A Contemplative Life

June 10, 2016June 9, 2016

The Stories One Family Told Me

As soon as I walked into the house, I could tell everyone was nervous. Polite, but nervous. And maybe a little skeptical. I shook hands with each of the ten people sitting in the dining room and then took a seat at the head of the table. I thanked them for agreeing to meet with me. I thanked them for their bravery.

I spent the next three hours listening to that family: there were two parents, four of their children, and their children’s spouses. They told stories, really difficult stories. Painful stuff. The father, the man sitting right there among them, had been horribly abusive, physically and verbally. He had treated his children, his boys especially, the way no boys should be treated by their father.

But that’s exactly how his own father had treated him, and he knew no different.

They shared their stories, the beatings and the put-downs, the sadness and the hard days. There were good times, too, vacations and Christmases, games and treats. There were the cold winter evenings they sat with their mother in the tiny bathroom (that’s where the heater was), memorizing Bible verses.

There were hard questions.

There was forgiveness sought after desperately, and given freely.

There were a lot of tears.

There was a lot of courage.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it, a family free to talk about such a painful past, a family that brave to pull back their sleeves and say, “See! These are the scars!” A family so desperate to tell their story, only so that others might hear it and heal, or hope for healing.

The father said something during our time together that I’ll never forget. He said, “Often, a father will see some weakness in his son, a weakness he had when he was a boy, and it’s unbearable to him. He can’t stand to see his own son with the same weakness.”

And I felt that. I see that in myself, the way I interact with my own boys. The moments when I am too hard on them. The times I come down on them. It’s something I won’t soon forget.

Can we share our stories, even our painful ones, in a way that brings hope?

June 9, 2016June 7, 2016

Away We Go

Shadows line the tile and a cool summer
breeze floods through the screens like water
through a broken dam. I can hear
the young men revving their car engines at the red
light on James Street and for a moment
I remember the smell of oil burning, the rush of waiting
for the light to turn. It seems a long
time ago.

They rush into the night, and I count the gears
in my head. First. Second. Third. They leave behind
a steady hum of city silence, which means:
the refrigerator
the neighbor’s air conditioner in the alley
a siren four streets away
and the creak of floors above me as Maile
walks the hall.

Twenty years from now, when my children
are grown, and Maile and I sit
on the porch on a summer night
like this one, what familiar things will the past
use to snag me? Will the cry of a baby in an
apartment across the street remind me of these
sleepless nights? Will a family walking
the sidewalk remind me of our own treks through
the city
for ice cream
or to the park
or to church?
Will a book I read remind me of my
attempts – successful? not? – to publish my own words?

For now I turn off the rest of the lights
and stand a moment longer in the hall on cool
wood floors, the breeze pooling around my feet,
the sound of another car revving at the light. The bass
thumps. Someone shouts. The light
turns.

Away we go.

June 7, 2016June 7, 2016

What Matters Most

After nearly seventeen years of marriage we sometimes
spend our Friday nights in the basement, going
through boxes of old stuff,
trying to decide what to keep
and what to cast off.
It’s like the ocean floor down there,
where everything settles after being shaken,
shipwrecked,
sifted.

You go through plastic bins full of children’s clothes,
preparing for this next baby, number six, and we
smile at the sight of clothes the other children wore:
a yellow rain coat; those monkey pajamas; boots
covered in cartoon insects with big eyes. Artifacts
from some other life, reminders of
this long and winding road. You sigh. You fold
each piece with care
and gently place everything here
or there
to keep
or to cast off.

I unearth the boxes of yearbooks and old
journals, binders full of short stories I wrote. In those days
I was certain publication was just
around the corner. Yet here I am,
so many years later, on the cusp of perhaps a book,
or perhaps not. Still waiting.
This is the way of things, the subtle gathering of years,
the persistent belief that words, thought through,
will find their way to the surface.

And then I see a notebook from October, 1997, when
I first laid eyes on you. Noticed you for the first time.
I wrote seven words at the top of the page
of my American Lit Before 1900 binder:
“Fact of the day: she’s from Ohio”
How little we knew of one another.

I read the words out loud to you, and you smile and almost
cry and we laugh, thinking back to who we were.
Who were we? Who would we become? We
had no idea.
How could we? Yet.

Yet.

Yet here we are in the basement of a row home, 20 years
later, somewhere
in the city, the sound of five children running the wooden
floorboards above us, the amniotic movement of another child
twisting and turning inside you.
Here we are, sifting through two decades.
This has been the way
of these years, the keeping and the casting off.
The sense that somehow, that which matters most
will find its way to the surface.

June 2, 2016June 1, 2016

The Most Important Word

Last week I had the honor of stepping into Seth Haines’ recovery room to talk about my vocation and all the little voices constantly jabbering in my head.

The real struggle for me has been more practical–how does one navigate a life when your income fluctuates so severely from one year to the next, one month to the next? During good years I make more money than I ever thought I would make, but during difficult years we have occasionally (twice) gone 6 – 8 months without making anything. My wife and I have five children (almost six). Not making money for that long can be scary and annoying and stressful. It can quickly lead to voices of self-doubt and judgment.

Nothing has influenced my relationship with God more than my current vocation, precisely because of the ups and downs. One word makes itself known to me during those difficult patches: Trust.

You can read the entire post HERE.

May 23, 2016May 23, 2016

When the Tree That Will Witness Your Life Was Planted 100 Years Ago

We walked through the wet grass and the rain that fell was the kind that doesn’t fall all the way, just sort of drizzles around in windy droplets. It felt cold for May. We sat in white chairs on very green grass under a gray and moving sky.

They got married there, under the gray sky and the massive sycamore tree, the same place he had asked her out for the first time, the same place they had had their first kiss, and I couldn’t help but wonder about that tree. How old was it? 100 years? 200 years?

I wondered about when it had started to grow, how close it came to being trampled underfoot or overgrown by other trees. Was that area a forest when the tree was a seedling? Did anyone nearly cut it down? Had lightning ever struck close by?

Every tree, every marker in our lives, ever significant event or person or happening, is only there by the thinnest of margins, the most unlikely of occurrences. 100 years ago, no one could have looked at that tree and thought, there’s a tree someone will fall in love under. There’s a tree someone will get married under. There’s a tree where people will say, “For better or worse.” Such a solemn vow. Such a sacred covenant.

I think of these things now, as I walk under a tree or play with my children in the park or wander the city with Maile. It’s a wonder, isn’t it, how this world has been prepared for us, how the trees have been planted, maybe for hundreds of years, the very trees that will mark the passing of our lives?

There’s something humbling about it, and encouraging, this idea that the trees or the buildings or the roads that will witness our very best times have already been planted or built or straightened, and they’re all out there, waiting for us to find our way to them. Our best times are waiting for us. I find that to be a comforting thought.

May 12, 2016May 12, 2017

Could Disappointment Be an Indicator that We are Right Where We Should Be?

Almost three months ago, my wonderful literary agent Ruth began approaching publishers about my book The Day the Angels Fell, the very same project that you all helped fund on Kickstarter almost a year and a half ago. Ruth read it and loved it and thought she might be able to find a home for it, so we sent out a book proposal to publishers. Initially, the response was strong. One publisher was immediately interested. I thought it was going to get picked up. I thought my longest-held dream, of being a novelist with a publisher, was about to come true.

But then the weeks passed. We still haven’t heard back from the first publisher. In the mean time, I received a kind rejection from one of my favorite publishers who said “the writing is absolutely beautiful, but…” Always “but.”

Right now there are two houses still considering it.

Can I be honest? I’ve felt a lot of disappointment in this process. The waiting has nearly paralyzed my creative ability. The weeks of silence and the few rejections (and even the vast, empty nothingness of no reply) rip at some raw place I didn’t know existed in me. I went into this feeling like a relatively self-confident person, someone who could take or leave whatever might happen, but I’m learning a lot about myself. I’m learning I’m not as confident as I thought I was. I’m not as independent as I thought I was. I crave this “one last” approval more than I thought I did.

And then, Maile. My wife is perfect for me. We had a long talk the other day about who I am as a writer, the kinds of things I want to put out into the world, the fact that I want to write literary YA that might not fit into today’s marketable mold. I told Maile I could sell out, write a fast-paced book that reads at a 5th grade reading level where the protagonist flirts with sex and drugs and makes fun of their parents. Maile laughed and said, “No, you couldn’t.”

And then there are my writing friends. People who remind me this book is good. Friends who remind me the only way is forward. Friends who tell me that The Day the Angels Fell made a tangible difference in the lives of their children and is a book their kids will hand down to their kids. Friends who remind me there is an eager audience waiting for book two, an audience who doesn’t care if it’s traditionally published or funded through Kickstarter.

On Wednesday of last week, something finally clicked. It was like I took a deep breath, came out of a trance, realized it is spring again. Spring always has a way of coming back around, doesn’t it? I started writing again, forging my way into book three, the final book of the trilogy that begins with The Day the Angels Fell and continues with The Edge of Over There (not yet released). I realized I have to keep writing through this process. I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Yes, I’ve been disappointed so far. Yes, if none of these publishing houses decide to take it, I will feel rejected and disappointed. But I feel like I’ve gone deeper this year into my writing life than I have ever gone before. I feel like I’ve found something there, long buried, something crucial. I’ve even discovered that I have a huge desire to make this book a success, with or without a publisher. That thought excites me. I can do this! (With your help, of course.)

And it all makes me wonder if we need to press in closer to our disappointment, if we need to get past the initial shock of it and ask why? Why is this disappointing to me? What does this disappointment tell me about what I think is important?

And is it possible that the location of my disappointment leads me closer to the location of my true hope?

Update: I wrote this post on May 12th, 2016. Four weeks later, I received and signed a 3-book deal with Revell to publish not only The Day the Angels Fell but also the sequel and a third book, yet to be determined.