Sunshine and Shadows

In every life there are shadows.  If there were no shadows, there would be no sunshine.  Out of the sunshine, shadows form and are cast.  My life has been filled with mostly sunshine.  I've been able to do what I love.  I've traveled the world and seen unbelievable places and met wonderful people.  I have beautiful and healthy daughters, an amazing family, and incredible friends.  Enfolded in the sunshine is a long era of time filled with honorable deeds and actions; years of spearheading noble causes.  Yes, my life has been filled with sunshine, prodigious sunshine; so much so, I forgot about the shadows.  Slowly they crept in and clouded my sunshine.

I've made mistakes in life.  I tried my best to do the right things and continue to do whatever I can to repair my wrongs.  There was a period I lost my moral compass and found myself in a very difficult situation.  The shadows lengthened and widened.  Without compass to guide, I made desperate and strained decisions.  My injudicious choices were never fueled by anything other than doing everything in my power to salvage a sinking ship.  Never was there any intent to hurt anyone or cause another loss; yet individuals were hurt and suffered loss because of my mistakes.

There's almost never a time when every decision we make is correct and every step we take is in the right direction.  Life is filled with complexities, and rarely are the complications black and white.  People seldom make the right choices when they're under peril or duress.  The shadows.  People choose right because they see something that makes their life valuable enough to start moving toward a life worth living.  The sunshine.

Out of the shadows comes enlightenment.  Within our greatest traits are the seeds of our undoing.  There is a connection between the great gifts we possess and the great problems we encounter.  Sunshine and shadows.

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The Moment

So I read today that Roger Clemens is coming out of retirement at the age of 50 to show professional baseball hitters he can still get the best of them.  The last time Clemens made a comeback he was 45 and amply compensated – $28 million – for his subpar performance and half season with the New York Yankees.  He found little reward on the field, going 6-6 and was shelled off the field in the third inning of his final outing, a playoff game the Yankees lost.

This time around, Clemens’ return from retirement is on a much smaller scale and his new team is slightly lighter on tradition and history than the pinstriped squad from the Bronx.  Nonetheless he is still returning and for some reason refuses to fade quietly into the Texas sunset.  He takes the mound tonight for the Sugarland Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League to face the Bridgeport Bluefish.

Apparently this comeback is fueled solely for the love of the game.  He's seeking some satisfaction with little financial incentive.  And his return is a far cry from his glory days of climbing the hill for the Yanks to face the Boston Red Sox.  I mean the Skeeters and the Bluefish?  Come on, these are hardly names one associates with baseball.  Sounds more like games my seven year old daughter Shelby plays on her Nintendo DS.  And what is a Skeeter anyway?  I believe I know what a Bluefish is but a Skeeter?  I did some digging and lo and behold I learned a Skeeter is a southern moniker for a mosquito, a common fan pest at night games here in Texas.  So in reality, Clemens is pitching for the mosquitoes, but as they say aroun' these parts, he's pitchin' and throwin' heat for the Skeeters.  Who in their right mind would name a baseball team Skeeters?  Even more so, why would a seven-time Cy Young Award winner and future Hall of Famer want to pitch for mosquitoes, Skeeters, or any team named after an insect?  He's pursuing the The Moment.

Though my athletic prowess is not on the level and scale of Roger Clemens, I'm an athlete nonetheless.  My two best sports are tennis and basketball.  In my present environment I can't play tennis  – my favorite – so I focus solely on basketball, my first athletic love.  The problem is, at my age, basketball is extremely hard on my body.  I'm reaching the point in life where it's becoming more difficult to lace up my Nikes night in and night out.  But for some reason I can't quite quit the sport I love even though I've tried a dozen times.  Why?  The Moment.

I play in two basketball leagues a year, spring and fall.  Scattered in between are a few tournaments.  The seasons are rigorous and long.  We play 3 games a week and with playoffs included, it's not uncommon for each campaign to extend well beyond 30 games.  When you're 48 and running up and down the court with young twenties who are faster, stronger, and more athletic, it's quite extracting and demanding on the body.  Especially three nights a week in a prison basketball league, which is much more physical than any rec league in America.  As a result, I'm the pregame player who smells like I walked out of an Icy Hot factory and I'm the postgame player stretched out on a yoga mat with ice packs wrapped around knees and ankles taking up yoga positions.

For each of the last six seasons, I've told myself this is my last campaign.  Initially, other players believed me and understood why I wanted to hang it up.  I'm the oldest guy in the league and one of only a handful of white guys.  But now they just roll their eyes when I mention retirement because they know I'll be back.  And sure enough, when the next season arrives, I'm back on my team and training hard to get in cardio shape by our first game.  I don't want to miss The Moment.

I've retired at the end of every season even though my performance and numbers remain competitive.  I consistently score in double figures and for the most part can stay with my man defensively using stealthy old-school slight of hand tricks like grabbing my opponent’s jersey.  I still have the ability to pull up behind the arc and bury 3's and my jumper has not yet morphed into a decrepit set-shot.  And every blue moon, I score 20 plus points in a game and managed to hit 30 once. (The planets aligned) I retire because my body does not always cooperate with my mind.  My brain tells me, I can beat that guy off the dribble; I can cut hard off that pick and beat the young fool to the hole.  But my body sometimes refuses to cooperate and screams back, that was 20 years ago stupid.  The aftereffects of each game require my self-prescribed cocktail of Motrin, Tylenol, and Aleve.  And the day after is always the worst as I walk around cement like looking like some mannequin that escaped from a display window on Fifth Avenue.  So why do I continue?  For that matter, why does any athlete push his body and extend himself and attempt to defy Father Time?  The Moment.

Every sport offers a pinnacle of achievement and feeling known as The Moment.  It's why athletes compete and perform.  It's why they come out of retirement and return to the sports they love.  It's why you see boxers attempt comebacks in their forties.  It's why there are senior leagues for every major sport in this country.  It's why Michael Phelps WILL swim again in Rio.  It's why Sampras and McEnroe and Borg and Agassi are still slugging it out on the old man's Champions Tour and why there is a Senior PGA Tour, Senior Baseball League, and thousands of recreational leagues for just about every sport and age group imaginable.  It's exactly why Roger Clemens is taking the mound tonight for the Skeeters.

The Moment is not exclusive to professional athletes.  It's found and felt in every league in every sport in every nation.  It's not limited to age or ability or talent.  It's seen in pick-up games and flag football contests and on lonely tennis courts where it's you and your best friend banging it out for bragging rights.  It's felt on the fields, courts, tracks, diamonds, courses, ranges, roads, and in the rings, lanes, and rinks.  It's experienced in all weather conditions: rain, snow, sleet, wind, heat.  The Moment is why you see old people playing softball in your city parks and even older people carting around on golf courses.

The Moment.  It's in that millisecond when I get the ball and I lift off the ground and my shooting hand goes forward and nothing else is happening in the world as the world goes silent and I see the ball rise in the air and arc perfectly as it leaves my hand and floats through space and I just know; I just know it's perfect as I watch the round orange come back down through the iron hole suspended in time as it swishes the net.  Then there comes the immense joy I feel and the waves of adrenaline rushing through my veins and the adulation from my teammates as we race back down the court to defend our basket.  The Moment inspires you to believe you have one more in you.  It's why you never quit.  It grants an illusion of clarity to our complicated lives.  As Mark Twain once wrote, "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sail.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.  Live."  Live your Moment(s).

A Day In My Life - Music

Today, nearly five years of living without an iPod and my music came to an end.  For the first time in the feds we're allowed to purchase MP3 players and download music.  Over the last year, I heard a rumor this day was coming but I never believed it.  In this environment the most unimaginable rumors swirl with every gust of wind.  And frequently they prove to be false.  I was stunned when MP3 players went on sale in the compound store last week and we were informed we could start buying songs through our computer system today.

All week, my mind's been spinning as I've tried to recall my favorite tracks.  I've carried a pen and notepad everywhere writing down songs and artists as they come to mind.  When I can't remember a title, I scribble lyrics I recall and ask the music connoisseurs if they know the name of the song.  Usually they suggest I sing the lyrics so they can ascertain some frame of reference, some rhythm or beat.  Big mistake.  No one has deducted a song title from my impromptu solos but they certainly have cast cringed faces and distorted smiles in my attempts to belt out tunes I can't quite remember.

I've hauled my notepad to the weight room, the gym, the track, and around the housing unit.  I've slept with it because I found myself waking throughout the night with song titles rollercoasting through my thoughts.  Following a week of horrendous solo performances, of wracking my brain trying to remember all the music that's been missing from my life for the last half decade, the day arrived to download my first songs.

I woke bright and early and rushed to the computer terminals with music list and iPod in hand.  I was eager to reunite with my music.  On arrival, I was greeted by a lengthy line snaking its way through the unit.  It was the longest line I've ever seen inside my living area, at least fifty deep, all waiting to reconnect with their music.  Disappointedly, I returned to my room and postponed one of the most anticipated moments of these last five years.  As I waited for the line to shrink, I contemplated why I was so anxious to download the missing music of my life and why so many others were feeling the same way about their music.

Music is a harmony that unites the spiritual and emotional with the physical in the human life.  We do more than hear music; we feel music.  The music we listen to is a metaphor for what goes on in the heart and soul.  It's an expression or representation of life churning internally, of emotions and spirit.  In our very constitution we are musical, as is the world itself.  No matter where you travel on this bouncing ball, you encounter music.  It's deeply embedded and entrenched in culture, in history, and in the lives of people found in every given region and country on earth.

Our spirit is fundamentally musical, complete with tonalities, moods, rhythms, counterpoints, harmonies, and dissonances.  It corresponds to some feeling or thought, and when we listen to music we are led to sensations that dispel the humdrum of daily life.  Our spirit yearns for understanding, for completion, for inspiration, and often in a song we find some solace for our yearnings.  The light clicks on.  Someone understands how I feel.  Music has the ability to move us deeply.  More than all the arts, it has a powerful effect on a person's life.  The brilliant Greek philosopher Plato wrote, "Without music, the soul becomes feeble, deaf, and blind."  Music touches our spirit directly and brings out individuality and imagination.

Often I approach life as a logical problem and when faced with difficulty I do my best to determine which alternative is correct and makes sense.  And sometimes nothing makes sense and the choices in front of me are clouded by confusion.  Music helps shift my thinking from logical sequence to pliable reasoning, and this opens windows where I can see and appreciate the many different ways life arranges itself.  It reconnects me with my past and this adaptive vision, as with music itself, provides significant insight that is a profound deepening and understanding of the original content of my life.  In other words, music casts fresh perspective on all that has occurred up to this point in my journey and can help calibrate my forward view of a boundless horizon filled with unlimited possibilities.  Words often can't do this; they are sometimes empty and inattentive, void of feeling.  But music moves my spirit, igniting me to action and fanning the flame of belief.

Music is made up of measures and developments so it's tolerant of the many different kinds of figurations that make up a life.  This is often why we connect to certain songs, why certain music resonates in our hearts.  Music creates an atmosphere, a milieu, a haven for clarity and calm.  Sometimes words don't enlighten but a song clears away all the cobwebs and allows us to see the various dimensions of our lives.  The deep power of music provides an ordinary life with beauty and poetry and in times of uninspired pragmatism allows our spirit to interact with inspiration.

Perhaps one of the reasons we lack enchantment in daily life is we often think too much in terms of cause and effect, instead of stepping back and acknowledging the sovereign expressions that simply come from being alive in a living and fluid world.  Music helps me appreciate the aesthetics of events that shape my life rather than their truth or fairness.  The art of living is quite different in tone from the toil of living.

Some hours later the line for the computers had vanished.  I sat in front of a workstation, logged in, and clicked the music button.  Suddenly I was connected to the outside world.  On the screen in front of me was a bridge to my entire past.  It was overwhelming at first.  My mind went blank as I tried to figure out what song to download first.  I noticed a running clock in the window.  I had fifteen minutes to select my songs and could only purchase a daily limit.  I quickly searched for songs that resonate with me and carry deep meaning both past and present.

The first song I purchased was What Faith Can Do by Kutless because the lyrics burn in my spirit.  I believe every word of this song; I live and feel and breathe the lyrics.  Next I pictured my three beautiful daughters whom I miss more than words can describe.  Past images of wonderful times spent together raced through my mind.  I needed songs that would take me back to moments where I could feel their touch and hear their voices and see their amazing smiles, songs that would wrap me into their past and present lives.  I downloaded Butterfly Kisses, I'm Already There, and Ready, Set, Don't Go.  These three songs connect me to my girls and bring me back to a very special experience I had some years back.

Next came God Of This City  and How Great Is Our God  by Chris Tomlin.  Both worship anthems inspire me greatly and remind me: Nothing is impossible for my God.  It's a tremendous blessing for me to access music that ushers the presence of God into my life as I live in a very difficult place and mind-bending world.  I followed those up with I Could Sing Of Your Love Forever  and Did You Feel The Mountains Tremble by Delirious.  These incredible songs take me back to the many years I lived out my calling, times where I was used by God and witnessed so many miracles and astonishing acts as I travelled and spoke all over the world.  And these songs reignite my belief that one day God will use my gifts again in a similar way.

Before I knew it, my time limit was up and I’d purchased my daily limit of music.  I scrolled through my iPod to make sure all songs were downloaded.  And there they were.  It's strange when you lose something and go without it for years.  Then suddenly you find it again.  It's an amazing feeling.  You appreciate it more, value it more, treasure it more.  So much more.  You comprehend, maybe for the first time, the considerable emptiness the loss created.

My First Playlist

Bent, Matchbox Twenty - I don't think there is a song I relate to more.

My Wish, Rascal Flatts -  My prayer and greatest hope for my daughters, my friends, my family.

Alright, Darius Rucker - At the end of the day, nothing in life is more important.

Hello World, Lady Antebellum - My prayer, my hope, my faith, my thoughts, my feelings, my girls ... song says everything I long for and desire.

Let's Stay Together, Al Green - A timeless classic on what marriage and love are all about.

The Color Of Love, Boyz 2 Men - For me, the most beautiful song lyrically and musically.  Love is the most powerful force in the universe.  It's magical.

4 In The Morning, Gwen Stefani - Sometimes our relationships reach a point where all feeling is lost, where everything is frayed, torn, fractured, and the only thing that remains is our commitment. When you hold onto and honor commitment by giving every piece of who you are to that commitment, something miraculous takes place.

Heal The World, MJ - A hope that burns in my heart.  I want nothing more than to make any wrongs right, assist others, and give my remaining years to help the hurting in our world.

Babylon, David Gray - A feel good song that triggers fond memories of wonderful times lived all over the world ... NYC-Honolulu-London-SF-HK-DC-Rome-Paris-Amsterdam-Munich-Monte Carlo-Kiev-Miami-Helsinki ... the list is endless.  Life is amazing and anything is possible.  Red lights do turn green again!

No Love, Lil Wayne & Eminem - You can't write a song like this nor relate to it unless you've lived the lyrics.  Like me, both Weezy & Shady lived through a difficult relationship and walked the path of incarceration.  Though graphic and provocative, the song is reality in my life and story.  Most lyrics apply.  "I'm alive again, more alive than I had been in my whole entire life."  "My nightstands are full of open Bibles."  "Been to Hell and back, I can show you vouchers."

Not Afraid, Eminem - A personal anthem.  A constant reminder to stand strong and never again lose sight of what's most important: God, family, and my girl's lives.

Everlasting God, Lincoln Brewster

Could It Be Any Harder, The Calling

The Last Beautiful Girl, Matchbox Twenty

Mockingbird, Rob Thomas

The Space Between, Dave Matthews Band

‘N Dey Say, Nelly

The Riddle, Five For Fighting

There Goes My Life, Kenny Chesney

Don't Blink, Kenny Chesney

Headlines, Drake

Take Care, Drake & Rihanna

When I'm Gone, Eminem

Mercy, Mercy, Me, Marvin Gaye

What's Going On, Marvin Gaye

Adrienne, The Calling

Angel, Lionel Richie

Viva La Vida, Coldplay

I Can Only Imagine, Mercy Me

Disrupted Faith – When God Seems Indifferent

Perhaps there is no greater disruption to the sparkle of the human spirit than unanswered prayer.  When news arrives that runs contrary to our fervent petitions and dislocates all we hoped and believed would transpire, our spirit is catapulted, sometimes instantaneously, into a shattering thrust, a blast from one state of mind to another.  Feelings go numb.  Words fall to the ground.  An explosion of confusion chases away lucid thoughts as the wind of our hopes and the gust of our dreams evaporate, leaving a hollow vacuum of nothingness.  Behind us lies a void.  And in front a wall, a wall of darkness.

In my previous post I wrote of news received from the U.S. Court of Appeals informing me I lost my Direct Appeal.  The news was difficult to absorb.  Once I read the ruling, I returned to my room and sat numbly on the edge of the bed.  A throbbing dread drummed in my heart and became a black hole of shock that swallowed all my questions and released no answers.  The decision seemed to pull all the air from my lungs and the court's opinion rippled on the gloomy sea of my feelings.  I catatonically reached for my Bible and impassively thumbed through its pages reading hundreds of notations I've written in the sidelines.  These inscriptions cover everything from personal insights to promises God has spoken to my life.

As I perused certain entries, I remembered times of prayer and study when I jotted those thoughts down.  My mind drifted back to bygone moments of inspiration and discovery.  It dawned on me that I've never prayed and fasted so much for God's help and intervention in my life.  I recalled a 40 day fast I undertook late last year wherein my faith flourished and reached colossal heights.  This fast centered on God working in my case, working in my family unit, and working in the lives of my daughters.  My thoughts revisited numerous extended fasts where I diligently sought God's provision for all who have been adversely affected and hurt by my mistakes.  Memories resurfaced in a crisp clarity of recollection to a period where my spirit was booming with confidence and conviction and assurance in a time when my body was hurting and wanting and failing.

In that dichotomy of reminiscence, those long minutes of my fragile self where I orbited polarizing realms of faith and disbelief, of trust and uncertainty, something strange occurred.  Abruptly, my thoughts shifted to the story of Joseph in prison.  Then Paul and Silas chained to a wall.  Then Peter isolated in a cell facing imminent beheading.  And then a kaleidoscope of images burst in my mental wanderings such as a disillusioned Jonah pleading fervently for his life in the belly of a whale; an inconsolable David stretched out for days on his palace floor begging God to spare his child; a heartbroken Job covered in boils mourning the incomprehensible loss of all his children.  I saw the great biblical characters of history, the great men of faith in their discouragement, in their sadness, in their hopelessness, in their desperation.  I did more than see; I felt.  I felt the pain and heartache and disappointment and despair.  I felt the hot sting of tears leak from my eyes and trickle down my cheeks.  It was a quiet grief, a quiet distress, quiet enough to hear the anguished droplets fall from my aging face onto the thin vellum pages of my Bible, one after another, each wet circle weeping outward into words on the page, words of trust and hope and faith, words I could find no strength to believe.

After some time, a tranquil emptiness enveloped the room.  Then I unexpectedly felt God's touch and presence amidst the whirl and crush of the news.  Though it was impossible to imagine anything good coming from the court's decision, there was a sudden calm and assurance, a potency from another world.  Mysteriously, and seemingly out of nowhere, an overwhelming sense of trust arrived and jolted my spirit.  I glanced down at my Bible and words from the book of Isaiah leaped off the page, "My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts says the Lord.  And my ways are far beyond anything you can imagine."  In a flash, God's Spirit transcended my injured spirit.  God granted me an unexpected endowment of faith.  Inexplicably I saw the current setback and horror of this experience from a new perspective.  Somehow, somewhere, I just knew God was using all the broken and disjointed pieces and creating a story of ineradicable hope.

Though it's difficult to see and understand in the present, I have learned in times previous and have been reminded in these years of a punitive sojourn that the obscure, unplanned, unexpected, and disappointing answers are inevitably worthwhile, sometimes needed, and often quite important on our journey through life.  My own life of faith has included many surprises across the years and I suspect if our spiritual pilgrimage did not include a few unexpected detours, we would hardly need faith.  After all, we normally lean on God out of need, not out of surplus.  I believe the sooner we discover this sublime truth, the sooner we will reach deeper depths of experience with a God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers and bullet points, but rather rely on His sovereignty and love.

Looking back on this ordeal, I see many coincidences, God-incidences that are misshapen pieces of a mysterious puzzle of God's promises for my life.  As with any puzzle, I can't forecast what piece will first connect to the next, nor can I predict what piece will be the last to find its place to complete the jigsaw.  I only know as I look at a life full of scattered pieces, somehow the pieces link and once assembled they form a beautiful portrait.

God's presence ebbs and flows in our lives and sometimes there is more mystery than resolution to our faith.  This was never more evident than in the puzzle of the Crucifixion.  In a time when God seemed most absent, He was closest of all; when God appeared most powerless, He was most powerful; when God looked most dead, He was conquering death and reclaiming life.  Though his followers petitioned for Jesus to be spared the awfulness of the crucifix, those prayers and hopes returned unanswered and their faith was severely jilted by the enigma of events that occurred at Golgotha.

This pattern of paradox is a recurring theme throughout the Bible.  A litany of individuals who witnessed miraculous acts and frequently received favorable answers to their prayers also endured long droughts when miracles did not happen, when urgent and desperate and passionate pleadings dropped back to earth unanswered.  Like the aforementioned individuals of biblical fame, those heroes experienced crisis moments that sorely tempted them to judge God as indifferent and powerless and uncaring.  Confused and bewildered, they faced a life-changing fork in the road: whether to turn away embittered or step forward with any sliver of faith they could find.

God works with whatever grain of faith a person can muster, even the type of faith that's barely hanging on and can't seem to marshal belief.  Any measure of faith touches God's heart from the kind an outcast woman exhibited by groveling on her knees through a writhing mass of human bodies, to the type displayed by a prophet who possessed the brazenness to call down fire on a mountain top.  This same bold, fiery faith also morphed into a faith filled with doubt, so much so, it caused Elijah to fearfully run for his life and beseech God to kill him.  Astonishingly, God responded in greater intimacy to the prophet's cry of distrusting faith than his fiery demand and bold demonstration of faith on Mount Carmel.

In reality - doubt, disappointment, unanswered prayer - often coexist with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?  Those who honestly confront their doubts often find an expansion of faith exceeding those very doubts.  Faith appears when least expected.  God does transcend our limitations, our doubts, our fickle faith.  He also transcends the disappointments, setbacks, and failures of our lives and births new perspective and fresh hope.  Rarely was this more apparent than when a forlorn father brought his sick son to Jesus and said, "Help us if you can."  Jesus responded, "What do you mean if I can?  Anything is possible if a person believes."  The aching father's next statement is quite revealing and reflects the spirit of one whose faith has been wounded: "I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief."  And Jesus countered the father's faltering faith and healed the man's son.  The father's shaky confession did not interrupt God's miraculous act in his son's life.

If there is one lesson the Bible teaches me about faith it's that God often works in ways I could never predict or fathom.  As in my abovementioned news, the answers to our faith are not always what we desire or expect.  And these disappointments can draw the life out of us and send our faith reeling.  The unexpected responses deflate our faith and cloud our perspective.  Faith can easily lose all support of feeling and confidence and belief similar to what the first Christians experienced at the time of Jesus' execution and death.  On that black day of infamy their faith faltered and vanished.  Most were left with broken hearts fractured by incredulity, doubt, and devastating questions.  As with us in our times of dimness, they were unable to grasp or comprehend that the darkest deed in all of history was the necessary prelude to the brightest.  As it was then, it is true now: the dark riposte in our lives just could be the needed prelude to the brightest.

There will be periods of life when God seems not only invisible but completely absent, when God remains silent and all the Bible's promises appear flagrantly false.  Whenever I encounter a sense of estrangement, a gist of disappointment or discouragement, I remind myself: God's faithfulness is the one constant in the annals of history.  Times will come that test me and press my belief to the outer fringes.  I may not receive the answer I hoped for; I may continue to undergo stringent discipline for my sin or failure.  Though I long to make my wrongs right, to fix what has been turned upside down, God may have something different in mind.

We sometimes experience times of unusual closeness when God seems responsive to our every need; we also experience times where He is distant and can't seem to be found.  When the latter arrives, we instinctively blame ourselves, assuming we have done something to push God away.  A voice inside whispers, telling us we are unworthy to receive blessing and something good from God, hinting our faith is weak and blemished and God would never respond to such flawed faith.  Irrational thoughts stream and gust through our mind, distorting the truth of a God who is there, who will answer, who holds our hopes in His heart and our best interests in His hand. 

In those times when I have no words and my faith stumbles through disappointments, failures, and doubts; in times when answers are not found and questions pile up, I find solace and strength in the faith of others.  I discover if God appeared in their storm and stirred their faith to rise, He can do the same for mine.  Maybe what I sense as abandonment is actually a form of empowerment.

I think of a young Jewish girl whose life embodied this principle.  She was interned at Auschwitz and somehow found a way to keep her spirit elevated enough to pen a journal during those years of anguish and separation and merciless torment.  She wrote of an uninterrupted dialogue with God: "Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on Your earth, my eyes raised toward Your heaven, tears sometimes run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude.  And I want to be there, right in the thick of what people call horror, and still be able to say: life is beautiful.  Yes, I lie here in a corner, parched and dizzy and feverish and unable to do a thing.  Yet I am also with the jasmine and the piece of sky beyond my window."

Etty Hillesum knew the horror of bottomless suffering, yet her young mind also understood that God is present in our pain, in our travails, in our suffering.  He is forever present in the beauties and oddities of life.  And in her abandonment she was empowered to look beyond the daily dreadfulness of life in a death camp and trust a God who could redeem what appeared irredeemable.

Etty's courage and example of defiant faith demonstrates that every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.  With God by its side, every human will has the power to transform its fate.  Fate is not something unchangeable as though it's fixed at birth and as constant as the rising and falling of the sun.  Life is stranger and more beautiful than that.  The truth is, no matter what kind of situation you find yourself in, no matter how good or how bad, you can change your life completely with a single thought, a single act of faith.  And this is what we must do in our setbacks, in our mistakes and failures, in our discouragements and disappointments.  We must put one foot forward, and then the other, and lift our eyes to the frown and smile of the world.  We must believe, and hope, and trust as we follow faith and push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day.

Update

To All My Friends:

I am writing to let you know I was notified yesterday that I lost my direct appeal.  Of course the news was devastating and immediately tossed me into a chaotic storm of confusion.  A deep, deep sadness, rarely felt before, immediately blanketed my heart and spirit.  I really needed strength from another world and a special touch from the Lord.  After some time in prayer and reflection, I felt God's grace and comfort and strength and He again filled my heart with faith and hope.

I appreciate very much all the love you have shown me and the support you have given throughout these long 4.5 years.  More than anything I am so very grateful for the prayers you offered up to the Lord on my behalf.  Whenever I should come to mind in your thoughts, please take that time to pray for my daughters, Shayne & Shelby, and my parents as well.  Their lives have been the most affected by my failures, shortcomings, and choices.

At this point there are still numerous options.  But the mountains are much taller and larger and harder to scale.  I know God is able and in no way has the decision clouded my perspective of His miracle working power.  Though I am confident in His interventions in our lives and stories, I have zero confidence in the U.S. Justice System.  Something horrible has gone awry in this country and the system is no longer about fairness, the truth, nor about justice.  Something is amiss.  For further insight on this, I encourage you to read the Amanda Knox blog on my blogsite.

In closing, I would never wish an experience like this on any other person or family and I pray that no one I know would ever be subjected to such an ordeal and the interruptions a saga like this brings to one's life, one's mind, one's spirit and one's family.  In the coming days I will write in greater detail about the above on my blog.  Again thanks for your love, support and prayers.

With Much Love,

Steve


ps.  Feel free to forward to any mutual friends.

Worshipping God in a World Gone Mad

The year was 1966 and this was Captain Jeff Powell’s forty-second career mission in the air war over North Vietnam.  He was flying about thirty miles southeast of Hanoi in an F-105 Thunderchief, a supersonic aircraft carrying almost half its weight in munitions.  His target was a bridge, a vital North Vietnamese supply line connecting to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Powell rolled down through a 10,000-foot cloud ceiling, spotted his objective and released his weapons.  Half the cement span disintegrated.  When he tried to pull out of the maneuver, the controls of his aircraft wouldn’t respond.  Suddenly the sky around him turned a bright white as the fuel tank under his left wing exploded.  He ejected at the last possible moment.

A month later, Jeff Powell was blindfolded and trussed with wire as he was being marched through the jungles and villages of North Vietnam by night, his captors traveling under the cover of darkness to avoid being spotted by American bombers or rescue planes.  At one point, nauseous and feverish, he was hung from a banana tree in a large village as the star attraction in a circus of mockery.  He was stoned and urinated on by the villagers.

One month later, somewhere near the Gulf of Tonkin, Captain Terry Jones had survived the destruction of his F-4 phantom by a surface-to-air missile, ejecting only after trying every emergency procedure to regain control of his plane.  Floating through the Vietnamese sky, he knew his only injury was a cut on his arm, but he was terrified nonetheless.  Beneath him, excited villagers and militiamen were gathering in a rice paddy and were shouting and pointing violently.  Some brandished sticks and machetes; others wielded guns and they were pointed directly at him.

Six weeks later, Terry Jones was in a bamboo cage in the jungle lying on his stomach with his feet in wooden stocks, his arms tied behind him with wet ropes.  Following this tortuous confinement, he was taken to a temple in a village and turned over to a North Vietnamese officer.  The man had with him another American pilot who looked close to death.  He was heavily bearded and emaciated.  From there the two prisoners continued their march by night through the jungles and villages of North Vietnam.  Their final destination was Hanoi.

Thus Jeff Powell and Terry Jones, and many others like them, came together to a place the America airmen called the Hanoi Hilton.  It was a triangular building the size of a city block, surrounded by a dry moat and twenty-foot walls studded with sharp hunks of glass and topped with electric barbed wire.  Upon arrival, the two pilots heard a prisoner in solitary confinement from a cellblock called Heartbreak screaming at the top of his lungs, “Oh, God!  Oh, God!  Oh, my God!”  The captive American had been bent over backwards and tied so tight that his spine threatened to snap like a dry stick at any moment because he would not give his captors information beyond his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth.  Jeff Powell and Terry Jones both went through Heartbreak.  Every prisoner did upon their arrival at the Hilton.

Major James Kasler arrived at the Hanoi Hilton with a broken thighbone sticking into his groin.  He was beaten from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, each hour, for days on end.  His head was smashed and his buttocks ripped to shreds with fan belts.  His mouth was so badly bruised that he could not open it.  One of his eardrums was ruptured.  But Kasler found that when he recited the Lord’s Prayer, concentrating intently upon the words, he was able to block out the pain of his beatings and torture.

Captain James Ray, shot down on Mother’s Day, 1966, had been in solitary confinement for two years.  Each day’s menu consisted of two servings of pumpkin soup with a lump of pig fat in it.  He shared his cell with an army of ants, mosquitoes, and flies.  It would have been easy to lose his faith and his mind, but often and mysteriously, he would feel a presence from another world.  He felt he was not alone.  It was two years later that he learned his family and church were praying for him back home in Texas at the precise time he would feel this unexplained presence.

All the prisoners at the Hilton endured torture, seclusion, loneliness, depression, and a strict regiment of rules over a four-year period.  In their isolation, yet shared suffering, they developed a method of communication.  A language was created based on the Morse code.  With their ears to the walls and their bodies wrapped in blankets to keep the noise level down, the prisoners communicated by tapping on the concrete dividers.  The alphabet was translated into a 5X5 dot matrix in which each letter was represented by the placement of vertical and horizontal wall taps.  Once a prisoner knew the code, he was connected to his fellow prisoners.

Via this network, the men taught each other Scripture.  They also discovered the names of their comrades and learned about each other’s lives and families.  Through this method, they ascertained who was being tortured and who was deathly ill.  In this way they shared each other’s pain and could pray for one another and support each other in an environment where they could not see or touch.

Eventually church services and prayer meetings were conducted through this acquired means of communication.  The men learned to time the guard’s perambulations through the prison.  When the patrols were out of reach, the tapping began.  When the sentinels were close, the tapping ceased.  Every Sunday morning, the senior officers thumped on the wall five times at the appropriate moment.  This alerted the prisoners that it was time to worship.  The signal was “church call” and it was the highlight of each week for the prisoners.  It was the one moment they looked forward to in a world of chaos, torment, and anguish.

The service would begin with the tapping of a prayer and upon its conclusion each man would recite to himself the Lord’s Prayer or the 23^rd Psalm.  These portions of Scripture were recounted from memory – there was no Bible in the prison during these years – and taught during the week and passed from one prisoner to another via the rapping conduit.  Following the Scripture reading, the prisoners would sing silent hymns and conduct private prayers.  After the reflective worship, the sermon would be preached.  Then the service was brought to conclusion with the singing of the Doxology followed by a prisoner tapping the closing prayer.  The services took the majority of the day to complete.

In November of 1970, conditions improved somewhat.  After an unsuccessful American rescue attempt, the North Vietnamese decided for security reasons to move POW’s from other prison camps to the Hanoi Hilton.  To make room for the influx, new cells were partitioned off; men were finally moved out of solitary confinement and into large, open cells that could accommodate up to sixty prisoners.  For the first time in four years, the prisoners could finally see each other and talk face to face.  No longer was the tapping language needed.  Now they could finally worship God together in one place.

For years the prisoners had asked for a Bible, and for years their request was denied.  Then in December of 1970, one month after they were united, the English-speaking interrogator brought a Bible into the cell and the men gathered around it and for a moment they stood in stunned silence.  Then they began to weep.  In front of them was the written Word of God, the source of all hope, of all life, of all power.  Jeff Powell was the first to pick it up and through his tears read the Christmas story aloud, then several Psalms, then the Sermon on the Mount.  The men were not sure how long they would have the Bible or whether they would ever see it again, so James Ray turned to 1 Corinthians 13 and memorized the chapter.  The Bible was in the cell for two hours.

In the spring of 1971, some four months later, the prisoners saw the Bible again.  The North Vietnamese permitted three prisoners to copy the Scriptures for one hour a week under direct supervision.  James Ray was one of the three.  He sat on a wooden chair at a wooden table and with a guard at his side began copying the Sermon on the Mount.  During the five weeks the program lasted he managed to copy much more than Jesus’ most famous sermon.  Each day when he brought the precious words back to the cell, Ray’s cellmates recopied the words in the crude fashion they had devised for other writing: on toilet paper rations with brick dust ink and quill pens.  They recopied the verses because each week Ray had to return his previous week’s copy before he could transcribe more.

Eventually, on the condition that the prisoners follow an approved format, the North Vietnamese allowed as many as thirty men at a time to meet together for formal church services.  More often than not, these services would be interrupted and the men would be thrust back into their cells.  However, on one occasion they were able to worship uninterrupted and with no overseer monitoring their every word and action.  And this unexpected liberty allowed the prisoners to experience a service they would never forget.

Captain Tom Curtis woke up early on Easter Sunday, 1971 and studied the notes and verses that he and James Ray had assembled the previous evening.  Curtis looked at the roomful of sleeping prisoners around him.  Twenty-eight men.  All of them pilots.  How had they managed to survive in this place?

At about ten o’clock Curtis stood in front of the drab eastern wall and called the service to order.  Several of the men limped while getting up.  Others writhed in pain as they struggled to take a seat in the semi circle near the Captain.  Once each captive flyer was in place, a quartet of prisoners sang The Old Rugged Cross and then everyone joined in Amazing Grace.  Curtis recited the version of the Passion of Christ that the men had patched together from somewhat faulty memories, “And when they had bound Him, they led Him away and delivered Him to Pontus Pilate.  And they stripped Him and put a crown of thorns on His head, and spit on Him and hit Him.  And they said, ‘Crucify Him.’”  As he listened to the familiar words, Curtis thought of the experiences they had all shared: being bound, chained, spit upon, whipped, lashed to trees, and stoned.

One of the airmen then handed the Captain several pieces of bread that had been saved from their previous day’s rations.  “And He took the bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to His disciples saying, ‘Take, eat.  This is My body that is broken for you, do this in remembrance of Me.’ ”  The bread was passed and quietly eaten.  Then Curtis repeated the verses about the cup – “This is My blood shed for you.”  These men know about blood, Curtis thought.  Their own blood flowing from open wounds, from lacerations and ruptured eardrums, from torn out fingernails – blood that seeped through every makeshift bandage swathing their frail bodies.  Now they all thought about Christ’s blood, shed for them.

The cup of carefully saved seaweed soup was passed.  Someone quietly hummed Amazing Grace.  As Curtis brought the cup to his lips, he trembled and began to weep.  He wondered if they had any right to identify their suffering with Christ’s.  But then wasn’t their presence in this place, alive against all odds, a sign of Christ’s continuing presence with them?  Suddenly he recalled Jesus’ words, “I will build My church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”  They were part of that church, a part of the broken body of Christ in every way.  Yes, the church had prevailed, for here they were, worshipping God in the jungles of a world gone mad.  Against all odds, God’s presence was alive in what was otherwise a living hell.

This story was adapted from “Loving God” by Charles Colson.

On Commitment

 

Some years back, I found myself in a beautifully preserved medieval city in the country of my birth, Germany.  Dating back to the year 950, Rothenburg is the oldest walled city in the Fatherland and lies in the charming Franconian region of the state of Bavaria.  The city sits at the crossroads of two of the most breathtaking and scenic thoroughfares of Europe, which wind their way through central and southern Germany ­– the Romantic Road and the Road of Castles.

On this particular trip, I arrived in the city with some friends following a long flight from the United States.  We landed in Frankfurt and were driving to my family home in Northern Bavaria.  On the way, we stopped in Rothenburg so I could give my companions a quick tour of the famed city that served as a backdrop in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Wandering the cobblestone streets, we were invited by a local acquaintance to visit an English Speaking Club to converse with erstwhile German soldiers who fought in World War II.  The Club meeting was held in a traditional German Kneipe somewhat hidden in the town walls.  Entering the ancient pub was a tight squeeze through a narrow passageway.  Once inside, the skinny corridor gave way to an old-world watering hole filled with antiquated furnishings and historical artifacts.  For the next few hours, I sat at a quaint wooden table surrounded by steins of beer and German veterans who survived not only the Great War, but also Hitler's Nazi regime.

As I probed the astonishing memories of these war heroes, they shared their riveting stories.  Their fascinating accounts of the conflict were told from a perspective somewhat counter to American versions.  Each narrative was filled with sensory details covering known histories stretching from the Normandy invasion, crossing the Battle of the Bulge, extending to the icy conditions of the Russian front, which ultimately derailed Hitler from conquering the world.  With each tale, a picture came together revealing a notable and significant veracity of life: Commitment through difficult times prepares our lives in advance for a fulfillment of life that is only experienced in reverse.

Throughout the world, human relationships either unravel or solidify in times of hardship and crisis.  These connections are the one constant that brings our lives enduring meaning and purpose.  Never was this clearer to me than in listening to these aged veterans open up about personal details of their lives.  Laced through the chronicles of their struggles were romantic tales of love found in a time of war.  There were inspiring stories of marriages surviving the unimaginable and hopeful sagas displaying the finest traits found in the human spirit.  I saw that not one of these men would choose to live his life differently even given the opportunity.  They seemed to possess a depth and quality of life rarely seen today that allowed them to look back over the years and recall difficult and tumultuous times with a touch of nostalgia. They had obviously lived lives that were rewarding and gratifying.

On another occasion, I spent a week with my German grandmother in her home.  One evening, she opened up about her life and shared some aspects of living in Berlin during the war.  She spoke fondly of hardships and joyfully told me about the period she was pregnant with my mother and trudged daily through the rubble and wreckage of greater Berlin to reach the munitions factory where she worked.  In sentimental detail, she spoke of life in the German capital during the unending months Allied planes swarmed the city and unleashed hordes of bombs in an attempt to bring the Third Reich to its knees.  At one point, her eyes moistened as she said, "Those were very difficult days but they were some of the happiest of my life."  Her words brought to mind something I read previously: Over sixty percent of Londoners who survived the Blitz when the German Luftwaffe utterly destroyed the city remember that time as the happiest of their lives.  Somehow a new spirit of life sprang up to eclipse the horror of the bombs in London.  In reverse, British citizens discovered a nirvana of life in a time of uncertainty and difficulty – one not seen during the years of struggle.  Commitment birthed that nirvana.

As one who is fascinated by world and biblical history, I have read and heard so many versions of the same story.  The names, faces, eras, and places change.  The dramatic details differ, but the storyline is the same.  Difficult times help nourish belief and strengthen bonds, preparing the way for a fulfillment and gratification of life that is difficult to find elsewhere.  Such a notion defies all logic and common sense.  But crisis, pain, hardship, and conflict lead to a quality and happiness of life that is not seen in advance but is experienced in reverse.  Commitment delivers this great reversal to our lives.

A crisis helps to unearth the foundation on which we construct our lives.  Difficult times drive us away from the temptations of a self-absorbed life, leading us back to dependence on God and community.  We start paying attention to actual human needs instead of falling for the illusions of a superficial culture.  In today’s affluent world, much of life is spent trying to avoid difficulty and stringent commitment, thus the high rate of divorce, and thus a culture that abounds with selfishness and an unhealthy focus on pleasure and instant gratification.  Oftentimes, our selfish pursuits call for us to abandon our commitments, especially in times of hardship.  We lose sight of what might become, of the rewards and gratification that await those who stand firm through the difficulty.  Every crisis, no matter how difficult, comes back to bless our lives if we face our fate with courage and commitment.  There is no conflict we can endure that will not produce a blessing.  It hurts when we go through such experiences and times.  However, somewhere in the future we will appreciate and value the trying episodes.  They will bring richness to our lives.

Difficulty enables God to act in our lives.  It places our reliance square in his hands.  We must do our best to not shrink from attributes of commitment in such times.  When we concede, we only rob our lives of remarkable demonstrations of God's intervention.  We hinder God's ability to unleash the miraculous.  This principle is reflected through the historical events and inspiring stories found in the book of Daniel.  Israel and Judah had been overrun by the Babylonian Empire.  The majority of their citizens were exiled to Babylon.  In the midst of the chaos, most of the gifted young men were brought to the King's palace to undergo rigorous indoctrination in the Babylonian ways.  Four of them, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah refused to abandon their loyalty and commitment to God during these long years of captivity.  At no point did they compromise their beliefs.  Their acts of commitment brought great favor and blessing; they also created unfathomable moments of crisis and conflict.  And in the crisis, they clung to God and to one another.  As a result, some of the most astonishing miracles in history took place.  Could it be that we miss out on the miraculous acts of God in our era, in our lives, because we walk away from our commitments too soon?

Commitment should be an absolute, not provisional.  When we make commitments, most of us do not make them with the intent to break them.  For the most part, we intend to honor our commitments with sincerity and determination.  We are aware they bind us to God and to one another and connect us to a quality of life to come.  So why then do we sometimes stray from commitments we make?  Is it possible that most of our commitments are made in times of sunshine and then suddenly, out of nowhere, the storms of life arrive, placing enormous pressure on our commitments to unravel?

Storms of life have a way of ravishing our hearts.  There are emotions and situations and tensions a human being feels in his life but can't always explain.  The truth is, oftentimes there are thousands of steps, and sometimes we don't even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take those steps; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are fluid and always changing.  Confusion easily sets in and clouds the picture in the window of our minds.  Blue skies are swept away.  Like a violent tornado that rips through a city, foundations are unearthed, walls to protect are torn down.  Fierce winds of life unexpectedly blow conflict and crisis into our world.  The landscape of our lives is abruptly and swiftly altered.  And in such moments, like Adam, we want to run, we want to hide, we want to avoid the conflict, the chaos, the crisis.  We believe we can take things into our own hands and fix our lives quickly with a few steps.  Absent of commitment, I don't believe we can.

Every person's life, every marriage, every relationship has crisis times, moments of truth when one person is tempted to give up.  Committed individuals, committed relationships survive these moments.  Crisis and conflict, pain and hardship, temptation and failure convince many to walk away.  These dramatic intrusions cloud our reason and judgment, often blinding us from seeing that great relationships take form when they are stretched to the breaking point and do not break.  The deepest strength and deepest love come only through testing.  Yes, we can leave.  We can walk away.  We will find new and fresh love somewhere else.  But just like our current relationship, that newness and freshness will fade.  Conflict and problems will arise.  And then what?  When we walk away, when we give up, we abandon a rewarding and gratifying life that awaits, one we can't imagine or recognize when our spirits are wounded.  Commitment cultivates in us a depth and breadth of love a couple enjoys on their silver anniversary, not on their honeymoon. 

As I write, I write to myself.  I have abandoned commitments made in my life.  I know all too well the curse and pain of divorce, of a life separated from God.  More than most, I carry the shame and pain of such failure in my spirit every day.  Though I have awakened to God's forgiveness and accepted his love and healing, this does not erase the consequences of my choices.  It does not always restore what has been lost, what has been squandered.

It's an odd feeling to be awakened from a life weakened by selective commitment.  I stand there looking in the mirror and my spirit gets an eerie feeling, as though it were haunted by a kind of nothingness, a void of something that could have been, an absence of people who should be by my side.  I hear the voices of children and feel the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen and to spend time with her and to love her for her.  I feel at once the absent glory of a life that should have been.  And then, a Voice arises from somewhere within making me understand that commitment is action, it's standing in the storms of life, not running for fields of ease and pleasure to avoid them.  The Voice tells me God comes to the side of the committed and though the past cannot be erased, the blessing of a future filled with promise is not stamped out.  For under divine inspiration, the Chronicler penned these remarkable words "The eyes of the Lord search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him."  Commitment will bring life new realities as we allow God to lead us through our failures toward renewal.  One's past does not need to be his future.

Hardship, difficulty, conflict, crisis, as absurd as it sounds, point to a better experience where fulfillment comes.  God allows troubling times to take place in order to achieve some greater goal.  We are designed to live through something rather than attain something.  Commitment, then, if one has faith in something bigger than oneself, is the path to experiencing a meaning beyond the false gratification often found in our present world.  It prepares our lives to inherit the blessings of the Greater Goal.

When we look back on the life we lived, what we will remember are the stands we took, the times we worked hard to make the world a better place, the sacrifices we made for others.  Such acts spring from committed lives. This is what I heard and saw in the stories of the German veterans I met.  Their lives did not reflect inflexible determination but rather spontaneity and joy.  By investing their freedom in commitment, they secured a deeper freedom for their lives.  How brightly a story of commitment shines.  There is something beautiful that comes to those who pursue a committed life.

Scripture quoted - 2 Chronicles 16:9