A Contemplative Life

January 3, 2018January 3, 2018

My Question for 2018

I’m entering 2018, not with a word, but with a question.

* * * * *

Leo is three years old. We walk into his room at bedtime. The city is cold outside his window, and the radiator at the foot of his bed is hot to the touch. I hope he never has to know the cold of those streets on a winter night having nowhere else to go. We draw a little closer to each other in the dark.

He wants to go to bed in a “fort,” so I tuck a blanket in the top bunk, draping it down over the bottom bunk where he sleeps. I turn off the light.

He is a creature of habit, although I haven’t yet figured out if this is due to age or personality. We sing the same songs every night. We pray the same prayers.

“Daddy,” he asks. “Will you stay with me?”

“Daddy,” he asks. “Will there be storms or fireworks tonight?”

“Daddy, will you lay beside me?”

So, I climb into the bed like a giant and he moves over and we lay there quietly in the dark. Sometimes, I start to drift off, and I turn over on my side. My eyelids are heavy. The warmth from the radiator slips into his bed. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. But he is not a fan of when I turn my back towards him.

“Daddy,” he says quietly. “I want to see your face.”

* * * * *

Many wise people throughout the ages have written about seeking the face of God, and at the beginning of this new year, I’m wondering more and more what that means. Crack open that phrase and what will I find? This force that moves the universe, that keeps everything racing away from everything else, that wakes up the maple trees in the spring and circulates the air in the atmosphere and reminds the fish and birds how to get home…what does the face of that force look like? And what could it possibly mean, seeking the face of that incredible force?

I don’t know about all of that, and I’m not sure exactly what it means to seek God’s face, but I know what Leo wants when he wants to see my face. He wants to know that I’m aware of him. He wants to know he is not alone in the world. He wants to know that even when he falls asleep, even when he is at his most vulnerable, even when the scariest things in the entire world have a tendency of turning up, that I’ll be there, eyes on him.

Is this what it means to seek the face of God?

I confess: I don’t know. But it seems a compelling question to unpack this year.

* * * * *

In his book, The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton writes,

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front…”

Could that be it? In seeking the face of God, are we actually seeking something in the world that is not brutal, but instead something in the world that is the kindest and gentlest and best thing we could ever find?

How does that change the way I live, if my main motivation in living is to find the beautiful things in the world? How does that change every interaction I have with someone else? How does that change the way I think about myself?

* * * * *

Daddy, I want to see your face.

In about a week, I start work on my next novel. I’ll be journaling before each day’s writing session, and you can receive those journal entries, a sort of look inside the writing of a novel, in your inbox by signing up here: http://eepurl.com/dfxFoP

December 12, 2017December 12, 2017

What the Woman Who Almost Died Said About My Book

“Have you read this book?” the woman asked as she picked up a copy of The Day the Angels Fell. The question was directed at my wife, Maile, while she worked at my mom’s market stand. Mai was taken aback – the woman’s question came out intense, pointed.

Have you read this book?

“Actually,” Maile said. “My husband wrote it.”

“Really,” the woman said, examining the back. “Could it be possible death is a gift?”

Maile waited.

“You know,” the woman said, “This was me. I almost died ten years ago – the doctors gave me a 10% chance of living. My son was eight years old at the time. He’s never really recovered from that. He’s very anxious about death.”

She turned the book over.

“What gave your husband the idea of writing about death like this?” she asked Maile, and Maile told her the story of me spending time in Turkey with a missionary who was dying of cancer.

“I need to read this,” the woman said quietly. “Maybe it’s a book I could work through with my son. Maybe it will help him be less afraid.”

She bought the book, and before she left she stared intently at Maile again.

“This is a God thing,” she said before she walked away. “I know it is. This is a God thing.”

* * * * *

There are few things that make me happier than when someone is caught up in the main question from The Day the Angels Fell: “Could it be possible that death is a gift?” I don’t know the answer to that, for sure. I have my suspicions. And I love it when you folks come along for the ride, enter into the questions with me.

Maybe you know someone who needs to read this book? Here are just a few places where you can grab a copy in time for Christmas:

Aaron’s Books in Lititz, PA
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Baker Bookstore
Books-a-Million
Christianbook.com
Lifeway
Hearts and Minds Bookstore, Dallas, PA

December 8, 2017December 8, 2017

The Hardest Part is Waking

One of my favorite writers, Kelly Chripczuk, has a new book of poems out called Between Heaven and Earth. What I love most about Kelly’s writing shines through in these poems – her honesty, her awareness, and her determination to pull the sliver of good out of every situation. You can buy her book HERE. In the meantime, here is one of my favorite poems from the collection, “The Hardest Part”:

I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking. – Song of Solomon 5:2

. . . you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. – Romans 13:11

They come to our room in the night,
nose dripping blood or underwear damp.
“Can you help me with this?” they ask,
and we are stirred from the heavy
darkness of slumber.

I never want to wake in the night,
never want to throw back the warm covers,
to search for glasses blindly.
I dread the wet sheets
and sitting in the cold dark of the bathroom
pinching his nose until the red river stops.

But when he shivers, stripping the wet
in exchange for dry, or when he waits
oddly stoic for the clotting to begin,
I feel compassion rise.

By the time I tuck them
back in, I can say I love you and
mean it as I rub their short-cropped hair.

The hardest part is waking.

* * * * *

Check out Kelly’s book HERE.

December 6, 2017December 5, 2017

My Most Frequent Prayer These Days

*This is your regularly scheduled, completely honest post about the ups and downs of freelance writing and self-employment. If you have had your fill of these posts from me, feel free to move on, nothing to see here. Tomorrow, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming*

A week ago, in all of my optimistic glory, I nearly wrote a blog post about how much better I’ve become in regards to waiting. Imagine that! I felt like Mario at the end of the level, hanging onto the flagpole, trotting gamely towards the next challenge. I was all set to write about how I’ve got that old anxiety about waiting under control so bring it, God, I’m up for whatever the next challenge is.

Yesterday, for some reason, my optimism came crashing down:

There is a silence in these post-Thanksgiving days, these almost-winter days, these early-Advent days, that can be enough to squelch hope in most of its forms. It is a natural season of waiting, in so many ways, a season in which there seems to be so little response, that it should not surprise me, it should not catch me off guard, yet nearly every year it does.

* * * * *

In desperation, I turn again to the Advent readings from this last Sunday, and the first was from Isaiah.

Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your heritage.
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
with the mountains quaking before you,
while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for,
such as they had not heard of from of old.
No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you
doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

The second from 1 Corinthians:

He will keep you firm to the end,
irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is faithful,
and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

The third from Mark:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Be watchful! Be alert!
You do not know when the time will come.

* * * * *

Wait, the readings implore. Wait, but not with your own strength. With mine.

Also, Be watchful! Be alert!, as if to remind us our waiting is not in vain. Our waiting will be rewarded. Sometime. Somehow.

Wait.

November 29, 2017November 28, 2017

A Book I’m Writing That I Haven’t Told You About Yet

There’s a book I’m writing that I haven’t told you much about. I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you the title yet, so I’ll keep quiet on that for now (although I love the title Revell came up with). This book comes out next fall (about four months after the release of The Edge of Over There). It’s a book I wrestled with writing – whether or not I should do it, and, once I decided to do it, how exactly to go about it. It’s a book about the friendship that’s formed between me and a man named Mohammad.

Here’s a quick peek at a very rough draft of a section I’ve been working on, a simple retelling of a conversation the two of us had not too long ago. Shhh. This is top secret.

* * * * *

When I first met Mohammad, there were things I never could have guessed about him, things I never could have imagined. The stories of other people are always hidden from us at first, waiting in the shadows. They are tentative, skittish things, these hidden stories. They are frightened of what might become of them if they step out into the light.

A man rides his motorcycle through the Syrian countryside, his wife and four sons somehow balanced on the bike with him. He has received a tip that his village will soon be bombed. Their combined weight wobbles the motorcycle from side to side, and he shouts at them to hold still, hold still.

A man sits quietly on a friend’s porch, drinking very dark coffee, watching bombs rain down on his village miles away. ‘That was your house,” he says, then, ten minutes later, “I think that one hit my house.” He takes another sip of coffee. His children play in the yard.

A man walks through the pitch black Syrian wilderness, his family in a line behind him. He can feel the tension in his wife, the fear in his older boys. Someone ahead shouts, “Get down!” and they all collapse into the dust, holding their breath, trying to keep the baby quiet. ‘Abba,’ his boys whimper. ‘Abba.’

There are things I never could have imagined about him.

* * * * *

“You know,” he says, “in Syria, we are always having coffee together. Almost every day, I go to a friend’s house and we sit for two hours, for three hours, drinking coffee together, talking about things. Why you not do that here? Everyone stays here, here, here,” he frowns and jabs at the air, pointing at our individuality. “No one knows their neighbors. No one has coffee.”

“You’re right,” I say. “You’re right.”

“I tell this to Muradi,” he says, smiling a reluctant smile. “I tell my wife I will start having coffee with people. Soon, everyone will come to my house and we will all know each other and talk together. She says, ‘Mohammad, Americans do not want this! They do not want!’ But I tell her I will show her. I will start. We will meet here, there. Maybe at a coffee house. It is good this way, for us to drink coffee together.”

He laughs. I laugh, too, but the truth of what he says reaches me. We are, as Americans, very good at being independent. I struggle to think of the last time I needed someone, truly needed someone. We are so busy. Too busy. There is very little time for that kind of community, where we meet together regularly, not rushed, to simply drink coffee.

“When you find a house out here in the country,” Mohammad says again. “Find me a house, too. We will live beside each other, and we will drink coffee together. We can invite all the neighbors!” He laughs again, grinning that boyish grin of his, and I can’t help but be amazed at what these refugees have to offer us, if we will only reach out our hands and accept it.

* * * * *

Mohammad is a Syrian refugee, and together we are telling the story of his journey here, the story of my journey in meeting him, and the story of our friendship. This is not a story of how I helped him – this is more a story of how a man from halfway around the world taught me more about being a friend than anyone else I know. I can’t wait for you to get to know him. He and his wife and his boys are amazing.

If you’re looking for a gift for a young (or young at heart) reader in your life, consider my book The Day the Angels Fell, described by Anne Bogel at Modern Mrs. Darcy as, “Neil Gaiman meets Madeleine L’Engle.” It’s a book that asks the question “Could it be possible that death is a gift?”

November 28, 2017November 28, 2017

In Which I Panic About My Son

After a long day of traveling, I crawled into bed and worked on my laptop for a bit while Maile dropped immediately into a deep sleep. We had gotten up at 4am, left NC at 5:30. Our alternator in the Suburban went out at 8am, so we waited while that was fixed, ate breakfast at a neighboring diner, and tried not to think about how much it was going to cost. Right before Christmas.

After finally getting home nearly 12 hours after we left, unpacking, grocery shopping, feeding the kids, getting them ready for school, and trying to keep everyone from trashing the joint in case we had another showing come up, we arrived at the end of the day. I read a little Conroy until my eyelids got heavy, closed the book, and that’s when the panic hit.

Who knows where these things come from? Who knows what strange combination of synapses fire to send you down the path of worry, melancholy, or homesickness? How can we scientifically explain this experience of being human? Suddenly, I realized my fourteen-year-old son would be leaving the house in less than five years. I know how fast five years can go. I thought of his easy-going personality, his constant desire to make us laugh, his never-ending tales of Minecraft or football or the latest book he’s been reading. And I thought about that not being in my life. And I panicked.

Have I been a good enough dad? Have I done enough special things with him? Am I giving him the tools he needs to be a good human?

It was a visceral sensation in my gut. I glanced over at Maile. She was asleep, the covers pulled up to her eyeballs, dead to the world. I slid out of bed. I decided I’d go to his room and hang out, sit on his floor as I sometimes do and just listen. He loves that. He can talk and talk, and we rarely have one-one-one time in this house of eight.

I walked down the hall to his room, expecting to find him reading a book or squeaking out some last-minute homework. I peeked into the room. He was asleep, a book beside him on his bed. I guess it had been a long day for him, too.

I stared down at his face. I pulled the covers up. I put his book on the shelf and my hand stayed on it for a moment as I looked at him again, remembering the smile he had when he was a baby.

I’m such a sap.

The house was quiet, and I followed the quiet downstairs, turned out the lights our daughter always leaves on after she showers. I double-checked the locks, hit the hall light, and slipped back into bed beside Maile. These years? They’re actually minutes. Seconds. I blink, and here I am, 40 years old. This is it. This is life.

If you’re looking for a gift for a young (or young at heart) reader in your life, consider my book The Day the Angels Fell, described by Anne Bogel at Modern Mrs. Darcy as, “Neil Gaiman meets Madeleine L’Engle.”