed a massive stereo system. The components were mismatches from different eras of technology. It was an ugly, hulking thing that leaned forward like some aluminum tower of Piza. But it sounded good. And it was loud. I had four speakers in my den and strung wire under the brown shag carpet to juice up two more in my bedroom. All around the basement, rock and roll spewed forth from trembling woofers behind black mesh screens encased in particleboard.
I had enough music down in that hole to wait out a nuclear winter. When I was a teenager, the digital age was still twenty years away, so I had albums. Stacks of albums. At $7 a pop, my allowance and money from part-time jobs helped me buy four or five records a month. By the time I was sixteen, I had over two hundred rock albums. Old records, new records, imported records, used records, and bootleg records stood in teetering columns around my basement. I spent hours listening to them while gazing in wonder at the artwork on the sleeve and pouring over the liner notes. Whenever my father told me what a waste of money it all was, I just looked at him like he was out of his mind.
The basement’s seclusion from the rest of the house gave me solitude, but the music made it my sanctuary. Music was my elixir, the only other thing than prayer and the Bible that made me feel quiet inside. One night at a party, I saw a girl on whom I had an obsessive crush kissing another guy. I returned home shaking with rage and sadness. But that same night MTV televised a concert that the radio was broadcasting at the same time. This was before every TV in the world offered hi-fi sound, so hearing music from television in stereo over 100 watt speakers seemed like a miracle. And, by a divine stroke, my favorite band was performing: Queen. While not the most morally pure band in the world, their music was amazing. Freddie Mercury pranced around the 20” screen while the speakers hummed to life with the sound of Brian May’s guitar. I knew every song by heart and lip-synced the words, dancing around the room in a hypermasculine imitation of Freddie. By the third song, I had forgotten that nasty kiss. When the concert was over, I went to bed fell into a deep sleep without dreams.
You’d think rock and roll fanaticism wouldn’t go over well in a fundamentalist Baptist church, but that wasn’t the case. Though our leaders had evangelical fervor, they weren’t legalistic. They encouraged us to be obedient to God and were quick to correct us when we got out of line, but they weren’t rigid or heavy-handed. Brother Rob was our youth pastor back then and he was a man of passion and talent. He nurtured everyone’s gifts and took an interest in our lives. On a bus ride once, Brother Rob sat next to me and listened to several Queen songs in a row as I prattled on about the intricacies of the music. He did his best to seem interested, poor guy. He cheered along with everyone else on the bus as I played air guitar during “We Will Rock You,” looking like wooly mammoth having a seizure. Brother Rob and our other leaders were conservative fundamentalists, but, as long as God remained top priority, they didn’t sweat the small stuff.
They even knew how to disagree with me. They expressed concern about some of the music I listened to, like AC/DC (hard to argue with that one), but they always listened to my perspective. One year, our church went through the inevitable “spinning records backwards to unmask the devil” phase. I watched in horror as beloved leaders spun records backwards and told us that the resulting gobbledygook said things about worshipping the devil. Though it drove me nuts, it was also one of the most exciting times I had in church because my leaders allowed me to debate them. They let me lead an entire youth meeting providing an alternative perspective on rock and roll and all this back-masking nonsense. They didn’t always agree with me, but they respected my right to challenge them. They let me play almost anything I wanted to on summer mission trips as long as the lyrics weren’t too sketchy. And I could play Christian rock all day long. The music might sound like someone murdering cats with chainsaws, but as long as the lyrics were about Jesus, they didn’t care.
But Brother Jeff cared. He cared a lot.
Brother Jeff became the associate pastor of my church when I was in the eighth grade. In addition to his administrative duties, he was in charge of the youth program. On his first day, the youth and their parents gathered in the gymnasium to meet him.
The senior pastor walked in to the gym escorting the thinnest adult male I had ever seen. He had a comical head of curly red, almost orange, hair. His freckles gave the rest of his skin a similar orangish glow. He looked like a carrot.
“God bless you,” said Jeff the Carrot. “I have been praying for this church, praying that God will guide me and continue his great work with the young people of this congregation.” He talked for over an hour in a nasal southern drawl about his vision for the youth program. He told us “God’s gonna do this” and “God’s gonna do that” and “God’s gonna bless y’all.” I still knew next to nothing about Jeff except that he looked like a carrot in a red clown wig that talked like it was yanked out of the dirt somewhere in South Georgia. The only relevant thing he told us was that the youth were allowed to call him by his first name. How magnanimous.
The adults asked questions first. “What is your vision for our youth ministry?” “What are your outreach plans?” “What’s your philosophy on Biblical teachings for teens?” Blah, blah, blah. No one in the room under twenty cared about any of this. The “young people” only cared about one thing. Could we hang out with this guy? Was he cool? I don’t mean “cool” like hip or even youthful. Nothing is more embarrassing than an old guy trying to act young. We wanted to know if he was someone we could trust. I took it upon myself to find out.
I raised my hand and the senior pastor recognized me.
“What’s your favorite Christian rock band?”
Though a silly question, I wanted to give Brother Jeff an easy way to connect with the youth in the room. The question got a few chuckles, which lighten the mood in the room.
But Brother Jeff did anything but laugh or connect with the youth. He breathed a heavy, affected sigh and rolled his eyes toward the heavens.
“Stephen, or is it Stevie?” he asked without waiting for the answer. “I’m afraid you might not care for my answer, which saddens me. But ultimately I answer to God and not to you or any of you other wonderful young people. My answer to your question is this: None. I think Christian rock is an abomination of all the other wonderful music that God has given us. Those rancid screeching guitars and that horrid pounding beat are, I believe, unleashed from the pit of hell. I despise Christian rock. Secular rock is worse, of course. I will abide none of it on my watch. No form of rock music will be played at any of our activities.”
He looked me in the eye and said, “I’m sorry”
My stomach lurched upward as I tried to comprehend what was happening.
Jeff inundated us with a whole new list of prohibitions, ones of which I had never heard nor imagined despite years of fundamentalist religion: no card playing (a sure-fire gateway to gambling), no ghost stories (a guaranteed way to conjure demons), no celebration of Halloween (more demons), and no movies unless they were rated “G.” He also forbade us to wear shorts, even though our mission trips visited states such as Georgia and Louisiana in the middle of August on a bus with no air conditioning. When I heard that, I could contain myself no longer. Without raising my hand I blurted out, “No shorts on our summer mission trips? The bus has no air-conditioning. We’ll all melt. And we’ll stink!”
That got a lot of laughs, but His Carrotness didn’t back down.
“I know it will be uncomfortable. But that’s nothing compared to the discomfort Christ experienced dying for our sins. Our mission trips will be the most important time for us to set an example to the pagan world and we will not be wearing shorts.”
A low whistle of amazement came from the back of the gym. Jeff’s eyes darted around looking for the culprit before he regained his composure and flashed an ultra-white smile.
No one asked any more questions after that. The senior pastor smiled and said something about us having plenty of time to get to know each other. He said it like it was a good thing.
I thought I was going to puke right on the gym floor. I had fought a long and hard battle for rock and roll at my church and finally gotten my mentors to listen. Now some guy shows up and, with a wave of his hand, banishes all music featuring guitars that plugged in, along with all other benign comforts of the flesh. I was in the middle of a bad dream.
Most teenagers would have stopped coming to youth group or just paid lip service to the new rules and gone about the time-honored practice of rebelling in secret. But not me. I declared war. This was my church. Church was the only place where I felt safe, understood, and respected. It was the only place I had fun. Now some dogmatic cleric was trying to ruin it for me. Over my dead body.
Poor Brother Jeff had no idea who he was up against. In a Southern Baptist Church, the Bible is the litmus test for everything. Ever since I’d walked down the aisle at age seven and taken the pastor’s hand, I’d been reading the Bible. I didn’t just listen to what my teachers told me about the Bible in Sunday school, I studied the thing. By age thirteen, I’d read the entire Bible (well, almost—I got the K.O. from Numbers in Chapter Three). I knew that Biblical support for Brother Jeff’s list of “don’ts” was thin at best and I wielded the word like a sword in our theological debates. I was certain that my knowledge of scripture would help me triumph over this new regime of the absurd.
I debated Jeff steadily for the next year, always using what I regarded as solid Biblical arguments. I prayed for him and for our church. I did my best to be a good example and a solid leader so that my disagreements with Jeff didn’t look like reckless defiance. I tangled with Jeff in public, in private, and in writing. I fought my war with prayerful diligence and refused to back down. For a long time, I thought I was winning. There was no way that this man could continue imposing ridiculous rules that were Biblically unsound, not to mention wildly unpopular. Well, at least they were unpopular at first . . .
One day I was talking to another guy in the youth group whom I liked and respected. He was a couple of years older and I’d always considered him cool. He was had introduced me to Christian rock, telling me about bands like Petra and Servant. We went to Christian rock concerts together and danced and sang and went bananas in the name of the Lord.
One day I commiserated with him, “It’s not right that Brother Jeff won’t let us listen to Christian rock.”
“There’s no such thing as Christian rock,” he said with a blank expression. “It’s all of the devil.” He didn’t elaborate, just looked at me in mute finality. I didn’t say anything because, in that moment, I realized that there was nothing to say. It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong about rock music, wearing shorts, playing cards, or whether the earth was round or flat. My friend’s mind was made up. The validity of my arguments was irrelevant. Brother Jeff had given an edict and my friend accepted it without question.
For the first time in my life, I felt nervous and alone at church. That might not have been so bad if I didn’t feel nervous and alone every place else.
* * *
On the first day of school in ninth grade, a cute girl cute called me “piggy” without provocation. I gave her a dirty look, but that night I lay in bed crying. Jeff had invaded my last safe haven, abandoning me to a place where pretty girls likened me to swine. Life couldn’t continue like this. Drastic times called for drastic measures.
First, I started taking the medication Acutane, a drug that eliminates acne with the gentleness of atomic radiation. I endured nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, and wisps of hair falling out until the medication ran its course and my face no longer resembled a map of the Himalayas. Next, I lost weight. I dropped fifty pounds in six months. Despite my girth, I’d always been strong and athletic. I could outrun kids half my size, and I could bench press 200 pounds by age fourteen. I lost weight mainly through running long distances and cutting out sweets. As a result, I lost more fat than I did muscle. By the last day of ninth grade, I had changed from an acne-covered behemoth into lean, muscular jock with unblemished skin.
That summer, I went to a Christian camp with one of my friends from church named Gordon Green. Gordy was a stud. He was good looking, smooth, and had no trouble with the ladies. On our first night at camp, Gordon spotted a brunette he found attractive. He dispatched one of our female friends to inform the young lady of his affections and ascertain her level of interest in him. Ten minutes later, our friend returned with the verdict.
“So, does she like me?”
“She says that you’re cute,” the emissary replied as a Casanova grin spread across Gordon’s face.
“But she thinks Steve is cuter.”
Gordon was speechless; I was thunderstruck.
“Could you repeat that?” I said, partly because I wanted to make sure I heard her right, but mostly because I just wanted to hear it again.
Despite the nice ego boost, I entered high school in the fall with my head down. I looked different but I still didn’t have many friends. The first day of high school is hard for anyone, but going through it alone is anxious drudgery. I zipped through the hallways avoiding eye contact with everyone. On my way to second period, someone grabbed my shoulder and spun me around.
“Lookin’ good, Simpson. Looks like you’ll be ready to wrestle this year,” said Mac Wood, a senior on the wrestling team with me. That was the first time he’d said anything nice to me.
“Thanks,” I said, wondering if I was supposed to say something cocky or funny instead.
“See you in practice,” he said and disappeared.
In third period Biology, a popular member of the football team took a seat next to me.
At lunch I sat down alone, but my friend Bill asked me to sit with him and four of his friends who’d never talked to me before. Later that week, we all played basketball at Bill’s house. By Christmas, we were sitting together on the bus. By springtime, we were hanging out over the weekend.
It was surreal. I figured that losing pounds and zits would make things easier I didn’t know that it would make me need church a whole lot less.
* * *
In March of my tenth grade year, I told my mother that I didn’t want to go to youth group anymore. She said that she didn’t care; I was going anyway.
“You don’t forsake the Body of Christ just because you don’t like one it’s parts. Is Jesus still the most important thing in your life?”
“Yes, mom,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Following him isn’t always easy. Sometimes we have to show Christ’s love to people we don’t like.”
I knew she was right, but I didn’t like it. My father’s take on the situation made sticking with church a little easier.
“If you think Brother Jeff is wrong, you need to stick to your guns. If you leave youth group, that means he wins. You’ve let him chase you off. Stick around and stand up for what you believe.
Now that I could do, though perhaps not in the way Dad imagined.
That summer, I went on the youth mission trip as I had every year. Since Brother Jeff wouldn’t let us wear shorts, I boarded the bus wearing mesh, see-through sweat pants over my shorts, obeying the letter of the law while gleefully defying the spirit. When Jeff saw me, he just shook his head, frustrated but impotent because I’d conformed to his rules. I whispered ghost stories to the other kids just because it wasn’t allowed. I organized card games at the back of the bus. Whenever Brother Jeff wandered back, we’d chuck the Jacks and Queens, whip out a deck of Uno, and beam at him like little cherubs. But the real coup de tat was smuggling rock and roll onto the bus.
I stuffed a bunch of socks with cassette tapes and hid them in the bottom of my luggage. Thus, the 1985 youth mission trip rolled out of town carrying every album by Queen and U2, along with a strong sampling of The Who, The Clash, Rush, Van Halen, and anything else that sounded like something Brother Jeff would hate. My buddy Gordon was the only person I told about it, which turned out to be a big mistake.
After eating lunch at a Cracker Barrell, we got back on the bus and discovered Gordon sitting in my seat holding my boom box. Ozzy Osbourne’s “Revelation Mother Earth” blasted out of the speakers at about 5,000 decibels. One of the adult volunteers told Gordon to turn it off. Gordon protested, saying that he thought the music sounded awesome. I shot Gordon a look that said, “I am going to kill you with my bare hands.” He turned the music off and apologized. Gordon didn’t rat me out, but he didn’t have to. It wasn’t hard for anyone to figure out who snuck Ozzy on bus.
When Brother Jeff found out, he gave me a look of contempt … and nothing more. I expected dire consequences, confiscation of my tapes at the minimum. But he didn’t do anything.
The next day, we had three hours to wander around in Jefferson City, Missouri. The place was filled with novelty shops, theme restaurants, and other attractions that teenagers live for. They also happened to have a palm reader, which piqued my interest.
At a Cub Scout Halloween party in second grade, somebody’s mom dressed up like a gypsy and read our palms. The whole thing was a joke, but the palm reader said something that stuck with me. She said I was going to marry a girl named Jenny. It just so happened that I’d had a crush on a girl named Jenny since seventh grade. Jenny was with me that day in Jefferson City as we passed a palm reader’s hut adorned with flashing astrological symbols.
I had told Jenny about the palm reader back was when I’d been fat and ugly. That was when she’d told me she liked me, “as a friend,” the label that every adolescent suitor regards as a curse. But things were different now. Jenny had been flirting with me lately. Maybe it was time to reintroduce the subject.
“Hey, Jenny, remember the story I told you about that palm reader saying I would marry a girl named Jenny,” I said, pointing to the palm reader’s hut.
Jenny flashed a feline grin and said, “I remember. Maybe you should get a second opinion.”
I needed nothing more. Without a second thought, I ducked in to the palm reader’s lair.
Five minutes later and five dollars poorer, I had no new information regarding the name of my bride to be. (For the record, my wife’s name is not Jenny and her parents never even considered that name.) I laughed it off as confirmation that palm reading was a bunch of hooey.
Since I have a big mouth, I told half a dozen people about the palm reader. Someone tattled. At our next stop, Brother Jeff and one of the volunteers cornered me. They took me into the sanctuary of the church that was putting us up for the night. Brother Jeff suggested we sit in the choir loft. It felt like being in the penalty box at a hockey game.
“Steve, the fact that you went to a palm reader grieves me, but I hate to say that I’m not surprised,” began Brother Jeff as the volunteer frowned and nodded in agreement. “I have sensed this sort of lawlessness in you from the first time we met almost three years ago. In those three years, things seem to have only gotten worse. What on earth gave you the notion of going to a palm reader?”
I told him the story about the gypsy at Cub Scouts and Jenny. I didn’t want to, but I thought Jeff would cut me some slack if I humiliated myself.
Jeff furrowed his brow and nodded.
“It’s all starting to make sense now. If you went to a palm reader in Cub Scouts, that would have opened you to demonic influence at a vulnerable age. That’s probably the reason you’re so obsessed with rock music. It explains your contentious nature.”
That just made me mad. I forgot about trying to get out of this unscathed.
“I told you that the palm reader at Cub Scouts was just a joke. I went to the palm reader today just as a stunt to impress Jenny. I promise you, Jeff, no demons were involved.”
“The Prince of Lies wants you to think that.”
I rolled my eyes. Bad move.
“You might not care about your own spiritual welfare, but I care about this youth group. You have opened the whole youth group to demonic oppression through this act. We have to intervene with prayer.”
So far Jeff had said nothing about calling my parents or sending me home. My worst fear was that he would make my parents come and take me home. This would result in nothing less than being thrown in a dungeon and forced to eat spiders until I was forty-five. So when Jeff told me that all he wanted to do is pray, my insides broke into applause. I let prudence prevail.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s pray.”
We bowed our heads. Jeff and the volunteer were silent for a few seconds. Then they started doing that humming thing. Not speaking in tongues, just a lot of “Hmm . . . yes, lord . . .” When Jeff finally started to form complete sentences, I thought it might have been better to be sent home.
“Demon of divination, demon of rebellion, demon of contentiousness . . .”
Was he talking to me? I hoped that he was just using hyperbole and not-
“We cast you out of Stephen in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and by the power of the blood of the Lamb.”
Oh. No. He. Didn’t.
“Dear Jesus we ask that, through the power of your precious blood, you release Stephen from demonic oppression and set him upon a righteous path. Bring him back into your glorious light and renew his heart and mind. Please build a hedge around this youth group. Send your angels to protect us from any demonic influence that this palm reader may have introduced.”
The volunteer said “Hmmm . . .” so many times that he sounded like a bathroom fan. I was trying not to scream, “Are you out of your mind?” at the top of my lungs. But, since I didn’t want go get pinned me to the floor and doused with Holy Water, I started saying my own silent prayer instead.
This is stupid, Lord. You know that I don’t have any demons inside me. I’m sorry for doing something wrong to impress a girl. I thought of it as a joke but I should have been more serious. But demons? You gotta be kidding me! I’ll tell you what, God. If I really am under demonic influence, make that clear to me right now. Give me a sign and I’ll go with this. I ask it in Jesus name.
I felt nothing. No physical, spiritual, or emotional signs that I was possessed. I felt convicted over committing a sin. I even felt bad about upsetting Brother Jeff. Other than that, nothing. I stopped praying and returned my attention to Jeff, who was still casting out demons.
Something started to freeze inside me. My anger drained away, replaced by cool apathy. I no longer wanted to debate Jeff. I didn’t even want to rebel against him. The absurdity of what was happening was too much. There was no way to change Jeff’s mind. The only sensible thing to do was stop caring.
* * *
In that moment, a cynic was born, but it’s not Brother Jeff’s fault. It’s mine.
I chose to handle my anger and pain by killing off the passion that created it. I had my nice, safe little Christian world and I threw a fit when someone changed things. I couldn’t handle it when I didn’t get my way. I couldn’t accept the fact things weren’t perfect anymore, so I made Brother Jeff the enemy. For years, well into adulthood, I imagined Brother Jeff as an evil despot who stomped on a vibrant faith with legalistic oppression. That’s what cynicism does—it splits the truth in half. In your preoccupation with the things that hurt you, you forget the things that nurtured you.
Cynicism begins as passion. This is especially true for Christians who fall in love with Jesus when they’re young. We give our lives to something beautiful and pure, believing that it will never be tarnished. We embrace our church and the warmth and love of its people. We experience spiritual highs that set us ablaze with fervor for Christ. We want to tell other people in hopes that discover this same joy. We pray, study the Bible, and become enraptured by our relationship with God and his church. For a little while, it’s like walking in Eden with God.
Then a serpent shows up and tells us about a fruit that will make us smarter. In a moment of selfishness and fear, we take a bite. Then everything changes. We see that the leaders we idealize are flawed and broken. We look around the garden and see hypocrisy and deceit. We see people twisting our beloved Scripture to bully people who disagree with them. People we love and trust hurt us, sometimes through malice, but more often weakness. Our peaceful, perfect garden becomes a forest filled with monsters, and we flee.
Beneath the surly and sarcastic exterior of a cynic lies a broken heart. Most cynics once believed in something with all their heart and mind. Then that same thing causes pain and disappointment. It’s so terrible that we vow never to let it happen again. We stop trusting, We suspect anyone who proclaims simple truths. We think that pat answers are for suckers, because we’ve been the sucker before. So we stop going to church or, if we do, we don’t get involved. We don’t just question religious authority, we mock it. We refuse to be vulnerable and embrace the love we once knew because we’re terrified that it will leave us again.
Oscar Wilde wrote,“A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” A cynic can tell you all about the painful cost of religion, but they no longer know the joy of depending on God and others. After I became a cynic, I still longed for the passion I once felt, but I refused to be fooled again. I refused to be hurt again.
The story about Brother Jeff is one-sided. I told the truth, but it was the cynical truth. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell you the whole story. I left out something really important, because it’s painful to think about: Brother Jeff loved me.
For years I imagined that our former leader, Brother Rob, was the one really cared for me. That’s not true. Brother Rob was great, but Jeff nurtured me more. Yes, we fought a lot, but Jeff took an incredible interest in my life. He was legalistic and stubborn, but there is no question that he cared about me. We didn’t always argue. We would talk about God, the Bible, or just chew the fat about topics that didn’t lead to an argument. Even when were fighting, Jeff invested time and energy in my life. The guy spent hours of his personal time debating a pimple-faced punk about music.
The guy was also a Bible scholar. He taught us things about early Christian history, Greek, and Hebrew that helped me see the Bible in the whole new light. He could give rousing, sincere sermons that inspired and convicted. Despite my anger at Brother Jeff’s rules, my knowledge and love of the Lord grew under his leadership.
And the guy was funny. He was a great practical joker with a lightening fast wit. He was open and gregarious most of the time. He even made fun of his appearance, saying that his red hair and freckled skin made him look like a reject from the Partridge Family. He could be cocky, but he could also show humility and confess his sins. For years, I didn’t allow myself to remember that. The cynic could never admit that his enemy was so friendly and so much fun. I was too busy judging him. In other words, I was too busy sinning against him.
I stopped going to youth group after the palm-reading/exorcism incident. I still attended Sunday morning services because my mother would have shaved her head otherwise. Then, in the spring of my junior year, I visited Methodist church down the road because a cute girl invited me. The youth group was almost identical to my old one—passionately evangelical, active, big choir, summer trips—except for Jeff’s rules. I got to listen to all the rock and roll I wanted, wear shorts, play cards, and nobody tried to pluck any demons out of me. My new youth pastor, Allen, was a wise and gentle mentor. He got past my suspicions, helped me assimilate into my new group, and became a trusted friend. He was exactly the kind of tender, listening leader that I needed to help me recover from the pain of losing the church of my childhood.
But I hadn’t heard the last of Brother Jeff. The summer between my junior and senior year, I got a letter from him, though I hadn’t seen him in months. In the letter, Brother Jeff asked me to return to youth group. His words bore no condemnation or judgment. He just said that things weren’t the same without me and he wanted me to come back. He invited me to go on the summer mission trip. He wrote, “Just call me up and say, ‘Jeff, I’m going.’ You don’t have to say anything more than that and you’ll be welcome to come. Otherwise, who’s going to ask the tough questions? Who’s going to keep me in line?”
Who’s going to keep me in line? This maniac was inviting the very thing that I thought he hated about me?
Jeff, I’m going. That’s all have to say? After so much strife, three words will set things right again?
Despite Jeff’s vulnerability and courage, his words rolled off me. I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t tolerate the idea that I was important to him. I couldn’t believe that I’d impacted his life. He drove me crazy, but he cared enough about me that I drove him crazy, too. That’s danger of passion. The things we love, the things that bring us the most joy, make us crazy. Whether it’s God, a person, a church, or a cause, to love something is to sacrifice peace. The world and all the people in it are broken. Love cannot exist without pain. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said, “I came not to bring peace but the sword” (Matthew 10:34). I doubt that he was war mongering or undercutting pacifism. Maybe he meant giving your life to something results in strife. You cannot have passion for something and be free from pain.
This was a lesson I would not learn for a very long time. I’m still not sure I get it. God’s tried to teach me again and again, but I have difficulty accepting it. But I’ve got to get used to it, because the other option is despair. It’s the way of the cynic, who sneers and makes a stone of his heart because passion is too dangerous. Being a Christian is supposed to be dangerous. It means being vulnerable, taking risks, and having communities of imperfect people. It means leaving our comfort zone and kissing it goodbye forever. Being a Christian means exchanging comfort for something so much better: joy. Comfort is nothing more than a lack of pain and aggravation. It’s about what isn’t there instead of what is. Joy comes from passion, love, and commitment to something and Someone bigger than you. Passion, love, and commitment come at a price (just ask Jesus), but it’s a price worth paying, because God’s joy provides a sense of meaning and a depth of feeling you can’t get any other way.
I never wrote Jeff back and I never saw him again. Caring was too difficult, so I stopped. I wasn’t willing to walk the dangerous path that leads to joy
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