2023-05-30T15:04:10+00:00

Round Here

May 30, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/1 Comment

The site prompt today is asking if I remember life before the internet. Yes, I do. For some reason, I’m often very nostalgic lately, so at those times that life B.I. seems preferable. Whether the time actually was more simple, or I was, doesn’t really matter in my head.

I like to put together jigsaw puzzles. Don’t ask me if I do that on an app – you already know the answer. I still read physical books, still turn pages. Now that I think of it, it’s mostly for the same reason. When life gets noisy and heavy, finding pieces that fit perfectly (or opening a book and turning pages) turns that volume down. These small acts reduce the complexity of everything that surrounds me. It’s a little like that aphorism: a journey of a million miles begins with a single step. We can’t finish a puzzle now, we can only give our time and focus to finding the next piece.

The puzzle on the dining room table is one called Rock ‘n’ Roll, and is made up of artists, album covers, ticket stubs, and instruments. It’s pretty good puzzle artwork, the overwhelming sadness in Kurt Cobain’s eyes is obvious and as heartbreaking on my table as it was in real life. There is Ray Charles, The Beatles & The Stones, Joan Jett, and Kiss to name only a few. There is also the album cover from the 2nd best album ever recorded: August & Everything After, by Counting Crows. (The best is, of course, The Queen Is Dead.)

So now I’m listening to the live version of August & Everything After. It’s the whole thing, in order, and it’s unusual in that Counting Crows live versions are mostly unrecognizable from the studio album tracks. You have to know the lyrics to know Mr. Jones at a concert to realize it’s Mr. Jones, but you still can’t sing along. This particular release, though, sounds like the original, but…extra. They’re a terrific band, even as they sort of under-achieved, never building on the perfection of this debut. But how could they, honestly? I am sometimes angry at the Goo Goo Dolls. I want them to make an entire great full-length album, and they don’t, they won’t. It’s like an act of rebellion. But Counting Crows made this 100% A+ masterpiece, and they deserve a pass forever.

Round Here is the first track and makes me cry every time I hear it (with both hands, it’s so sad and so beautiful. Like the great philosopher Rob Base once said, “joy and pain.”)

My wedding Anniversary was Saturday, and my son graduates high school on Friday. Those are the bookends to a week marked with the challenge of holding 2 life-changing events carefully and joyfully. I married the Angel 22 years ago, and the term soul mate is casually tossed around but rarely appropriate. She is easily mine and I hope I’ve risen to even 3% of what she deserves. My son is 18 and steps into an adult life that I get to watch from a front row seat, the best one in the world. He is everything I dreamed he’d be and more.

This week will have baseball games and work and blog posts about music puzzles and phone calls and workouts, but the majority of the week in my heart will be a staggering gratitude. I began this by talking about nostalgia, and I sort of miss Swatch watches and Atari 2600’s and getting up to change between 3 TV channels, but preferable? Baby, I wouldn’t change one thing about this amazing, messy, wonderful life that I have been given, and I wouldn’t miss these people and this week for anything.

The Shar Pei

May 10, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Over the last few days, I’ve gained an impossible amount of weight. For you to truly gain 1 pound of weight in a day, you would have to eat 3,500 MORE calories than your targeted intake. So in my case, I would have had to consume 5,700 calories yesterday to be 1 pound heavier. For the last 4 consecutive days, I’ve been 1 pound heavier each day. This is physically impossible, and I’m certain that it’ll ebb to a more reasonable number soon, but still… I wonder why. Did I have too much sodium or carbonation, am I the victim of a voodoo situation, a curse, it could be anything.

For a man who has struggled with weight and what we’d probably call body dysmorphia, this phenomenon is jarring, no matter if it’s impossible or not. I’m pretty sure I’m the only human exception to science.

I’m growing at such an alarming rate. I told the Angel this morning it’s a matter of time until she no longer fits in our queen bed.

My beard has been annexed by gray hairs, instead of the cool (or at least what I tell myself is the cool) dark stubble I usually wear. There are so many wrinkles on my face, I appear to be more shar pei than man. I can’t sleep through the night without getting up to pee, and then when I do get up, everything creaks and cracks. I wear readers and don’t even try to read the ridiculous restaurant menus anymore, I simply guess and hope they offer what I want. 2 people in this house have iPhones with fonts sized so small, it’s as if they’re both taunting me. This is 47.

Oh, and I have a son who will graduate next month. Last night was his high school baseball senior night, and the Angel and I cried on the field as they took our pictures. He turned 18 last week. I have this peculiar adult that has taken the place of my baby boy.

What else I want to tell you about 47 is that every word of this post is true, and that I don’t mind any of it. Not even a little. (Maybe the number on the scale a tiny bit, but that’ll come down. I guess aging can bring a gentle, kind level of perspective, where there is more than only right now and maybe overreacting hasn’t served me well before and wouldn’t now. I don’t have to skip breakfast.) If the Angel doesn’t fit in our queen, we’ll get a king. I have the greatest woman who still wants to sleep like spoons with me, and not much can be better than that.

My gray beard is awesome, I’m thinking of really letting it grow out. The creaks and cracks are from years and years of competition and it was totally worth it. There are still books worth reading, I don’t care what’s on their phones, and I have always asked the servers what I should be ordering anyway (who else knows better than them?).

As for that peculiar adult. I am the dad of one of the finest people I’ve ever met. With each year, he shows more and more – we’re all lucky he’s in the world. And as heartbreaking as it is that he doesn’t sleep on my chest on my sofa in my home anymore, now he can change your lives by being in them instead of just ours. To reference a very famous quotation, “This is my son, whom I love. In him I am well pleased.” I get to look him in the eyes as a man, and that is nothing to be overlooked or undervalued.

Yes, I look like a shar pei, but each of those wrinkles have stories. Every one of the crow’s feet on my eyes were etched with a billion smiles, laughs, and tears. I said tons of Hello’s and Goodbye’s. I suppose I could eliminate the lines with several hundred injections, but why would I want to? This is my life, and it’s wonderful. I did my best to be fully present and aware, to not miss a moment. I am one who has been blessed beyond reason or anything I could ever deserve.

I am a very grateful shar pei.

Something I’ll Never Understand

May 4, 2023May 4, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/1 Comment

We all know several things about me, if you’ve ever read anything in this space. 1a. I live with the idea that we are all loved & accepted, and deserve to feel that way. 1b. Today is not simply an extension of yesterday, it isn’t just “what it is,” we aren’t just “who we are,” and our relationships aren’t just “the way they are.” And given 1a and 1b, We can do better starting right now. 2. The Angel is my special lady, and I’m very much in love with her and the still shocking idea that I get to be married to her. 3. I can’t seem to get enough of documentaries, the People’s Court, and Catfish. And 4. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out is my favorite song.

Because I hold all of those things closely to my heart, it pierces my heart to see people hurting and in pain, living lives as if we aren’t the treasures we so clearly are, making decisions that dismantle us, always settling for less.

The way this is manifesting in me right now is in regards to the way we relate to supposed catfishes. Sometimes, the Catfished discover they have not been lied to, that the person is exactly the name and face of who they thought it was. The “Catfish” just can’t meet, video chat, or commit, they have hidden separate profiles, collected money, acted as if they are single, and in some extreme cases, had fiancés or spouses. And the Catfished has a decision to make, a decision I absolutely cannot fathom.

I think of it in much the same way as I do affairs with married people. A person carries on with someone who is married, with what in mind? That they’ll leave their husband/wife and they can be together? But whyyyyyyy?

The personal ad/dating profile would read: Looking for an emotionally unavailable, selfish, manipulative, sickeningly passive, disrespectful, dishonest boy/girl who will treat me like a prostitute.

Why would anybody want someone like that? Why would we consider the opportunity to wait for someone with such little regard for their marriage, spouse, family, and us as a lucky one? Why would we so easily forget that Fernando is a boy who stood us up MORE THAN 20 TIMES, then did it on tv, after taking upwards of $4,000 from us, and hopefully give him another ‘second’ chance that we will live happily ever after?? If I would treat the Angel like nothing more than something I stepped in, what makes either of us dream that you would be different?

[I understand mistakes. I understand we all do things we don’t want to define us. And you know I understand transformation. But I also understand the difference between mistakes and patterns, between falling in a hole and living there. I’m talking about an affair, not an accident. 7 years of deceit, not the quick knee-jerk lie of a 6 year-old to avoid punishment.]

Would this even be a thing if we all really knew how much we are worth, how valuable we are? Would we allow ourselves to be fed table scraps? Would we feed table scraps to a queen? Would we lie so much if we believed we were enough and not as inadequate as we do? Would we buy those lies if we weren’t so insecure and afraid?

The thing is, in relationships like this, no one is operating under a framework of abundance, beauty and love. We have believed people are things to be used to prove ourselves. We all need a major perspective shift, and that begins here, now, with you and me. I don’t care who we were or what we’ve done yesterday or one hour ago, I care about what we do today and tomorrow. What could we build if we stopped seeing each other as lowest common denominator, if we stop settling for so much less? I bet it would be amazing.

Dreams

April 18, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I just finished reading My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrik Backman. This isn’t my first time reading it and I cried just like I did each of the others. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s inspiring and hopeful, and reminds us all why we don’t just give up when the news gets so bad and the searing pain of engagement gets so intense.

I turn down corners of pages that contain words, sentences, and/or passages that move me. When I re-read books, I look forward to those pages and sometimes I read the page several times and have no idea why I turned down that particular corner. Others, I know immediately. One of those turned down corners held this peach: “Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”

I’m thinking about the things we like and why we like the things we like. Maybe we choose the books/songs/movies, for whatever reasons (we like the cover art or it’s cheap or our friend gives us a gift). Or maybe those books/songs/films choose us (and we’d find them in our path somehow, over and over, until we finally pick it up when we’re exactly ready and explode). Do we like those things because we’re a certain way, or are we a certain way because we like them? Or a wonderful dance between the two? Maybe we are predisposed, open to the impact of a book about an 8 year-old girl, her grandmother, wurses, and monsters born of sorrow, and when we find each other, we join this dance.

On another page: “And probably a lot of people think Maud and Lennart shouldn’t do that, and that types of people like Sam shoudln’t even be allowed to live, let alone eat cookies. And those people are probably right. And they’re probably wrong too. But Maud says she’s firstly a grandmother and secondly a mother-in-law and thirdly a mother, and this is what grandmothers and mothers-in-law and mothers do. They fight for the good. And Lennart drinks coffee and agrees. And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn’t know what weapon to use if one can’t use dreams.”

I hope we’re all fighting for the good. In fact, I believe we’re all fighting for the good, in the way we fight for the good. (Well, mostly all – some people are selfish psychos who want to cause damage, but there are so few of them… Well, it’s like this. Bad pizza exists, but pizza is so rarely bad that it’s hardly worth ordering our lives around. Most bad pizzas aren’t psychos, they’re bad pizzas born of sorrow and loneliness and despair, and that sort of pizza doesn’t want to be awful at all.) So we’re fighting for the good, trying to find what weapons are ours to use.

Dreams are a Swedish cookie, that’s what Backman and Maud and Lennart are referring to. But when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been frozen in too many ways, maybe the other kind of dream is necessary, as well. (Actually, Maud and Lennart are the only ones referring to the cookie. Backman is obviously referring to both.) We get our imaginations drummed out of us very early, until we believe this is simply “how it is,” that people are untrustworthy, and all pizza is inherently bad. Reclaiming the truth requires, first, a dream. A dream that things can be better than they are, that we are worth fighting for, and that holding hands is still the best way to remember that all isn’t lost, that we are alive and that we are together.

Maybe amazing art like this is what made me so naive and awesome. Or maybe these books affirm my naïveté. It’s fun to think about but, in the end, who really cares? We have dreams to bake, people to love, and fighting to do.

Am I The Villain?

April 12, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I ripped this title from a song called Beach Zombies by Skye, with the lyric, “ooh, I’m tryna be a f***ing villain.” The Beautiful South is a great band who writes songs that are sometimes very, very dark but always sound like angels (Woman In The Wall, for example.) Beach Zombies sounds like a sweet love song, except for the lyrics. I’m not tryna be a villain, but I’ve at least got to consider the possibility that I am. Do villains usually know they’re the villains, or is good and bad a matter of the perspective of the one with the pen (or keyboard or Twitter or TikTok account)?

As you already know, I have a complicated relationship with youth sports. There are 2 ways to look at a successful coach. A wrong way, measured solely in wins and losses. And a right way, where the athletes are mentored in a sport by well-meaning people with character and integrity. They are taught sport and competition, but they are also shown the connection between this specific sport and a beautiful life off the field/court/pitch/etc. We have not had awesome luck with either. And I drift in and out of that dad in the stands, complaining and pointing out the obvious deficiencies.

I also coach baseball and I do not win games too often, but I bet you’d like to trust me with your kids for an overwhelming amount of time in season. And once, last year, a previous coach walked up and down the line of parents/fans loudly detailing my every flaw (through his eyes). It was disappointing and embarrassing, until he spent a whole inning informing MY WIFE, the Angel, of my ‘mistakes,’ at which point it became hilarious. A, it’s my wife and that seems like some kind of societal code violation. And B, if you want to talk about my flaws and mistakes, the Angel is already very well aware.

Am I that guy, embarrassing myself as I loudly expose my insecurities???? Am I the villain in this story??

Yes, of course these coaches aren’t doing any mentoring (well, not any particularly good mentoring – they are certainly showing a kind of example), and aren’t winning. They are obviously, publicly, having a very rough time navigating the tremendous responsibility and wonderful honor of the position.

Do you know what the main feeling I had for that guy, walking up the sidelines trashing me? Yes, of course, I felt anger, indignation, embarrassment, shame, and the need to fight in relatively small amounts, but the biggest portion by a long shot was sadness. I wanted him to be ok with himself, to not have his inadequacy the keys to his behavior. I was sad that he looked so foolish. I wanted to hug him and tell him he was enough, and that I liked him.

Why don’t I feel sad for these coaches? I know it’s because the sideline guy was attacking me, these guys are hurting my son.

But as much as we can learn from a positive sports experience, we can learn an equal amount from the inverse. How do we respond to adversity, to unfairness, to frustration, rage, and broken hearts? Can we still relate with class and dignity in our pain? How do we lose well?

We’ve been discussing these questions and ideas in my house, I’m trying to guide him on this treacherous path. But then I am sitting in the stands with my big mouth and open wounds. I think I probably am a villain, but I think we probably are all villains at some points, in some spaces.

Today is a new day. There’s a game in a few hours and it’ll drive me crazy, but it is a new opportunity to answer for myself the same questions my boy is facing. How will I respond? It’s only youth sports, but it’s an awful lot more. It’s always, always, a variation of “Who am I?” Sure, sometimes we forget, but the truth remains, and every circumstance is another chance to affirm the beauty of that answer,

Eyes To See

March 22, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I go to a local store for something called creamed pearl tapioca pudding on Tuesdays. Every Tuesday. And then I drop it off with the Angel at her office, along with a fountain soda as thanks. What I tell her is that it needs to be refrigerated and I’m unable to access our fridge. I don’t need to take it to her. I take it all through the winter, when my car is colder than any available appliance, mostly so I can see her for those 30 seconds.

Yesterday was Tuesday, and while I was there, I was overwhelmed, speechless and in awe of this woman. I sent her a text from the parking lot that read, “No kidding, I can not believe I get to be married to you. You are a KNOCKOUT,” and then I added 2 emoji faces with hearts for eyes. We’ll only talk about how she looks today, but as you probably already know, the beauty on the outside isn’t close to how lovely she is on the inside. She’s pretty far out of my league, but that’s her problem, not mine.

The point is that sometimes we can be so familiar with something that we take it for granted, easily and often. I live with this Angel, see her everyday, in pajamas and in heels, I know she’s gorgeous. I know her smile in my sleep, the way her eyes shine, how her laugh sounds, her skin feels. I know all of this, but there are surely lots of moments where I don’t truly appreciate all of this.

And there are so many things just like her (well, not just like her), but equally overlooked, or dismissed as common when they are anything but.

Pizza, Lord of the Rings, vinyl, this blanket, Catfish, creamed pearl tapioca. There are things we couldn’t wait to get, absolutely had to have, and changed our lives, that we don’t even give a second thought today. I’m not sure we need a change of scenery nearly as much as we need to open our eyes to the current scenery, because at some point that new scenery is going to be the current scenery we are looking to change.

I haven’t listened to The Queen Is Dead in months, and the last time I did, I skipped some tracks. It’s a perfect album, and I treat it so cavalierly that I skip tracks. We eat in front of the tv or in the car, concentrating and appreciating nothing. We see sunrises and sunsets everyday more perfect than the finest art. The Angel is so stunning she could stop clocks.

How and when did we get so distracted and jaded that we miss all of this splendor? Somewhere we were sold the lie that there was anything in this fantastic world that is “ordinary.” Ordinary is for the blind and imagination-less. In the Bible, scales fall from the apostle Paul’s eyes and he can finally see things as they are, see reality as it is. Maybe our scales need to fall, as well. I don’t really want to take anything for granted anymore, and I certainly don’t want to take people for granted ever again. I don’t want to become so familiar with laying like spoons with the Angel that it loses it’s tender warmth and simply becomes something we do. It IS something we do, but it’s not simple at all, it’s also significant and perfect.

I wonder how many other things in our everyday lives are significant and perfect, if we only had eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to feel them.

Toothpaste Caps

February 27, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

In the modern classic The Incredibles, Bob (Mr. Incredible) returns home from some forbidden crime-fighting to an angry wife, Helen (Elastigirl, or Mrs. Incredible). They argue about the political ban on superheroes, moving, changing jobs, and sports for their son, but the argument isn’t about any of those things.

It’s the same in all of our relationships, isn’t it? The most common example of conflict in marriage revolves around the toothpaste cap. We all know no one actually leaves the cap off of the tube. Unless they do… Does this come from somewhere in real life? Why haven’t I thought about this sooner? I figured it was just some nonsensical hypothetical scenario, like making “widgets” in business classes. What kind of savage doesn’t put the cap back on? Maybe it is totally imagined, it has to be.

Anyway, it’s a solid example because toothpaste caps are small and insignificant, and the fights are big, loud, very significant, and not about oral hygiene or bathroom cleanliness at all. They’re about respect or value or minimization or resentment or fear or insecurity or inadequacy or regret, any number of reasons, really, and all things that have their roots much older and farther reaching than toothpaste. It’s like treating the cut in the skin rather than the broken bone that caused the tear.

There are 2 monsters in the closet here, 2 “broken bones,” as far as I can tell. First, we often hide, pretending that we’re perfect and nothing is wrong. That if we’re not fighting right now, then that must mean we have peace. We don’t communicate well, we ignore warning lights and signs, choosing to act like the white picket fence doesn’t have termites. This all comes from general, garden variety laziness and more importantly, our propensity to choose comfort, convenience, and ease.

I guess there’s only 1 monster, because that last paragraph was a list of symptoms, too. Helen finally ends the argument in the movie with, “This is NOT. ABOUT. YOU.” The bone that’s broken and in great need of attention is our narcissism. We are very selfish. The Bible calls this idolatry, and all that means is that we are our own gods, we are our own #1. I’m angry about the cap you left off because of what it says to/about me. I’m frustrated and resentful because you don’t do what I want you to do, what I think you should do. I’m offended because you are disrespectful of my wants and needs, scared because you aren’t properly deferential to me and my expectations, inadequate and insecure because you might not want or need me and what will that say about me???

This is almost entirely why we can’t talk about religion or politics like human beings. We identify with a position so closely that another position is not simply judging ideas or concepts or platforms, it is judging us. I’m so thoroughly identified, to discard my opinion is to discard me, to deem it less is to deem me less. We don’t usually do this with choice of condiments or sodas, so we can easily talk about the merits of ketchup without coming to blows. We cannot with our theology or our political affiliation.

Most conversations are variations on that Incredibles scene. We’re talking out loud about Dash playing sports, but barely concealed is a defense of our own worth and fear at becoming obsolete and discarded. And we are way too terrified to be vulnerable enough to drag the real issue into the light. So we dance around sports, tenets, and toothpaste caps, unable to say anything real.

It’s the most depressing scene in the movie by a mile, and every one of us can easily relate. We are all Bob Paar; Incredible, overflowing with so many talents, gifts and abilities…and wildly desperate that you notice. The thing is that all of the ways we try too hard to be these pathetic gods only obscure how super we really are.

Reviews

February 14, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

It’s been a few months since I’ve reviewed anything – this will happen. Sometimes, the overwhelming nature of living a life you love provides more than enough inspiration. But today, my calendar is clean and I can settle in, think back and hopefully decompress while I tell you what I liked and why.

A quick observation before we begin, about the Rihanna Super Bowl halftime show. No matter what happens, there are legions of trolls saying how terrible it is, and I can’t think of anything less interesting. There are notable exceptions (Thor, Love & Thunder, which is fascinating in it’s desire to devalue the entire MCU and ridicule fans) that prove the rule you’ve surely deduced: I like everything. There is beauty in most all works of art, some might take more time and effort than others to discover, but it is there. And if it’s not (again, like Love & Thunder, though Christian Bale’s performance is terrific), then I prefer to move on without much comment. There is already enough negativity in the world, you don’t need mine. I don’t even need mine!

I’m currently listening to Local Natives cover Gerry Rafferty’s “Right On Down The Line,” and it makes me appreciate The Angel. Today is Valentine’s Day and the best, most beautiful blessing in my life has always been her, right on down the line.

Poker Face is a cool hard to categorize comedy-ish drama on Peacock, starring Natasha Lyonne. After episode 1, I’m firmly in, but I’m pretty sure I’d watch Natasha Lyonne do anything. She’s so good, she gives me hope for tomorrow. It makes me want to watch everything she’s ever done.

Raya and The Last Dragon is an animated film with Rose from the new Star Wars as Raya and Awkwafina as the dragon. You know, the most disappointing reaction from that Star Wars trilogy was the embarrassing treatment of Rose/Kelly Marie Tran. Sometimes, our behavior is just abhorrent. The second most disappointing reaction was the creators of Rise of Skywalker caving and writing her character essentially out of the trilogy. Anyway, my sons are still laughing at how I cried during Raya, but how can I help it? My soft, beautiful heart grew 2 sizes the day we watched.

I finally saw Wakanda Forever, the 2nd Black Panther movie. I wondered if I would, or if Love & Thunder and She-Hulk chased me away forever. I didn’t see it in the theater, and instead watched it from my couch, just in case. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term “woke,” but one of the criticisms was that Wakanda Forever is “woke.” Probably it is. I don’t like being the target of an agenda, especially when it’s so ham-handed that I am conscious to the fact that I am nothing more than a “demographic” – this wasn’t as obvious as other examples, I didn’t think. Women were the leads and most of the important characters, but representation is not “woke.” I wanted to be a superhero because I was a little white boy and all of the superheroes for the last 100 years looked just like me. Now, they don’t. And that is not a bad thing in any galaxy. The cultures (people, music, rituals) are different, and that’s wonderful, in cinema and in real life. I say it’s probably “woke” because Disney usually seems to be trying too hard. However, if the art is as lovely, deep, and honestly moving as this one, “woke” isn’t so bad.

This Is Pop is a series on Netflix and, this week, I watched the Britpop episode. It would be impossible for me to express just how much Blur, Pulp, Oasis, Suede, Echobelly, and on and on through all the disposable B and C ripoffs, meant to me. I’ve been abundantly clear about the Smiths/Morrissey, but it never ended there. The nostalgia I feel sometimes causes my heart to ache, the music was awesome, everything felt far more simple than it does today. I had opinions and understood the world. Oasis fought Blur for Britpop supremacy, but the right answer was that Pulp was better than both of them.

I’m not so certain about too much anymore. I do have some, and hold onto them firmly and passionately. But (I can’t believe I’m going to write this) I don’t care what sort of music you listen to, what your Top 5 desert island discs are, or what your favorite song is – I just care that you do. You see, I find you totally fascinating, who you are, what you think & believe, what you’re like. I want you to have opinions and I want you to know why you hold them. And I really want you to tell me what they are.

Of course I love all forms of art and the effect they have on/for me, but more and more, I love the communal effects. In a dark theater, a great film connects us, to each other, to God, to our world. The same thing happens when we sing along to a song, when it takes us back to a space and time when we were present and alive. Usually we are so wrapped up in surviving, putting one foot in front of another, getting through the day, that some program on a streaming network can jar us out of that monotonous routine like little else, and wake us up to the indescribable divine gift of each moment. We are here and we are alive, so for heaven’s sake, turn it up and move a little.

A Christmas Life

December 27, 2022/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I am the pastor of a small church in town. You might not know this because this space (lovewithacapitall.com) has been a separate room where I can talk about Morrissey (mostly) and other art and artists I like. At least as separate as I can be. The things we discuss here, we also discuss there – After all, I do write it, and the best, most authentic art comes from the most authentic parts of us. If I were to pretend I didn’t love Morrissey songs and Fight Club and superheroes, that would be to abandon certain important, meaningful parts of me. How can we connect on any sort of deep level while one of us is hiding or holding parts of him/her-self back and pretending to be something else,something we think the other wants us to be? Dishonesty and image making drive me insane. So, there (in the church virtual room), these cultural touchpoints relate explicitly to God and the complicated journey of faith. Here, not necessarily as explicitly, but they do relate.

Anyway, this particular faith community began in my living room, when the church to which I belonged closed its doors. That means I speak every Sunday, and each talk should probably contain one point the people who give their most valuable possession, their time, can use, just in case they don’t hear anything else. It’s shocking, but the truth is that not everyone present is hanging on each word I say. Gasp! On Saturday night, Christmas Eve, this ‘takeaway’ was that we don’t only celebrate Christmas once a year, but that we live Christmas lives.

What does that mean? What does a Christmas life look like? Maybe I should’ve given a bit more thought to that, it sounded like a pretty good phrase at the time, and maybe I did an adequate job at conveying the idea. Often times, we are having conversations in our heads & hearts, and very little has to be said to affect us in profound ways. For instance, let’s say you were feeling that you wanted to learn to play the guitar, then a character in the book you’re reading is a guitar player, then you’re listening to Howard Stern and he’s interviewing Slash, and then you come to a church service and I happen to be talking about Abraham and Campbell’s Heroes’ Journey and say, “Maybe you’re thinking of taking a new step…” And that’s all it takes. I don’t have to be eloquent or clear at all, it’s enough and your spirit and what I call God will do the rest.

I know a Christmas life doesn’t mean we spend money like wild animals buying things we don’t need and don’t really want in the first place, things we have to return or exchange. It doesn’t mean we buy landscaping and put it inside (though I guess it could mean that for you). It doesn’t mean we gain weight as if we’re preparing to hibernate for months (like I do). It doesn’t mean we make habits of superficial small talk with distant relatives (unless we actually care for them and the talk gets bigger and less superficial.)

It’s always easier to define what we are not, or who we don’t want to be, or what we don’t want to do, than it is to say Yes. But negative postures don’t change our lives. Wanting to not become my dad never got me closer to who I wanted to become, to who Chad was once the block of stone had been chipped away. What would it reveal? I wouldn’t be a groundhog or 10 million other things, but what would I be underneath it all? That’s the coolest thing about opening your eyes, what you’ll see.

So, here’s what I came up with. A Christmas life is one of imagination. It takes a very open mind that dreams to consider a story of a God coming as a baby to a 13 year old girl in a barn, and what it could all mean. It takes imagination to hope for something new, for a fresh word. A Christmas life hopes. We hope for more than we see, that I can be more, that you can be more, that it isn’t what it is, that we’re not simply what we’ve always been, that we can change our world. A Christmas life is relational. We ask, listen, think the best, hold each other, kiss, put our phones down and pay attention to the fantastic blessings in front of us. We have more friends than “friends.” Mostly a Christmas life loves. We love our people, our animals, our neighborhoods, our country, our planet. But we do not love these things at the expense of other neighborhoods, countries, or planets. We love those, too. We are awake and aware, looking for people to love and ways to love them that they understand and receive. A Christmas life does not miss sacred moments, and a Christmas life realizes that they are all sacred moments if we are intentionally present.

I wonder if all of that came across in my message. Who knows? I wonder if all of that comes across in my life. I think, to that thought, what a Christmas life would say is, “if it didn’t yesterday, it sure will today.”

(One more thing. You know, I know almost nothing about promotion or reaching more eyes for this blog. And what I do know, I shy away from, for several reasons. But it’s going to be a new year. Promotion doesn’t have to be to feed my ego and/or brag about numbers, it could totally be about connection and circles that overlap.So, I would love to know you’re there, so maybe we could dream together and talk about what A Christmas Life means to you, and maybe we could do what we can to usher in a new world. Just a thought.)

How Many Tricks Can a Pig Do In 1 Minute?

November 2, 2022/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

178 people named Hirokazu Tanaka came together in Tokyo on Saturday to break the Guinness World Record for largest gathering of people with the same first and last name, breaking a group of Martha Stewarts. That’s fascinating for lots of reasons. Hirokazu Tanaka? I don’t know 1 Martha Stewart (of course, there is the celebrity, but I don’t personally know even one), for people with that name to hold a world record and to have never crossed paths with one seems unlikely in retrospect. Maybe I have and just didn’t know. And, there’s a world record for this?

Most toothpicks in a beard (3,500), most tricks by a pig in one minute (13), longest duration spinning a basketball on a toothbrush (1 min 8 secs). People are very strange. I don’t know why any of these things matter enough to be noteworthy. Do we really need to know how many cans a parrot can open in a minute (35)? More importantly, do we care? How fast can someone burst 3 balloons using just their back (6 secs) or how many t-shirts can someone remove while heading a soccer ball (22)? I don’t think I care, yet here we are, so maybe I do.

Last week, in this space, I wrote about perspective. Is the world actually falling apart or are we looking only for pieces of the sky on the ground? Is today really a worse, more frightening time to live, or are we simply building a case and finding evidence to support that hypothesis? DO we see the world as it is, or as we are?

I pastor a church and teach the Bible. One of the most dangerous paths to travel is to seek and twist verses to match my already held beliefs, instead of discovering what they mean and bringing my ideas to them. (I do recognize it’s mostly impossible to read/teach an unbiased version of anything. Everything is colored by our experiences and filtered through our minds, hearts & souls. It is the height of arrogance to think we have the right answers on everything, untouched by footprints in the snow. It’s like those who think marketing doesn’t affect them. But we can, and must, try to find truth while remaining open to the very real possibility that the opinions we currently hold could, in fact, be wrong.)

Anyway, back to parrots opening cans, gatherings of Hirokazu Tanakas, and finding what we’re searching for. We read these stories and can come to a great number of conclusions that are not exactly complimentary. But we can also see them from a different angle, which is where I generally choose to stand. Human beings are amazing; interesting, quirky, and endlessly amusing. What makes someone wonder how many tricks their pig can do??? And then, makes them reach out to preserve that number for posterity?

What makes someone choose to be a nurse, or a therapist, or makes them get out of bed at 4am to workout? Why does she have that particular tattoo or listen to that podcast? What is it about that song or singer or movie that makes him love it the way he does? Why do we pick dogs or cats or bunnies or snakes as pets? What is your favorite color or dessert or topping on pizza?

And we are constantly growing and becoming, so the answers to those questions today will certainly (hopefully) not be the answers next year. I married the Angel and every day I learn more about her, every day I am surprised. We’ve been together for almost 25 years.

I get to pastor a church, and that means that one of the best parts of my job is getting to talk with, learn about/from others, and connect. I ask a million questions and listen to what they say, how they move, how their face scrunches up or eyes water, how they shift uncomfortably in their seats. It’s so great because you are so great.

The point is, it’s sometimes easy to think people are awful, untrustworthy, selfish, and sometimes we are. But that’s not all we are. There are other, much larger pieces to us that are smart, funny, generous, loyal, honest. Maybe if we could only open our eyes to those parts a bit more often, the world around us might transform to meet our imaginations, and then there would be less nasty political ads to mourn and more super weird world records to celebrate.

Love With A Capital L

A journey towards living an inspired life of love in the modern world

Tag: beauty