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May 24, 2017May 24, 2017

When Money, Fame, and Admiration Aren’t Enough

A normal night in the Smucker household. Catch all our normal moments at my Instagram account: @shawnsmucker — A normal night in the Smucker household. Can you find Poppy? Catch all our normal moments at my Instagram account: @shawnsmucker

This post comes to you from the carpeted floor in the bedroom shared by Sam and Leo on the second floor of our row home in Lancaster, PA. The fan is going, because what kind of alien sleeps without the soothing lullaby-hum of a fan? Even though it’s almost 8:30pm, pale sunlight still glows in eerie lines through the blinds. Sam is fast asleep on the floor beside me – he always wants to sleep on the floor. Leo, on the other hand, is turning in his bed, making counter-clockwise journeys so that his head is periodically on his pillow, then the bedside, then at the foot of his bed. And so on. And so forth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this little book I have coming out on September 5th, nearly three months from now. If you hang out with me on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, you’ve probably heard me talk about it, and I’m sorry if it’s getting repetitive, but it means so much to me, this little book, so I hope you’ll hang in there with me for just a little while longer. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to release a book into the world; actually, I’ve been thinking about what it means to do anything that feels meaningful, whether it’s releasing a book or starting a business or growing a church or raising children.

Mostly I’ve been asking myself, What do I hope to gain from sending this book into the world? I’m not always thrilled with the answers I give myself. Such as, “A bestseller that will make us filthy rich.” Such as, “Fame beyond my wildest dreams.” Such as, “Confirmation that I’m a wonderful writer and everyone in the world secretly admires me.”

I’m afraid there are many of us out there doing things in the hope that this one meaningful thing we do will somehow drastically change our station in life, that it will swoop down and rescue us from our loneliness or our indebtedness or our failures. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I’ve been thinking that money and fame and admiration must not be that great because you don’t see all movie stars walking around on cloud nine living wonderfully happy lives. Most wealthy people I personally know have all the same problems I do. Well, different in the leaves, but same in the root.

So, it would seem there is something deeper, some kind of bone-marrow-depth joy that money and fame and admiration only encase. Something that must be cracked into, split open. Something that must be sought.

I wonder: What lies on the other side of all those things I think I want?

The flipside of a financial windfall could be, perhaps, something that has no real affect on me financially in the least.

The opposite of fame could be, perhaps, anonymity.

The opposite of affirmation could be, perhaps, indifference.

Could this be the way to real joy? Not financial excess, but simply having enough? The freedom of creating anonymously? Walking through life without being judged as either enough or lacking?

I feel like I’m rambling.

* * * * *

Leo does another slow spinning lap in his bed, and I can hear him sucking on his finger, which means he is nearly asleep. I can see Maile in our neighboring bedroom, lying on her side of the bed, light on, reading. The lines on the blind are nearly invisible as the alley darkens.

These are the regular moments. These are the moments a life is made of.

* * * * *

I have a little book coming out September 5th. Maybe you’ve heard me mention it? I will work hard to promote it. I will try hard to get the word out. I want to sell copies. I want it to do well.

But as the date draws ever closer, I am pressing in close to the hope of new ideals. The blessing of just enough. The freedom of anonymity. The weightlessness of not being judged. With them, I know I can go on creating, go on writing, go on doing what I’ve been made to do. Money, fame, and accolades are moving targets that draw us ever further from who we really are.

I take a deep breath, suddenly realizing I am already where I want to be. Maile turns out her light. Leo is asleep. The night is upon us.

* * * * *

Despite my new ideals, I’d still really love you to read my upcoming novel, The Day the Angels Fell.

Here are the places you can preorder it:

Aaron’s Books in Lititz, PA: 717-627-1990
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
ChristianBooks

May 23, 2017

Where He Was Going at 11pm #RideshareConfessional

I pull into the parking lot of the pizza shop in the heart of a local college town. The streets are dark. The shop is almost empty. It’s nearly 11pm.

A college-age kid knocks on the window, opens the door, throws a backpack into the back seat.

“Can I go in and grab something real quick?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, starting the clock.

He comes out five minutes later, carrying a bag of food. His destination is 45 minutes away, east, towards Philly.

“You always make this trek?” I ask him.

“Naw,” he says. “But my girl lives over this way. Now I got to go to work. Night shift. Stocking shelves. But it’s good money, man.”

“You sound exhausted,” I say, laughing. “You should probably grab a snooze.”

“Yeah, man,” he says with a wry grin. “Not a bad idea.”

In the rear view mirror, I see him lean his head against the glass. I try to avoid the bumps. He sleeps. 30 minutes later he reaches down and eats a solitary piece of pizza, slurps down a soda through the straw. The streetlights flash on both of us. The headlights of oncoming cars glide over us. The world is a strange thing. He falls back to sleep.

I pull into his place of work. He gets out. I park. I go inside and grab a box of Apple Jacks and eat most of it during the 45-minute drive home. It’s no communion bread, but, Allelujah, it’s the fifth week of Easter and it’s good.

May 17, 2017May 23, 2017

This is the Next Generation #RideshareConfessional

The kid gets into the car. I pick him up from an orthodontist outside the city. Traffic is heavy and the weekend is close.

“No, man,” he says into his phone. “What about Coby? We have to invite him.”

He is quiet, listening to protests on the other end of the line. I glance at him in the rear view. He’s a handsome kid and carries himself with an air of self-confidence.

“What do you mean, his handicap?” he says, grinning, but not the kind of grin that is amused. “You mean he can’t run fast?”

We drive past other cars, under bridges, into the city.

“Oh,” he smiles. “You mean his seizures? C’mon man.”

The smile has moved into his voice, but there’s also no backing down. It’s the sound of someone who is willing to be patient but knows you will come around to their way of seeing things eventually.

“No, invite him. I’ve got Coby’s back. He’s good.”

A pause.

“Okay, cool. See you tonight.”

A simple conversation, but it struck me. We hear so much about bullying these days, and it’s a serious problem, and we need to face it and stop it. But there are also really good kids out there, standing up for those on the outside. I’ve driven some of them. They give me hope for our future.

May 16, 2017May 15, 2017

Now, Courage Looks Like This

There are days when inspiration drips from the corners of my mind, when ideas crowd around and argue about which one came first, when I can type and type and type and the words just keep flowing.

And then there are these still days, slow days when I keep looking over at my bookshelves and thinking about how many stories there are in the world already. How many words. What could I possibly have to add to all of those chapters, all of those covers, all of those sentences? Hasn’t it all been said already?

* * * * *

I think a lot about what it means to be called to do something, what it means to take something on not just for a season but for a lifetime.

“But everything has its season,” they say. “Everything has its time.”

I wonder. I wonder if anything worth doing can be done in less than a lifetime.

* * * * *

This has been a slow spring, the kind of spring where the writing oozes like sap. There are no running taps here – just a quiet, barely discernible gathering. If you wait long enough a drop forms, coming out through a break in the bark. And even when the drop is fully formed, it doesn’t run or glide or slip. Or even drip. No, it simply hovers and waits.

And there it is, the word. The word that has always confounded me, the word that I’m realizing might be my nemesis.

Wait.

* * * * *

It is 4:30pm and I need to leave the sanctuary of my study. The words were few today. Now I will go down the steps and quiet arguing children, throw Leo into the air until he giggles, kiss Poppy’s plump cheeks. I will try to help with dinner or picking up around the house. Later, we will take two children to soccer practice and sit in the green grass and try to gather the energy to talk to our community, gathered there, watching our children run and kick a ball.

Just before I walk out of my office I stare at the framed quote my friend gave me, years ago now, one of my favorites.

“If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.” So said the character Owen Meany in the John Irving book.

You know, for many years I saw courage as an explosive, powerful force, something made of shields and swords and armor. Storming castles. Once more into the breach and all that. But now, I wonder. I think the courage I need looks more like quietly continuing on, even when the waiting feels interminable, even when the waiting seems to have bested me.

Courage is a quieter thing than I ever imagined.

May 15, 2017May 15, 2017

When the Taxi Driver Asked Me if I’d Seen the Movie About the Taxi Driver Killing Everyone

A bizarre thing can happen at night when I get called out to a strange area, drop that person off, then get another call 15 or 20 minutes further away from home, take that person to their destination, and then get another call. Sometimes, I completely lose track of exactly where I am.

This happened a few weeks ago. I drove someone west, out of Lancaster, picked up my next customer and drove them a little further west, and ended with a call north of that, somewhere along the Susquehanna River. By then, I had no idea where I was. I pulled into a train station that looked deserted. I circled the parking lot once before spotting a man sitting alone on a bench. A misty rain had begun to fall. It was cold, and after midnight. The place was empty. It all felt rather strange.

He crawled into the car, swearing quietly under his breath about the weather. His destination was thirty minutes away, which was good and bad. Good, because that’s a nice fare. Bad, because, well, it was after midnight, his destination was in the opposite direction from my house, and I’d have about an hour drive home after I dropped him off. But there we went, driving north, into the cold and the rain that fell harder, and the darkness.

He was very eccentric. He told me about the five children he had with three different ladies, repeating that fact over and over again, then marveled at the fact that I have six children who share the same mother. He explained his job to me, how part of it was traveling home on his own dime from faraway destinations, how he used to drive a taxi in a previous life. Then he asked me a question that caused an eerie feeling to settle into my stomach.

“Did you ever see the movie Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro?” he asked at one point.

“No,” I said. “Can’t say I have.”

“It’s about a crazy taxi driver who ends up killing everyone,” he said, chuckling to himself, leaning up in between the front seats to tell me more. I was suddenly very aware of the man’s hot breath, the sound of phlegm in his throat.

There I was, in the middle of absolute nowhere, driving someone who seemed a little off kilter and was suddenly asking me if I saw the movie of the crazy taxi driver who killed people, oh and by the way he used to be a taxi driver.

I dropped him off at his truck which was parked on a side street in the middle of nowhere. The rain let up for a moment. He smiled and got out.

May 11, 2017May 11, 2017

The Autistic Iraqi Boy in the Hospital Bed, and the Song He Sang – The Iraq Journals, Part 4

I sat on a small stool in between two hospital beds. There were maybe twelve beds in the boys’ hospital ward, which was actually a sturdy, huge, permanent tent. The tent was in the middle of an open-air trauma hospital surrounded by 12-foot-high cement blast walls topped with razor wire. Beyond that? More layers of blast walls and fences and trenches, the makings of a high security prison, only this place was trying to keep people out, not in. Just beyond the fence were the suburbs outside of east Mosul. The air was cool, with a slight breeze, and the sky was slate gray.

Later, I spoke with one of the directors of the hospital, set up and installed by Samaritan’s Purse at the beginning of 2017. She said that a few weeks before we arrived, there had been a suicide car bomb along with a few other incidents in Mosul, all in the same night. Dozens of casualties had arrived at the hospital, so many that the entire staff, even those supposed to be sleeping, were called in. Still, there were not enough people, so non-medical staff were called in to help. Their job?

To sit with the dying.

She said she sat there in the midst of all those beds, each bed holding a person who could not be saved, and she sang and she prayed and she waited while each and every person took their last breath.

This is what some people on this planet are doing. While I worry about where my next paycheck will come from or complain about the temperature of my latte, there are people in northern Iraq, accomplished, talented, dedicated people who could have high-paying corporate jobs but instead choose to go to the ends of the Earth and sit with strangers while they die.

This is the ministry of presence. This is what I learned about during our trip to northern Iraq.

* * * * *

I’ll be honest: I felt very out of place there in the hospital. The doctors and nurses scurried here and there, from tent to tent, all with such purpose. We tried to stay out of the way. There were three, state-of-the-art operating rooms, a women and children’s area, an entire section where the staff lived and ate (no one left the hospital unless it was to travel back to Erbil), and a men’s section completely cordoned off with its own blast walls – any male between the ages of 15 and 50 who came to the hospital without ID was placed in that section until they could be positively ID’d as anyone other than ISIS.

And there I sat. Quiet. Not speaking the same language as the children I hoped to comfort. Feeling very inadequate. Learning about the ministry of presence.

Beside me, the boy began to moan. He pulled the blanket up over his head, arched his back, and let out a long, low groaning that seemed to emanate from his soul and have no end. I looked around urgently – why wasn’t someone helping him? He seemed to be in a lot of pain. An older man came over to the bed and scolded him, shushed him. I looked over at the nurse.

“He’s autistic,” she explained. “That’s the boy’s uncle. His father is in the men’s ward until he can be ID’d.”

One of the girls who worked in the hospital grabbed Murray’s guitar and sat down beside the autistic boy. She started strumming chords, three or four different ones, creating a simple, steady melody. The other boys in the room, most of whom had broken arms or bandaged fingers, clapped their hands together gingerly and smiled. The boy beside me, the boy who had been moaning, peeked out from under the blanket. His dark eyes unblinking. His mouth closed and silent. She kept playing. He watched her fingers.

Then he started to sing.

His voice was mystical, magical, in the way Arabic singing is. It was like the sound of a different era. It was like his voice was coming to us from a thousand years ago, through narrow city streets and over boulder-covered mountains. And, remarkably, his singing was in perfect pitch, perfect rhythm. Our friend kept strumming, and he kept singing, the words wavering out to us like an apology, or the offer of friendship.

Someone asked the interpreter what he was singing. She smiled a sad smile.

“He is singing a lullaby to his mother,” she said softly. “His mother who is now dead.”

I traveled to Northern Iraq with a group called Reload Love. They take spent bullet casings, melt them down, and turn them into jewelry to raise awareness and money to support children impacted by terror. They send aid to in-country partners that have expertise in rescuing children from harm’s way and provide much needed assistance, including relief supplies, children’s programs, and safe spaces such as playgrounds. Reload Love is doing incredible work. You can find out more about them, as well as check out their beautiful line of jewelry, here.