The Whales, They Love Me

Three things made today a great day! Three things happened that punctuated my day with excessive exclamation points and weeping-for-joy emojis. Three brief surprises burst forth from the surface of a day, otherwise characterized as "pretty good," like three blue whales breaching the surface of the ocean, showing me their bellies and yelling in whale language, "we love youuuuuuu!"

It all started like this: I got up early (for a Sunday) and met a few hundred other folks for the Mission Waco Walk for the Homeless event at 8:00 AM. It was a walking tour to visit several of the organizations around town that provide services to homeless folks. It was part advocacy, part education, part cardio. As the crowd walked from the shelter to the food bank to the veterans services building and so on, a delightful group of bikers blocked traffic for us like motorcycle cops at a funeral. They did a great job keeping us from being run over by early service Episcopalians.

Then I noticed that one of the bikers was my friend Paul who has a cool beard and a pony tail and plays bass.  Sometimes his band, The 10th Leper, plays music at Church Under the Bridge.  All these things make Paul pretty cool in my book. But to top it all off like the whip on top of my low fat caramel macchiato - today I found out that he rides a Harley!

[This photo taken from Paul's facebook page is credited to Souther Photography]

He agreed to let me ride on the back of his bike for a few blocks and it was fun to ride in the open air on this beautiful morning in downtown Waco. Its engine grumbled "potato potato potato" noises like a panting dragon.  Bucket list.

After rejoining the crowd I had the privilege of walking alongside Judge Ken Starr. He and his wife Alice were also participating in the Walk for the Homeless, though sadly he missed the sight of me on the hog.  He was very interested to hear about what Engineers with a Mission had been doing in Haiti with JAMES and Mission Waco. He was particularly excited to hear about our new Humanitarian Engineering program at Baylor. He and Alice were so attentive and engaged, and their support means a lot to me. Towards the end of our conversation, he told me something very exciting! Unfortunately, I don't feel the liberty to put it on the internet!!  So the second high point of my day will have to be redacted like Hillary's emails released by the State Department.  He said ahey! you think you're clever getting past my redactions   and that kkdk alk kdakkllkja  aklsdfj.  What's that you say?  Anticlimactic? All that buildup just to be redacted?  Yes well, you're right, it is. What can you do?

[Left to right: Jimmy Dorrell, CEO of Mission Waco

Rob Wolaver, President of Texas State Technical College, Waco

Johnette McKown, President of McLennan Community College

Ken Starr, President and Chancellor of Baylor University

Photo courtesy of Dr. Adam Ecklund, and by "courtesy" I mean stolen from his facebook page without permission.]

The third highlight came later that afternoon. For reasons you might not expect, I purchased a handgun. In fact, I bought my first ever firearm, a .357 magnum revolver.  You see, ever since, like, three months ago when I started thinking about doing humanitarian work with water wells along the Texas/Mexico border, I have been thinking about snakes. In my search to buy a snake gun, I had the opportunity to fire a friend's .357 at night. In the darkness, it was easy to see the huge fireball shoot out of the barrel. And the sound was so loud that it literally made my ears ring. This induced in me some kind of testosterone power pose that normally only comes with watching Monday Night Football or using a large chainsaw. I was hooked after one shot like a junkie.  

[My new gun is on order and won't be in for another week or so. In the meantime, please enjoy this likeness of an European American Armory Corp. Windicator .357 Magnum Revolver.]

So there it is: my three awesome things that happened today. I realize, looking back on them, that these things paint a picture of me. I'm afraid they make me look a bit like a redneck. Not that there's anything wrong with that (jk, I think there is) but in my case, it is simply not true. I refuse, in fact, to be defined by political stereotypes or other social expectations. I simultaneously care about social justice but also own a handgun. I frequently have the privilege to converse with both homeless people and university presidents. I like Harley Davidson motorcycles, but never plan to own one. I am pro-immigration, but also pro-rule of law. I am neither a libertarian nor a socialist. I do, however, speak whale.

The Icon of Communism Is Melting

I just finished reading Darragh McKeon's book, "All That Is Solid Melts into Air".  Even though I can't pronounce his first name, I enjoyed the place where his book took me.  It's part dystopian novel, part historical fiction, part poetry. Simultaneously beautiful and yet disturbing.  Like when I dance.  Only beautiful. 

It was set in the late 80s as the former Soviet Union was unraveling. (This was an important time for me because it was my high school and college years.) It is the story of everyday people who live their lives of fear while things inexplicably fall apart around them. 

I was intrigued by this novel because the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in 1986, just a few weeks before I graduated from high school. As I was preparing to start college as a physics major, the news was telling frightening stories of physics-gone-bad.  But honestly, this wasn't too shocking at the time.  As far back as the third grade, I can remember having disaster drills at my elementary school that included preparing for nuclear strikes.  The hallways at our school had signs in the hall that said "Fallout Shelter".  In retrospect, this seems an outrageous and fear-spawning thing to do to elementary school children.  But it was the Cold War. It was part life.  For example, as a young child I knew the names "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" were given to the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  I knew what ICBM stood for.  (That's Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.) This was how life was at the time.

The book's prose is often beautiful and filled with delightful details such as thoughtful observations of the shadows of a bridge over a frozen river or the motes of dust in a film projector's cone of light. The title is a quotation from Marx's Communist Manifesto; but ironically, this time it is the icon of communism that is melting.

Chernobyl is an apt symbol of the former Soviet Union: a meltdown was considered as inconceivable as its collapse, and yet both vaporized, leaving behind toxic clouds for Marx's masses to ingest like poison opiates. In the chapter on the accident itself, they find the section titled "Operational Procedures in the Event of a Reactor Meltdown" has actually been redacted from the nuclear plant's operations manual. "An event such as this cannot be tolerated, cannot be conceived, such a thing can never be planned for, surely as it can never happen. The system will not fail, the system cannot fail, the system is the glorious motherland."

And a few years later, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, a happier symbol of the collapse of the USSR, I was graduating from college. In the preceding years I had largely been to busy or too self absorbed to understand glasnost or perestroika, but I remember when a 19 year old West German flew a small plane all the way into Red Square.  I remember when the USSR shot down a Korean airliner that strayed into its airspace.  All these details were brought back to me in a way that made me reflect on just how significant those times were.

What will the world be like 30 years from now?  Will Putin reestablish the motherland? Will nuclear power be made safe, or clean, or banned altogether? Will my grandchildren look back on the United States as I do the USSR?  I suppose we can only dance on, dear readers, each in our own beautifully disturbing way.

My Unfading Introverted Tendancies

Intergalactic aliens are invading my home. I know, I know, it's unexpected.  Just when I was getting used to the place, too.  They've only just arrived in my kitchen as if Jodi Foster called to them by phase modulating my microwave oven through the satellite dish.  Will that cost me a roaming fee?

Their behavior is strange to me, it's unpredictable and erratic, but they also appear to exhibit some kind of intelligence.  I am fearful they will knock over my lamps, invade my personal space, or ask me embarrassing questions.  Finally, they speak to me:

"We are freshmen engineering majors.  We come in pieces."

That's when I remember that I signed up for the Faculty Dinner.  All the incoming freshmen are paired up with faculty volunteers for a dinner before classes start next week.  My group was all engineering majors.  The goal is to foster relationships between students and faculty as soon as possible. Studies show this leads to student success and retention, but I'm in it for the free dinner.

This is my fourteenth year to teach at Baylor, and yet I felt nervous about them coming over. Some of my jokes about aliens are actually on target. I feared they may ask me embarrassing questions in their youthful naiveté and nervous energy. But this is not so different from when I go to a party of adults; I feel much the same way then too.  I suppose you can take the boy out of the introvert but you can't take the introvert out of the boy.

[A couple of seasoned veterans helped run things and make it easy for me.] 

 [I fed them at our big table, but then they asked if I had any pie.  I said yes, but its circumference was only a little more than three times its diameter.  They groaned and said my jokes were irrational.]

[All but two of them are from out of state. I'm the old guy in the back.]

Much to my relief, we actually had a nice time. Everyone was very polite and friendly, and no one embarrassed me or themselves. Martha was great with them and was very engaged. She mingles naturally while I nervously stuff my mouth with brownies purchased for the students.  She learns things about their lives quickly and easily. She easily fosters relationships, and I foster Jodi Foster.

My Recent Time Travel

The memorial service for my Aunt Francine was held at the First Baptist Church of Childress, Texas recently. She was my father's only sibling. Because of his Parkinson's disease, he was unable to travel the nearly 500 miles from Houston.  I went on his behalf and had a moving and profound experience as I visited iconic places of my childhood and tried to come to grips with my own mortality.  

Aunt Francine and Uncle Bill have lived on and operated a large cattle ranch outside Childress my entire life. It is remote, enormous, and beautifully rugged.  As a kid, I used to visit my cousins on the ranch - this was like visiting another planet in a time machine for a boy growing up in Houston.

[Cousins Amber and Ty both have families of their own now. I'm so proud of the people they have become.  I would like to write about them sometime, but that's for another day.]

At the memorial service, Ty read a passage from Aunt Francine's Bible, noting the words she had underlined and personal notes she had written in the margins. Seeing a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marines be emotional and vulnerable in front of the crowd was powerful and moving; it left everyone wiping their eyes.

After the service we drove back out to the ranch - for me it was like driving back in time. Very little has changed since I was last there 18 years ago at Amber's wedding.  In fact, very little has changed since I was a kid 40 years ago. Then and now, it's like it was when I was a child; you can still see the open land for miles in all directions.  There's a neighbor a mile or so to the east, another a mile or so to the west. It's rugged, expansive, beautiful, and almost timeless.  Almost.

[One of the views from their backyard]

[I remember being there in a thunderstorm in 1981 when this bell was hit by lightning.]

In the evening after the memorial service, we sat on the stone patio Aunt Francine made and enjoyed the view, the shade, the breeze, and mostly the family. I really enjoyed visiting with my cousins and their spouses and kids, and Uncle Bill, of course. It was hard, however, to speculate about the future with them. As our parents age, how do we respond?  How do we want our own children to respond as we, ourselves, age?

These are questions I have been wrestling with for the last few years in the back of my mind, but this weekend in the Texas panhandle brought them to the forefront with new poignancy.

I would have liked to spend another day with them, but I had to leave early the next morning. I decided to drive the additional 100 miles to visit Ralls, Texas where my father grew up and grandparents lived.

About halfway between the ranch and Ralls is a scenic overlook where the ultra flatness of the Caprock gives way to the rolling terrain to its east.  This is a special place for me; it's the place I proposed to Martha in the summer of 1992.  Again, hardly anything has changed there. The land stands in contrast to our lives; it moves at glacial speeds in comparison. Forty years ago this place looked exactly the same, except for some new wind turbines that peeked up over the horizon.

One of my imagined alternate lives would be to live there, owning and operating a wind farm. In fact, I even toyed with writing a novel set here.  I wrote a few chapters about an introverted engineer living here, but instead of ranching cattle like my Uncle Bill, he harvested the wind.  

On the subject of harvesting, when my grandfather died, my grandmother planted an oak tree in his honor at the little church he attended.  I had not seen the tree in a long time and I wanted to see how large it had grown to be.  As you can see, it's doing well!  I even took a handful of acorns to plant myself.

Before I left town for the long drive home, I visited the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. I felt compelled to do something that I have never done before. I stood at their grave and talked to them. I'm not sure why I felt I had to do this, but the feeling was strong, and the act was cathartic. I told them that their beloved daughter had died.  I know they already knew this because they are in heaven now, but I felt like I needed to give them the bad news somehow. I left a flower from her memorial service on their tombstone.

When I visited their grave, a wave of sadness overwhelmed me. I grieved for my aunt, my grandparents, my father's struggles with Parkinson's disease, and even the loss of my own childhood. My sense of adulthood, my sense of mortality, and the fact that even the seemingly unchangeable does, indeed, change and move on - these were overwhelming to me.  Standing in the cemetery with my camera in hand, I wept like a baby.

The Ralls cemetery has a new chapel and, just behind it, five large wind turbines: symbols that change really does happen, and also that it isn't all bad. There can be hope in change; things can really get better, they need not always decay.  This helps me accept my own aging and mortality. This helps me grieve the losses that inevitably come to us in life.

"You will be secure, because there is hope..." - Job 11:18

Compared to Magazines

As I write this I am preparing to lead a trip of engineering students on a two week trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  I can't sleep.  I need to pack. My thoughts are racing.  So what do I do? In a fit of procrastination I decided it was time to write a blog post!

As I sit here at midnight I am listening to a song called "Mother India".  It’s one of my favorite songs. It's about the mutual brokenness of the third world and the first world.  It has been my observation that both of these "worlds" are really screwed up. Of course, Texas and Haiti, for example, are very different in some ways. I don't mean to minimize that. But there is a shared human experience in both of them. We're all really broken, but on us all are the fingerprints of a genius Creator.  The song captures this well and ends with a great hope.

Father God, you have shed your tears for Mother India

They have fallen to water ancient seeds

That will grow into hands that touch the untouchable

How blessed are the poor, the sick, the weak

The Serpent spoke and the world believed its venom

Now we're ten to a room or compared to magazines

There's a land where our shackles turn to diamonds

Where we trade in our rags for a royal crown

In that place, our oppressors hold no power

And the doors of the King are thrown wide 

My favorite line is Now we're ten to a room or compared to magazines.  Do you get it?  In the so-called "third world" people are often crowded into slums - a family of ten can share a 100 square feet. Poverty is horrible. And in the "first world" I know many folks tangled in the web of consumerism, comparisons, or body issues; a web spun by media marketeers. Our lives are constantly compared to magazines.  Both worlds are broken. There's wisdom in this song. I consider it an anthem of my calling.

"My calling"?  Isn't that a bit medieval, you say? What is that "calling" of yours, Mr. Joan of Arc?

I hesitate to write it because I might be wrong, or partially wrong, and embarrass myself in the future by saying it's such and such.  Or perhaps I will embarrass God if I say my calling is "this" when he's been trying so hard to get me to see that it's "that".  So let's put down some caveats.  This is what I think it might be, or perhaps it's just what I want it to be, or perhaps it's what I think it is tonight as I'm loosened up on Xanax.

[This is me being goofy at the Haitian elementary school to which we are bringing solar electricity next week! Photo credit: Angela Chancellor.]

In this part I'm going to refer to myself in third person 'cause there's no one else to talk to at this late hour.  

Is he serious? Why is he all "loosened up"?  Is he an abuser now? I don't think so.  It's not "abuse" if you have a prescription and take it per the doctor's instructions. The Xanax is for the insomnia he's been having lately. Even so, it makes me him a little buzzed and less inhibited. Will this help him write? Perhaps it will pharmaceutically dislodge his writer’s block like ex-lax for the blogosphere.

Why is he having insomnia?  It usually comes about this time of year (early May). This year he's busy with grading finals and helping his son with his Eagle Scout requirements and coordinating a dozen other engineers to go to Haiti in three days and teaching summer school and moving out of his house - all within a 60 day window. He's pretty stressed out. Oh, and he’s building a time machine out of discarded flip-phones fished out of a dumpster. Discarded flip phones are plentiful because of their obvious inferiority at wasting our time compared to newer touch-screen phones with way more apps.  

I'm going back to first person now.
My phone's touch-screen is broken. Not broken like the world, broken like glass.  I dropped it too many times and now the screen looks like a spider web. But it works just fine. It doesn't hurt my fingers to slide on the broken glass, and if I can't read something because of the cracks I just slide it up or down to a less broken spot.  I can waste time just fine. 

In this unfocused post I think I am trying to talk about what it means to have, and identify, one's calling. I do an amateur job of this in my freshman engineering classes helping students figure out that they can't all be Iron Man.  I paraphrase Frederick Buechner when I say God's calling for you is this: the intersection of your gifts, talents, and passions with the world's great need. In my class, I unpack this idea to help the students understand it.  But I don't have to explain what that means in this post because there's nobody reading this except me and the third person. I like writing in the third person.  How did I get in the third person, anyway?  Did he eat me?  Did I use a shrink ray to get really small so I could walk around in his guts and take selfies by his pancreas and stuff?

Yes, that's exactly what I did.

But seriously, to the best of my knowledge, I think my own calling, or the intersection of my gifts, talents, and passions with the world's great need is this:

to be Iron Man myself. 

No that's not right.

1969

In 1969 a baby girl and her family took a summer vacation at a dude ranch outside Del Rio near the Mexican border. It was a hot Texas summer and the family rode in a station wagon from their home in Houston with the convenience of air conditioning but without the inconvenience of seat belts. Once they got to the ranch, however, they rode horses with neither. Since the baby girl had not yet been born, she rode in her mother.  

This was Ross and Ginger's second marriage each. She brought one teenage daughter into the new family. He brought a daughter and two sons. They were very different people, but their differences fit together like pieces of a dysfunctional jigsaw puzzle. Both of them smoked a lot of cigarettes. This was before smoking was bad for you. 

Ten weeks before Ginger was due to give birth she went into labor at the dude ranch. They station-wagoned over to the nearest clinic in Del Rio and that's where Martha was born. Except her name wasn't Martha yet, because the doctor told the family that she would not live and advised them not to give her a name. She weighed less than four pounds and, like most premature babies, had underdeveloped lungs. The clinic lacked the equipment required to treat a baby this little. Since they didn't even have an oxygen mask small enough, they pointed a hose at her face and fixed it to the side of her little bed.  Her parents and brothers and sisters came to see her. Her skin was red and she had no fingernails. 

Her chest labored up and down as she struggled to breathe. 

Then something happened that is hard to understand. The family spent a few more days in Del Rio taking pictures of the little girl who would be named Martha and holding her. Then they left. They drove back to Houston and left her there to die by herself at the clinic. Undoubtedly, this was Ross's idea. The situation was too out of control for a controller like him to tolerate. But Ginger complied because she was powerless and afraid to refuse him. Leaving Martha behind was a source of shame for them for the rest of their lives.

They called the clinic regularly from their home in Houston to see how things were progressing and after several weeks the doctors became convinced she was going to live after all! Ross and Ginger drove back to Del Rio and brought Martha home laying on the front seat of their station wagon. They arrived on the day Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon. It was July 21, 1969.

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Forty four years later Martha is a grown woman with children of her own. I am her husband and we have been married twenty years.  Except for a couple of brief periods I'm not supposed tell you about, she has not smoked cigarettes, ridden horses, or been back to Del Rio.  She drives a high-mileage minivan which is like a station wagon only taller.

Over the years her mother's health degenerated; Ginger was spending week after week in hospitals and rehab centers to treat her COPD. All those years of smoking had ruined her lungs to the point that her breathing was shallow on a good day and full of suffocating panic on a bad day. Martha arranged for a nursing home in Waco where we live with our children and minivan. We moved her there and in a short time her strength and attitude improved significantly.  The nurses guiding her through her respiratory therapies would often tease her and laugh with her until her blood oxygen count reached 100%.

But the day after Thanksgiving, 2012, she had a flare up and had to be hospitalized, and it was then that we learned how bad her condition was. The doctors told us she had a 50/50 chance of making it through the night. She did survive that night, but the next day she and Martha decided the best thing was for her to enroll in hospice care.

[Martha visiting her mom while in hospice care]

Martha visited her every day for eight days. The morphine was a great help. Not only did it decrease the oxygen consumption of her body, it also calmed her fears and took away her panic. This was the most peaceful she had been in years. On the ninth day it seemed the end was near and Martha stayed with her around the clock. She stroked her hair, whispered prayers into her ears, and told her it was OK to let go. I came up to visit and bring Martha a change of clothes. Ginger laid on her back while Martha held her hand.

Her chest labored up and down as she struggled to breathe. 

That's when it hit me. Although Ginger had given up on Martha and left her to die as a baby, Martha refused to leave her mother. What a picture of forgiveness this was. What mercy I had just witnessed. What an act turning the other cheek. It left me speechless and I went home and wept for the beauty of it. 

"...as we forgive those who trespass against us"

She died the next day in Martha's company. It was days before I could talk about it without choking on my words, but eventually I pointed out what she had not noticed herself, the redeemed contrast of her own birth and her mother's death that I had observed. She was overcome.

My Heroes

This post is a list of people I call my heroes. They have inspired me, or informed me, or encouraged me to one degree or another. Some of their influences affected me in earlier years of my life, some are still in progress. They have all had me in tears at one point or another, some many times.

I list them in no particular order.  About some I have much to say, others not so much.  Don't read anything into that. Their influences are all too multi-dimensional to make direct comparisons between them.

I must confess to you that I worry about making this public. It is my own weakness that I worry about what you think.  What if you hate them? What if you think they are trouble-makers, bigots, ivory-tower-ish, or self-righteous? What if you roll your eyes at my list? What if you think them pretentious and (gasp) me too by extension???  Well, so be it. These folks are awesome.

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Francis Schaeffer's books - how can I say it? - finally made sense of the world.  The first one I read was "How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture". It was a brief history of western thought, why it was great, where it went wrong, and where it is headed. In its few hundred pages, it transformed my understanding of philosophy, art, culture, politics, law, theology, and history. It put a big enough frame around them all that I could finally start making some sense of them all. He was a genius. I wanted to name my youngest son Schaeffer, but my wife was afraid he would be beaten up on account having a funny name.  So we made Schaeffer his middle name!

Nothing I can say is adequate praise for the Saint of Calcutta, Mother Teresa. Her devotion to the poor and marginalized (sustained for 45 years!) is nothing less than inspirational. I love this picture of her.

Rich Mullins was a musician whose life and lyrics communicated great spiritual depth and yet sincere humility. His authenticity and simplicity inspired me and challenged my suburban middle class life. There was a longing in his music, a hunger for something else over the horizon: heaven.

And if I sing, let me sing with a joy

That has born in me these songs

And if I weep let it be as a man

That is longing for his home

Bono is still alive, and therefore a potential threat to my hero list; he could still do something to embarrass me.  My first real connection to his music and message came in 1987, the spring of my freshman year of college when U2 released "The Joshua Tree". My roommate and I played it countless times and even today hearing it will evoke good memories from that time of my life.  Like MLK, Bono uses his voice both metaphorically and literally to "defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. [To] rescue the weak and the needy; [and] deliver them from the hand of the wicked" as Psalm 82:3-4 says. And like MLK, his motivation for this voice is born out of his grateful heart redeemed by his Creator. 

I was born

I was born to sing for you

I didn't have a choice but to lift you up

And sing whatever song you wanted me to

I give you back my voice

From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise...

Only love, only love can leave such a mark

But only love, only love can heal such a scar

Justified till we die, you and I will magnify

The Magnificent

Magnificent

Chuck Colson spent time in prison for his part in the Watergate scandal. In the midst of his arrest and sentencing he became a Christian. He founded Prison Fellowship to minister to the forgotten and the thrown away in prisons. His book "Loving God" changed the way I think about prisoners, human dignity, hope, and service.  His radio commentaries on science, culture, and apologetics picked up where Schaeffer left off.

I was five months old when MLK was assassinated. His eloquent and peaceful fight for justice has as its anthem the Bible verse Amos 5:24 - "But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream."  Justice matters. People matter. Human dignity matters.

My favorite author, Clive Staples Lewis, died on the same day JFK was assassinated. During college his books showed me that being a Christian and an intellectual need not be mutually exclusive, and that the growing chasm between my faith and my intellect could be closed. This was, for me, a reconciliation marked by enormous relief. His influence on my life has been more than significant.

One of my favorite quotes of his, one that is not well-known I think, particularly inspires me. It  reminds me of my father's struggles with Parkinson's disease: 

"But if you are a poor creature--poisoned by a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels--saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion--nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends--do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day He will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all - not least yourself."
Italics mine.

Blood Marrow Donation: Final Entry

Today I found out that my blood brother died.  I never met him.

It began, for me, back in 2000, when I registered with the National Marrow Donors Program to see if I could be a match for a co-worker whose daughter had cancer.  I wasn't a match.  But seven years later I was a match for someone else.  They called me up out of the blue and asked if I still wanted to be a donor. Of course I did, I told them, I had to blog about something.

So in 2007 I wrote about going through the preliminary procedures.  In 2008 I wrote about the process of peripheral stem cell donation, which was the type I underwent. You can read them all here, I recommend them. I was funnier back then.  I also wrote about my great half-uncle who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for developing this very type of transplantation to treat leukemia (really). Then in 2009 I wrote about receiving a hand-written letter from a man named Lee.

Lee was in his sixties, had a wife and kids, and he had been the recipient of my marrow donation.  The letter included pictures of him drinking coffee and being with his dog. He was a real person after all.  In his letter he called me a hero. His wife and daughter also included letters and they called me a hero too. "Hero" seems like such an exaggeration.  "Nice" maybe, but not "hero."  I somehow felt like I had deceived them into thinking I was someone else, or that it was a case of mistaken identity that I was impolitely refusing to correct. He also called me his blood brother, which touched me.  He didn't have to say that, but he did.  Unlike "hero" which has objective standards, "blood brother" said to me that I was important to him, personally.

[A picture of my dog to prove I am a real person after all too.]

When I looked through my mail today I saw another letter from Washington state.  I know very few people who live there, so somehow I knew what it was without opening it.  It was from Lee's widow.  She told me of his recent and peaceful death. It was a death that had been postponed a few years by this procedure, but eventually had come nonetheless. She wanted me to know. She said to me "You, Brian, will forever be in my heart and prayers."  That touched me.  The way she inserted my name in that sentence like that. It was personal.   To her, anyway, I was a real person after all too.

What's all this "Justice" stuff anyway?

"...with liberty and justice for all."

As a kid I recited the pledge of allegiance robotically every morning before school.  Prayer had already been removed from this daily ritual by the time I was in elementary school in the 1970s, so the pledge of allegiance was the only thing we said.  But even without the prayer, the daily repetition did its job and caused the ideas of liberty and justice, perhaps too abstract for a kid to fully understand, to slowly soak into my innermost parts.  To what ever extent I could understand them, I learned that liberty and justice were important and to be valued at the highest levels. 


As the years went by, I continued to hear about the importance of liberty (freedom) and how the United States was "the" global example of a free country. I was taught to be grateful for our freedoms.  Example after example reinforced this value: one of the most symbolic icons of the United States is the Statue of Liberty, the Emancipation Proclamation is heralded as a great milestone in our history, and there are countless others.  Furthermore, in church I was given at least two important theological bases for valuing freedom: the work of Jesus was, in part, to set us free from slavery to our own sins, and secondly, our free choice to love God was what made our love real and not robotic.  Free will, freedom, democracy, these are at the heart of Western culture and especially America.


But I heard less about justice than liberty.  Justice is harder to define. When one celebrates "justice" it's usually because there was first an "injustice" that has now been remedied.  "Justice has been served" and similar phrases tended to make me think that justice was primarily punitive. That is justice, in my limited view, was performed by law enforcement officers, vigilantes like Clint Eastwood, and lawyers (at least the good ones) but not by everyday people.  I didn't hear much about justice in church either. When I read the Bible I found many verses expressing the value of justice, but I didn't hear many (any?) sermons on it. My friends didn't talk about it. "Hey man, how 'bout that justice, eh?" We didn't sing songs about it on the fourth of July.


But then, later in life, I started hearing about "social justice".  I had no framework for understanding what this was, how was it connected to punitive justice or biblical justice?  I found that other evangelical Christians were uneasy talking about it. It raised questions of "rights" and whether or not those rights had been violated. It seemed to be too much about pointing fingers and laying blame to be the topic of polite conversation.  And though the Bible had much to say about justice, it didn't use the term "rights" or seem to speak about justice in the same way. What was I to make of this?


During this week, I plan to write several posts about my personal journey to understand biblical justice and why it matters a whole whole whole lot. I will give you my amateur thoughts about the history of the church's teaching on justice in the United States during 20th century.  I will share my struggles on whether or not I can be a Republican and like social justice. And I will share with you something special that my students and I are doing, an event called "Camp [In]justice" later this week.

U2 and Stravinsky: Kindred Spirits

Last night I read a fascinating article comparing U2 and Stravinsky. And Henry the cat thought it was the most interesting thing he ever saw in his whole life, ever.


Being on the faculty at Baylor University, I receive quarterly copies of a journal called Christian Scholar's Review. Each issue has half a dozen-ish articles from Christian scholars from all over the country.  Most of the time my cat and I can't even understand the titles of the articles; frequently they're high-level pieces on linguistics, or philosophy, or other topics outside my field of expertise. But once or twice a year an article captures my attention, reaches into my soul, and compels me to work past my unfamiliarity. The result is I do the reading-equivalent to sitting in the driveway, unable to stop listening to something on my car's radio.


For example, in 2003 I read an article called "Finding God in Prozac or Finding Prozac in God: Preserving a Christian View of the Person Amidst a Biopsychological Revolution" by Michael Boivin.  Are we still the same person if we alter our brain chemistry? Are we conformed less (or is it more?) to image of God when we use pharmacological assistance rather than when we languish in depression or anxiety?


Then in 2009 I read "International Development: Christian Reflections on Today's Competing Theories" by Roland Hoksbergen, Janel Curry, and Tracy Kuperus.  Are the prevailing theories about international development overly reductionist when they focus on culture, politics, economics, and geography?  ls their explanatory power limited by inadequate understanding of the whole person, an understanding of which the Christian worldview has much to say?

[My cat, Henry, helps me not take myself too seriously.]

Last night I read "U2 and Igor Stravinsky: Textures, Timbres, and the Devil" by Dan Pinkston.  It compared the Irish rock stars to the Russian composer and draws parallels in the way they favor texture over melody and harmony, both breaking tradition with the established norms of their times.  They even use similar musical "chords" that are not chords. The 0-2-5-7 pitches together, for example, defy the traditional naming nomenclature, being neither major nor minor, and are found in both their masterpieces,The Rite of Spring and Bullet the Blue Sky from the Joshua Tree recording. 


And at an even deeper level "...the way in which they respectively grapple with fame from the perspective of Christian faith is instructive. There is effectively a tension between fame and Christian humility that enlivens the music of both. Since neither U2 nor Stravinsky explicitly labeled themselves as 'Christian' artists, yet produced music that is at the forefront of their genres, they serve as models of how art of Christians can function outside the confines of the Christian establishment."


I agree. In fact, I would say that Bono (U2's singer) is a hero of mine because of the way he uses his gifts: influentially, outside the confines of the Christian establishment, and yet boldly fighting for that which is right as defined by orthodox Christianity. May I use my gifts half as well.


Near the end the article says "For both Stravinsky and the four members of U2, music was and continues to be a fundamental means of personal expression and inevitable vocation... Both U2 and Stravinsky have left us with a large body of work that is broadly influential, deeply human in meaning, an at times, exquisitely beautiful.  The spiritual substance of their output is also part of the lasting legacy. Works that artfully speak to the spiritual concerns such as joy, sadness, good, evil, longing, and praise will long outlive the musicians themselves."


While reading the article I thought of the U2 concert I attended a while back. I shot this video of the fans singing "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". I used to not understand this song. It seemed to be expressing a dissatisfaction or incompleteness with the Christian faith, a dissatisfaction that apparently collided with the content of their other songs which embraced or defended it.  But finally I realized this song is about dissatisfaction with the world as it is today, full of problems and pains. He is singing about the longing for a better place. He is a sojourner in this world. He longs to live in heaven, in the Kingdom of God, where mercy and justice are not marred and polluted and his personal searching and striving can at last be satisfied.  Let it be, Lord.

Of Ferry Boats and Cosmic Justice

Today is a day of waiting. My team of engineering students arrived in Honduras yesterday, all but one. Because of his military obligations, Billy had to come a day late.  So today, the team is hanging out at the beach-side hotel we know as Jack's Place while I return to Roatan to retrieve Billy.  This means I ride the ferry to Roatan, then a taxi to the airport. After I get Billy, we return by the same route. This means most of my day is spent waiting around.  I'm glad I brought my book.

This morning I had to do something I have not done before. I had to figure out a way to park my car for the day at the ferry.  It took a lot of questions, the answers to which I only understood about 10% of.  A half an hour later I had my parking permit and a little less respect from kind folks with whom I conversed.  When I am out and about without a translator I feel a little vulnerable. But it makes me sympathetic to non-English speakers back in the US.

I mentioned that I brought a book. I'm excited about it. It's called "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" by Thomas Sowell. He is a conservative economist from Stanford (I didn't know anything conservative came out of Stanford). It's a critique of social justice programs that fail to take into account the larger costs of their activity to society as a whole.  Here's a quote:

"Cosmic justice is not about the rules of the game. It's about putting particular segments of society in the position that they would have been in but for some undeserved misfortune. This conception of fairnes requires that third parties must weild the power to control outcomes, overriding rules, standards, or the preferences of other people."

and later he says

"Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virture of their own."

I am looking forward to spending some time reading more today.

Mixed Emotions

Tomorrow is our last day in Honduras, and I have mixed emotions about it. In the last two weeks, we have accomplished much, and even finished our goals ahead of schedule. I have eaten lots of refried beans and plantains, and drank more than a few good cups of coffee.  I have enjoyed driving here, and listening to the students gasp at the Honduran driving styles and laugh out loud as they are tossed out of their seats on the bumpy roads.  Our team has bonded and drawn closer to each other and to God as we shared our life stories, prayed for each other, and worshiped with both our songs and designs. I don't want to "break up the party" by going home. I remember feeling this way at the end of summer camp as a kid. The extra-ordinary must again yield to the ordinary.  It's time to awaken from the dream. Can I press snooze?  And yet, at the same time, I miss my family. I miss reliable power and water, and I miss my own bed.  I even miss my dog.  So in another sense, I am ready to go.

I find that it is often the case that significant things (projects, relationships, or experiences) come with bitter sweetness.  Any married person will tell you that. Any parent will too. There is no perfect job or vacation.  But there are Good ones.  The genuine love for an imperfect family, or even a job, can be eternal and righteous anyway. On this trip to Honduras, I have gained the satisfaction of making our projects work; of keeping all the students alive and happy, in that order; of (perhaps just a little) inspiring them to think differently about how us nerdy engineers can do something of cosmic importance to build the very Kingdom of God; and I have made new friendships and strengthened others with half a dozen extremely talented students half my age and twice my IQ.

And yet, I find that it hurts a little. I know it will never be the same for this particular group. Even in reunions, it can never quite be recaptured. The life and community we have shared is like the sparkly stuff of fireworks: beautiful, yes, but short-lived. It is not insignificant, but it is ephemeral.

---------------

When I first started coming to Honduras, I would experience a very specific emotion at least once each trip.  I would find myself feeling like a pretender.  I would ask myself "What were you thinking? Who are you kidding to think you should even be here?"  I haven't felt that way in the last couple of years.  But instead a new tormenter has come. I have been feeling like a bad father and husband. Perhaps I have too much fun on these trips, and it seems wrong to ask my family to function without me while I go "play" for a while. It's hard on me when I know my family needs me, and there is nothing I can do about it because I am so far away.  At any rate, I can't seem to shake these darker emotions just under the surface when I am here.

Perhaps these are the "sufferings" in which we get to partake?  Paul said we get to share in the sufferings of Christ. Can't there be another way?  The tensions of family separation, of financial strain, of the heat and humidity and bugs and electricity blackouts and water shortages, and even the bitter sweet emotions of the end of a special trip - perhaps these are my share of His sufferings for now.  This knowledge helps it not to hurt so much.

Packing for Honduras

It's the eleventh hour, literally, and I am nearly ready for our trip to Honduras.  The day or two before one of my trips is always the hardest part for me.  It's hard to leave my wife and boys.  I'm even going to miss the cat I recently dropped $500 to repair at the vet.  That's like, 9,500 Honduran Lempiras.  It sounds even more expensive that way. Good old Henry the cat.  I thought about taking him with me, or perhaps Maggie the Cocker Spaniel.  But she would bark at people on the plane...

"Sir, you're going to need to control your animal.  This barking is unacceptable and in violation of TSA regulations."

"Sorry, she just has to go to the bathroom.  Can we open the door and let her out for a minute?"

"Sir, we're at an altitude of thirty thousand feet."

"If I could just hold her rear end out the door..."

Right now, tumbling in the drier, are the lightweight quick-dry clothes that I always take with me. They can get wet (from rain, rivers, and sweat) and dry overnight.  My routine is to wear them right into the shower, wash them with a bar of soap, hang them up on a bungee clothes line. They're ready to wear by morning.

On the kitchen counter are the following items, in no particular order:

1) knee high rubber boots, size 13
2) two tool bags with hand tools, a soldering iron, a volt meter, and a laser tachometer
3) a bottle of Benadryl for allergic reactions
4) doses of both Imodium and ex-lax: the ones and zeros of engineering trips abroad.  I can't pack them next to each other because they would cancel each other out, leaving only empty containers and the fear of untreatable gastrointestinal distress.
4) the following books: "When Helping Hurts", and "Solar Engineering of Thermal Processes"
5) several thermocouples and a temperature-measuring data logger with a USB connector (check it out)
6) a very worn out baseball cap that has accompanied me on ever trip I have taken since 2006

After I got back from Kenya in 2006, I refused to put my ball cap in the laundry; how could I wash Africa down the drain?  A few years later, however, working in the heat and humidity of Honduras, my sweat soaked through the cap and mixed with this Kenyan souvenir. The muddy stain was gross, so I abandoned sentimentality in favor of hygiene.

By now, it is nearly midnight. I have procrastinated packing another hour by writing this blog post.  I'm thinking about going to Wal-mart to buy some sunscreen and travel snacks.  I'm too excited to sleep.

This Chaos Production

Anxious, I lie awake
Tsunamis of troubles
My glacier is melting
On burst housing bubbles

I am quite powerless
Forced out of indifference
By what news men show me
Ads tell me my preference

Our oceans are plastic
Unnoticed malaria
Clean water in shortage
Islamic mania

Our systems are fallen
Erected by broken
Billionaires in Hummers
And junkies crack smokin'

My own heart divided
To eat snakes or salmon?
Do hungers control me
In spiritual famine?

Sweet Jesus have mercy!
This chaos production
Let your Kingdom come soon
Undo the destruction!

a poem by the Middle Aged Fat Guy

A Poem That Touched Me

What I Know

by Lee Robinson

What I know for sure is less and less:
that a hot bath won't cure loneliness.

That bacon is the best bad thing to chew
and what you love may kill you.

The odd connection between perfection
and foolishness, like the pelican
diving for his fish.

How silly sex is.
How, having it, we glimpse
our holiness.

What I know is less and less.
What I want is more and more:

you against me—
your ferocious tenderness—

love like a star,
once small and far,
now huge, now near.

"What I Know" by Lee Robinson, from Hearsay. © Fordham University Press, 2004

Disapointment Part 3

I think the worst is past, but then again, maybe I am in the eye of the hurricane. I am no longer discouraged about not being selected for the Faculty-in-Residence position. One reason why is I realized that I made a strategic error in the interview process. It's hard to be mad when you realize it's your fault.  I overestimated the leeway I would have in this position.  I sold myself as X, but they wanted X+Y.  I told them I was a comfortable chair and a great radio, and they said "fine, but we want a car that actually drives".  There are reasons I had this misunderstanding, but I won't go into that anymore.

There is, however, another reason I am no longer discouraged. And this reason is a more dangerous reason. I am more likely to feel the sting of rejection again by pursuing this Reason Number Two, but I am pursuing it anyway, because I feel called and compelled to do so.  Reason number two is...

I have applied for a second Faculty-in-Residence position that is not affiliated with the engineering dorm!  Today I had the interview and I think it went well, although there are many applicants for this spot because it is open to faculty from any department all over the university. I know what you're saying.  What is he thinking?!?! Didn't he he just get through moaning and complaining about not getting the first position?  Yes, yes I did.  Maybe I am crazy. Or maybe I am some other adjective that I can't think of at the moment.

Is this some kind of rebound dating phenomenon?  Am I grasping at straws, you ask?  I don't think so. I really like this "girl".  We have a lot in common.  I think we could be an item, you might say.  And while I'm not comfortable giving you any details yet, I think this second Faculty-in-Residence position may be even better suited to our family than the first one.  It is an opportunity to enjoy community life, be surrogate parents to 350 college students, reach out to the struggling and hurting, and maybe, just maybe, spend even more time overseas during the summer months helping to bring about the Kingdom of God.

Disapointment Part II

The exiting Faculty-in-Residence offered to have The M and I over to the apartment to answer questions we might have and see the place. I set it up, though The M was still thinking there was no way we would apply for this position. But the day we went to the apartment, she became envisioned. She caught it.  Now she understood why I thought this was perfect for us.

The exiting FIR was so kind and answered all our questions. She told us they were looking for someone who would have a ministry with the students, and that was the most important thing. That resonated with us very much, as we enjoy being with students and getting to know them on a deep level. We love to encourage them when they are down, and simply walking through life with them.

Furthermore, The M and I both have a history of clinical depression, and she has also struggled with an anxiety disorder. This opportunity to taste a little suffering of our own has been used by God to cultivate a deep compassion in us for the hurting. It's a compassion I didn't have ten years ago. I wouldn't have chosen to get it this way, but he really does find ways to use the bad in our lives to bring about good.

And we also know that there is a higher-than-average incidence of mental illness among intellectually gifted young people like the ones in the engineering dorm. It's our empirical observation and we believe it is true, but it's not widely known outside of mental health circles. So The M and I were particularly excited to reach out to those struggling with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and so on. I didn't plan to start "seeing patients" or making diagnoses, but I do have "eyes to see" the symptoms and help students get the professional help they need.

(These reasons do not adequately explain the multi-faceted way that we saw ourselves not only being a blessing to the students in this role, but also being blessed ourselves by it.  My description here is one-dimensional in comparison to reality, but it's more detail than you want to read or I want to share in so public a venue.)

To make a long story short, we applied, were interviewed, but did not get the position. I think that our interpretation of the position was not exactly what they were actually looking for. I think they were looking for more of a leader and an organizer, and less of a shepherd and a nurturer.  Perhaps I was in love with the idea in my own mind, and not the "real" position, in the same way young couples love the person they think they are with, but who, eventually, prove to be someone else altogether.

It's been nearly two weeks and I am still deeply disappointed. I have not wanted something so badly, and had it denied, in a long time.  The only other sense of disappointment that I can remember on this level was not getting into the Master's program I wanted back in 1990.  And this time, my entire family wanted it with me, especially The M.  So I feel extra disappointment for letting her down.  And I feel extra rejection, because she was rejected with me.

I know I am going through the stages of grief.  I am passed "Shock and Denial" and somewhere between "Pain and Guilt" and "Anger and Bargaining".  Inside my own mind, I am second guessing everything I said in the interview (guilt) and angry with everyone involved in the decision and the other applicant that got the job (anger)!  I know it's not rational.  In my head, I know my pain is not their fault nor my own. But in my heart I am reeling.