Posted on

One of the Saddest Moments of My Childhood (or, My Conflicted Relationship With Sports)

IMG_0419

It was one of the saddest moments of my childhood, and it happened on a warm summer evening. I was laying on the sofa with my dad and we were watching baseball. He was tired from a long day at work and was drifting in and out of sleep. The air was muggy and warm. I don’t know where everyone else was in the house.

“When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?” I asked him, staring at his face, his closed eyes, his straight mouth. I probably thought he looked old. He was probably younger than I am now.

“Dad?” I asked again.

“Yeah?” he said in a sleepy voice.

“I said, ‘What did you want to be when you grew up’?”

“I always wanted to play baseball in the Major Leagues,” he said in a quiet voice. “I wanted to play center field.”

“Really?” I asked. The thought of my father wanting to do something other than what he was doing upended me, as if I was on a boat and someone had pulled down on one side. The world tilted on its axis.

He nodded, somewhere between being awake and sleeping.

“Yeah. Always baseball.”

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking about my own conflicted past when it comes to sports, especially now that I have children old enough to want to play in some of our local community leagues. On the one hand, I love sports. I feel like sports taught me a lot about myself, a lot about perseverance and teamwork and pushing beyond surface levels of comfort. When I had to run a five-minute mile or when I got benched or when I scored a goal – all of these things changed me, gave me insight.

On the other hand, I hate sports, especially what they have become these days. What happened to just showing up and playing and having fun? These days it seems like you can’t be a 12-year-old and just play a sport unless you’re striving to be on a travel team so that you can position yourself well for a club team so that you can get a scholarship to college so that you can play professionally and hey hold on a second what happened to just playing and having fun?

I’m realizing with my oldest son right now, I have two major pitfalls when it comes to him playing sports.

First of all, I want to guard him from any disappointment. I know what it felt like to be the star of the team, and I know what it felt like to get cut, and I hated the latter. I find myself heading him off at the pass, discouraging him in subtle ways from trying certain sports or activities because I don’t want him to experience the disappointment of rejection. That’s not okay. If there’s something he wants to do, I want him to try – the possibility of failure will always be there, and I want him to come to grips with that now, when he’s young. Fail and learn about yourself and try again and fail and learn more and  try again. That’s life.

Second of all, I take his performance way too personally. I went through some challenging times playing sports, especially in college, where I got upset about not playing as much as I thought I should. Now, when he gets pulled to the sideline, I feel my blood pressure rising. It’s like I’m back there again, getting pulled off the field, or on the sideline waiting to play. I have to separate my playing experience from his playing experience.

This article put things into perspective: The Only Six Words Parents Need to Say to their Kids About Sports (Or Any Other Performance).

Here’s the spoiler. The six words we need to say to our kids?

“I love to watch you play.”

* * * * *

On that summer night when I had the saddest realization, Dad fell asleep for good, and I was left staring at the television, watching Major League players live out their dream. I was heartbroken, because that’s exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up, and to think that my dad had wanted it as badly as I wanted it and hadn’t made it…I felt so sad for him in that moment. I didn’t move. I stayed there and watched the rest of the game, his arm draped over me, his steady breathing like a metronome behind me.

I think we bond together in our common failures more than we do in our uncommon successes. Maybe that’s what I have to look forward to with my son, even in his failures. We’ll get through it together, and we’ll be closer because of it. We’ll walk off a field someday, or a court, or away from a recital, and he’ll know his time in that activity has come to an end, and I’ll remember that feeling, what it felt like when something I enjoyed was over.

Maybe that will be what bonds us together. I’m okay with that.

In the mean time, I’m going to encourage him to try the things he wants to try, and when he comes off the field my first words will not be suggestions for improvement or a list of things he needs to work on. I want to always say,

“I love to watch you play.”

Posted on

The Problem With Wanting to do Big Things

940144507_bffa8dd93d_z
Last week, when I was waking up, I sent out a lot of emails to organizations working with refugees overseas and offered my services. I envisioned flying into faraway cities, handing out food to starving children, perhaps even running from machine gun fire. You know. I’m pretty fast.

The Big Things. I imagined doing all the Big Things.

Then I got an email from one of the organizations. Could I help them put together some web copy for their blog?

Web copy. For their blog. This was not a Big Thing. This was definitely a Little Thing. It would probably take me 30 minutes. I did it, and I was left considering the difference between Big Things and Little Things.

* * * * *

The Little Things.

It’s easy for me to forget about the years and years when my only writing was in my own journal. I started around 8th grade, then starting writing on a daily basis during my freshman year in college, when I was 18 years old. That was in 1995, and I was plowed over by the realization that I could write whatever I wanted, that I could tell stories that freed myself and others. I became addicted to words.

For the next eleven years I dreamed of Big Things…but I did Little Things. I wanted to write the Great American Novel, the Poem That Would Be Remembered. Instead, I wrote a page in my journal everyday. Many of those weekends I spent writing short stories. I read hundreds of books, and those words, those various ways of writing, all sunk into my mind. Little Things, over and over, every day.

It felt so inadequate compared to what I wanted to be doing, what I wanted to be writing. It felt like such small preparation, like I wasn’t really accomplishing much besides preserving some memories for posterity. But all of those little things added up. Over the course of those eleven years, consistently writing every day, I’d guess that I wrote around 1,500,000 words. I read 30 books a year, on average, and if each book was of average length, that means I read nearly 20,000,000 words in those eleven years.

We have to be willing to do the Little Things, even when we can’t see how they’re connected to the Big Things. We have to be willing to give those Little Things enough time and space to add up, to become significant. We want to hit it big today. We want to be the next American Idol, this evening. We want to be snatched up from our current situation and dropped into wealth and fame.

Eleven years after I started keeping a journal on a regular basis, I was contacted by the publishing house Thomas Nelson. They offered me the chance to write a book. Suddenly all the Little Things I had done for the previous decade made sense. Suddenly I realized the Little Things were transforming into Bigger Things.

Keep doing the little things, every day. They add up.

* * * * *

I don’t know where these little ways of waking up will lead me or our family. But we’re going to keep doing them. Little Things, every chance we get.

Posted on

What It Feels Like To Wake Up

breathing

She creeps into our room, wheezing, barely able to breathe, but she does not come to the bedside to complain. No, I had given strict orders the night before that mom needs her sleep so if you come to our room please curl up on the floor under the blankets provided. I wait a moment, but it sounds bad, her breathing, so I slip through the darkness and stretch out on the floor beside her.

I count her breaths. Forty per minute. Her heart is racing, her throat pulling in with all its might, but the air, it won’t go in. She struggled again and again to catch her breath.

“Are you okay?” I whisper in her ear.

She nods.

“Should we go outside to see if that helps your breathing?”

She nods.

I wrap her in a blanket and lift her, light as a blossom, and carry her down the stairs, out the front door and on to the porch that looks over James Street. It’s strange to be there in the middle of the night without any cars, without any people. The street lights shine steadily, the wind rises in a clatter of leaves and paper in the gutter, then dies down. It’s cold for a May night. We sit on the chair and I wonder where the time goes.

The cool air does not help like I hoped it would, like it did when she had the croup and we sat on the back deck in the dead of winter, our breath rising in one steaming cloud. The spring air does not help, so after five minutes or ten – it’s so hard to tell in the middle of the night, when sleep is heavy – I carry her back up to the room and soon it’s 6am and Maile is leaving for work and Abra is in the bed with me, sitting up, still struggling to catch her breath.

The urgent care clinic doesn’t open until 8 so we try to wait it out but I can see she is beginning to panic, such a slow drowning, so we get in the truck and Maile comes back from work and I drop the two of them off at the ER two blocks away. I watch Maile carry her in through the doors that open automatically, like a sea. I watch and I take a deep breath.

* * * * *

It’s always the breathing isn’t it? It all comes back to the rising and falling of a chest, the drawing in of air, the expanding of lungs. It’s the first sign of life when we’re born and the last thing to go. I remember when each of our five children was born, and we waited the agonizing second to hear their scream, their breathing. I remember when my grandmother was dying. Her eyes were closed, her body still, and yet the breathing went on. Sometimes she wouldn’t breathe for 30 seconds, 60, 90, then her lungs would open up one more time, sip it in, take only what was needed. She carried on for days that way, the bare minimum. Only breathing.

Life is in the breath.

I’m breathing again. It comes with waking up. My eyes are open again, and the air. Oh, the air! I take it in and look around, eyes wide, and it feels like I’m seeing the world for the first time in a long time. It feels like I’m in the middle of a new life.

Friends have asked me, Are you really going overseas? and I laugh. Not that I know of. Not yet. Not today. I don’t know where this new wakefulness will take us, what it will show us. But I do know that there’s an African-American man who lives across the street, a man I’ve waved to for the last year since we moved here. He’s a kind man, and he always waves back.

For the first time, yesterday, I walked across the street and offered him my hand, and he shook it.

“My name is Shawn,” I said, “and I see you over here all the time, but I don’t even know your name.”

He smiled.

“I’m Eric,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

This is what it looks like, to wake up.

This is what it feels like, to breathe again.

Posted on

The Boy Who Woke Up (or, How Ann Voskamp Ruined My Evening)

6147869603_d709aebc0d

Last night, I woke up.

Not literally. Maile and I had just left a graduation party for my wonderful sister where we stuffed ourselves with delicious food and arrived home with four fewer children than usual. My parents had graciously swept in and offered to keep the older four overnight, so the home we came back to was quieter than normal, less scattered. Normally, if we arrive home after eight o’clock, I’m shouting “Brush your teeth!” and “Get your pj’s on!” and “Sammy, seriously, brush your teeth!” Last night it was just silence, and there was a spirit of peace. I felt like I had walked into Saint James Episcopal Church, alone.

I opened the windows and put a fan in one of them. Cool, muggy air swept through the house, along with the sounds from James Street, the sound of cars swishing along wet roads, the sound of a world where rain had just fallen. It was a welcomed respite. A reprieve from this life that has somehow spiraled out of control lately with busy-ness and running here and there and chasing something, always chasing something crucial. I can’t always remember what we’re chasing, but we keep at it because that’s the Responsible thing to do.

Those things, that busy-ness, it will do to you what you least expect – it will put you to sleep. It will close your eyes to the things that are most important in the world. It will put you on a track of ever-shrinking concentric circles until all you’re doing is turning inside of yourself, like Gollum turning his ring over and over.

I sat on the sofa and sighed, tired from all the chasing. Maile took Leo upstairs and fed him, put him in his crib. She came downstairs in her pajamas and went to the kitchen for something to drink. Finally, a night where we could breathe. Watch a movie. Zone out.

I turned my eyes to my phone, as I tend to do these days in an ever-increasing search for distraction. It’s the cycle: Chase, Chase, Chase, Distract, Distract, Distract. Ann Voskamp posted something, something about those trying to survive ISIS, something with “Please read this!” attached, and because I was in distraction mode, I read it.

And it woke me up.

Please read it. Please read it in all its horrific detail, all its everything. I had tears in my eyes from the moment I started reading it until twelve hours later when I still didn’t know what to do and so I read it again. Maile and I sat in the living room and read parts out loud to each other and cried some more. Then we woke up this morning and, because the kids were still at my parents, we read it again.

I feel suddenly awake to the world. I want to do something to help, something, anything. I don’t know what. I hope I can figure out what to do before I go back to sleep again. I’m scared about that. I’m scared that the bills and the activity and the Busy-ness will put me back to sleep. I’m awake, for one screaming day, and it hurts, you know? We don’t create these little sleeps, these little distractions, for no reason – they anesthetize us, make us feel good, help us to forget. These activities and jobs and television shows keep the days spinning by, and soon the kids are in college and the house is paid off and we’re looking into retirement packages because we’ve worked so hard, you know, and now we deserve some rest.

But every once in a while you wake up and you feel it. You get a sense, such a small sense, of the pain the world is feeling, and it scorches you, moves straight for your heart, leaves you gasping. My initial reaction is to pull away from that pain, to drown myself in this chasing, this busy-ness. I want to fade away, to binge-watch a new show on Netflix or maybe one I’ve already seen. Breaking Bad was good the first time – I could probably get another three months’ worth of distraction out of that one. I want to focus on paying the bills, working a few more hours, getting the kids to their lessons and their grandparents’ house and keeping them distracted, too. Lord knows we don’t want our children to wake up. Heaven forbid.

Now that I’m awake, part of me wants to go back to sleep.

But not now. Now I’m awake, and I want to do something. I send out a message to everyone I know who works internationally, and that’s what I say. That’s what I try to shout. “I want to do something!”

But it came out as only a whisper. It turns out I haven’t used that voice for a long time. Too long. It’s dry and parched. I drink in Ann’s article again and I try to shout.

“I want to do something!”

And I wait.

Posted on

A Short Note to My Fellow Writers: Be Careful

2487525194_4f614e9b05_z

Can we have a heart-to-heart, writers?

First let me tell you about yourself. I know I’m being presumptuous, so if this isn’t you, feel free to quietly walk away. You’re a creative soul, eager for validation, eager to be original. You’d like everyone in the world to love what you write but you don’t want to sell out, whatever that means. You want to be published, and if you’ve already been published, you want to be published again.

Did I mention you want people to read what you write?

Here’s the point: There are a lot of people out there who KNOW that this is what you want. They also know what to say to make you feel validated, make you feel important, make you feel like the writer you are. And because they know the right things to say, too many of you are following blindly. You’ve swallowed their message hook, line, and sinker, and now you’ve got your wallets out and have your credit card ready.

Wait.

These folks, they’ll use this desire you have to be known, to be published, to be heard…and they’ll fleece you. They’ll charge you money to do something you can do on your own, or learn on your own, for free. There’s so much great stuff out there you can get for FREE. There are so many tools you can use to improve your craft…for FREE. Try Googling “authors talking on Youtube” or “how to self-publish Youtube video“.

But these folks won’t point you to free resources – they’ll charge you for writing classes or for consulting or for a path to publication, and you’ll pay because of this need you have to be heard. It’s a basic, instinctual need. Especially for you. A writer. And they’re playing you.

I’m not saying all writing classes are bad or online courses are unnecessary. I’ve run a few classes myself, and I’ve paid for that kind of stuff. There are good courses, and there are good teachers. I’m not saying everyone who offers you something in exchange for your hard-earned money is a fraud. I’m saying be careful. Do your research. These days, there’s usually a valid, inexpensive (free?) option that will help you find out the things you need to find out.

Want to hear an example of someone who cares about the writer and not about the writer’s money? I once contacted Jane Friedman. I had decided I was willing to pay her rather hefty hourly fee to talk about better ways to market my recent book. You know what she told me? When she found out I was trying to promote a book for kids, she said she didn’t have a lot of expertise in that area and that I’d be better off looking around. “I’m happy for you to sign up for the hour,” she emailed me back, “but I don’t know if it will be worth your time.”

Now there’s someone you want to work with. Someone who doesn’t jump at every opportunity to make a buck.

* * * * *

Don’t let your desire to be read or published or heard line the pockets of people who know your innermost desires and are willing to use that information to increase their own platform or bank account.

Here are some questions to consider BEFORE paying to become a “better writer”:

– Do they have any credentials? Have they wrestled through the writing process, not just on their own, but with other writers and teachers in something akin to an MFA program? I don’t have an MFA, and I’m not saying they’re necessary, but degrees can be an indicator of how much work the person has put in to get where they are.

– Have they edited or published anywhere professionally or for someone besides their friends? If you’re going to pay someone to edit your material, pay someone who deserves to be paid, and not just someone who calls themselves an editor.

– Are they offering you any sort of interaction or is it simply recorded or written material that you’ll be consuming? I personally feel that canned material created for the masses cannot get you beyond the most elementary of concepts. If you really want to improve, you need individual feedback, not only a PDF that makes you feel good about yourself all the time.

– Have they written anything of substance besides books or blogs on writing? I’m leery of listening to people talk about writing if they’ve only ever written about writing. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Would you take advice from someone who had only ever written about flying a kite but never actually flew one? Would you take your car to someone who had only ever written about an engine but never actually worked on one?

– If it’s a course to help you self-publish your book…do you realize how easy this is to do yourself? Are they insinuating that you will sell a lot of books if you buy their course? If so, run away. Far away.

– Do you find yourself on a track where you are continually going back to them and paying for more stuff without making progress as a writer? If you’ve been reading someone’s blog for years and buying their books and paying for their courses but your writing hasn’t progressed…why? Why? Why???

Those who talk the loudest about teaching you to write often have the least to offer because most people who actually know something about writing are too busy. You know why they’re busy? They’re writing. One of the best things you can do is buy books and materials on writing from writers who rarely write about writing – people like Stephen King (On Writing) or Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird).

Be careful, friends. That’s all I’m trying to say. There are good teachers out there. There are good courses. Just be careful.

Help your fellow writers out. What are the best free resources out there right now that help with writing, finding agents, self-publication, or promotion?

Posted on

That Thing I Love About My Church

cry

I am new to this mainline church experience, this liturgy, this Book of Common Prayer. My children and I still gawk at the stained glass on Sunday mornings when the sun explodes on the other side of those angels and saints. I take the wafer every Sunday with a little bit of nervousness, a little bit of uncertainty. I still hold the cup like an egg that might break.

We have been at this wonderful place, St. James Episcopal Church, for almost a year now. And there’s always been something about it that I liked but couldn’t quite verbalize.

Until Holy Week.

We talk a lot about the problems we have with The Church in general, but this week I’m heading up a series over at The High Calling about what our churches do well. In the rest of this blog post, I reveal one of my favorite things about St. James Episcopal Church – you can read that HERE. (Stay tuned next Sunday for my absolute favorite thing.)