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The Man I Saw Under the Carpet

Classified from Flickr via Wylio
© 2007 Joel Bedford, Flickr | CC-BY-ND | via Wylio

I am not a morning person. I am also not a new clothes kind of person. I am also not a shower-every-day person. I can’t decide if I lack these things because I write for a living or if I write for a living because I lack these things and therefore am not qualified for anything else.

I can relate with something Anne Lamott once said about herself: I am completely unemployable.

But on Wednesday morning I rolled out of bed for an early-morning (7am) coffee with a good friend. There are few other things that will get me out of bed that early. I put on a baseball cap, the clothes I had worn the day before, and as I was stumbling out the door I remembered to brush my teeth. Which is a major win.

Whenever I wake up early and go outside I wonder why I’m NOT more of a morning person. It’s actually pretty invigorating, walking out into the city early in the morning when the traffic is just beginning to slip out on to the roads. I heard somewhere that the morning is the safest time to be in any city, because the trouble-makers are mostly in bed. It seems this is true, as everyone I crossed paths with that morning was very kind and wished me a good morning.

As I turned down Duke Street I was finally starting to wake up, otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed what I noticed. A carpet moved. That’s right: just a normal, indoor/outdoor carpet on someone’s large porch rustled, as if it was alive. I slowed down. Then I saw the man.

He was sleeping under the carpet. It was a rather chilly morning, and he turned over under the carpet much the way I had been tossing and turning in my warm, soft bed all night. He had a flat, rather white pillow and wore a winter cap on his head. His black hair was long and greasy. I sighed and kept walking.

“The kingdom of the heavens is among us!” Jesus called out to the crowds, and what an amazing idea, that heaven is here, in the streets and the houses, the alleys and the railroad tracks. The porches and the breezeways. The kingdom of the heavens.

But as long as there are men and women sleeping under thin carpets on cold nights, we still have a lot of work to do.

Please keep doing what you’re doing. Please keep feeding the hungry, visiting the widows and the imprisoned. Please continue to fight human trafficking and free us from our addictions. Whatever you are doing for the least of us, you are doing for Christ himself.

Please keep doing what you’re doing. And if you’re not doing anything, find someone who is and then help them.

 

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Where the Bible Stories End

Bible Study from Flickr via Wylio
© 2003 Melissa Johnson, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

Today I’m over at Deeper Culture writing about the flannel boards from my childhood Sunday School and how they’ve led me to make up my own ending to one of the stories:

But there was one story that always left me wondering. It was the one with flannel Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden in their new clothes of flannel animal skins. They looked sad and dejected. Behind them, two flannel cherubim guarded the entrance to the Tree of Life, and a flannel flaming sword glowed, reminding me of Saturday morning cartoons and the sword of He-Man, Master of the Universe.

That story of the first two people being sent out of the garden stuck in my mind because when I was a child I always wondered, “What happened to those two angels guarding the Tree of Life? Are they still standing there, flashing sword burning fire?”

You can read the rest of the post HERE.

* * * * *

Today I’m giving away a free copy of Matthew Paul Turner’s wonderful children’s book, God Made Light. All you have to do in order to be entered to win the book is leave a comment here letting me know your favorite children’s book. Good luck!

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For They Shall Inherit the Earth (Whatever That Is)

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“Blessed are the meek,” Father David reads, “for they shall inherit the earth.”

There’s a weight to those words as we sit in St. James Episcopal Church. Outside, the sun emerges from behind the clouds and, for a moment, the church is lit up, the stained-glass windows glowing. But then the clouds sweep in again, and the light fades.

* * * * *

I walk through the early-morning city, traffic not yet lined up on the streets, the sun not yet risen above the eastern line of buildings. There are cars on the street, but not many, not yet. As I walk, steam billows from my mouth, from the exhaust vents of buildings, from those few cars that drive past. We create small, impermanent clouds that a nearly-winter breeze is quick to blow away.

Then I see him, a man approaching on a wheel chair. His lifeless legs are folded up under him, and he pushes himself along, strong arms, hard features. He has gray hair and hasn’t shaved for a few weeks. His eyes are nervous. He glances up at me as we cross paths, and he mutters something so quietly that I can’t tell if it’s to me or to himself.

“Cold, sure is cold.”

I stop and turn and watch him roll away from me, up Prince Street, and I wonder.

Workers pull their trucks to the side of the road and jackhammers began tearing into the sidewalk, exposing the earth inches below the concrete, exposing just how shallow these cities of ours really are.

* * * * *

I come home later in the day and the sun is warm and the traffic is heavier. I approach the stretch of sidewalk that had been torn up and in its place is wet, shimmering cement, dark gray and waiting. They’ve made quick work of it and wrapped it all in yellow caution tape.

I have this urge to run home, collect my family and bring them back to that spot so that we can each put one hand in the wet cement. I picture the seven hands in a row, drying, filling with dust and dirt, the years wearing away at the prints. I want to leave something permanent behind, some reminder that we have been here. Though the rest of this shallow city may pass away, I want to remain.

But that’s not possible. Not really.

I turn the corner and there’s Melinda sitting on her milk crate across from our house on James Street. She waves, and I wave back. I wonder if she’s been evicted yet, as she had predicted. I wonder where someone like Melinda would go, in this cold. There’s Water Street Rescue Mission and a few other places. Where would I go, if that was me?

On Sunday, just a few days later, I ask my kids what they would do on that cold day if they were homeless.

“I guess I’d climb into that dumpster,” Cade says. We walk slower as we pass the large bin full of trash, and the weight of that thought makes a deep impression in the wet cement of our minds.

* * * * *

“…for they shall inherit the earth.”

In my naivete, I always thought of “the earth” in that phrase as meaning “everything.” The meek will, eventually, have it all. But maybe it’s not that, not even close. Maybe the meek will inherit the actual earth, the dirt, which at first sounds like a raw deal, right? Who wants to inherit dirt?

But then I think about this city and the impermanence of so much of what we create. These streets, these buildings…it wouldn’t take long for them to crumble and erode away. But long after that happened, you know what would still remain?

The dirt beneath it. The earth.

Maybe when the meek inherit the earth, what they’re really inheriting is the stuff that is permanent. The stuff that isn’t a few inches shallow. It’s not “the glitz,” as a friend of mine recently said, but the stuff on which everything else is built.

It makes me wonder what I’m inheriting, and what I want to inherit.

* * * * *

We hit the first Kickstarter stretch goal for my upcoming novel, so there will be some awesome illustrations in the book! I can’t wait to show you a few. The campaign is currently at $4,511, and if we can get to $6,000 in the next few weeks that means all the contributors will receive a free audio version of the book in addition to their regular rewards. Keep spreading the word!

I’ve been on a few podcasts lately in which I’ve been interviewed about my upcoming novel, The Day the Angels Fell. I had fun recording them with some great folks and you might enjoy listening to them. Here are the links:

“How to Crush Kickstarter,” recorded with The Storymen: Matt Mikalatos, JR Forasteros, and Clay Morgan.

“Fallen Angels, Runaway Truck Ramps, and Kickstarter Campaigns,” recorded with Eric Wyatt

“Shawn Smucker on Writing Fiction” on the Schnozcast with Bryan Allain

And coming soon, an interview I did with David Mantel on “The Broken Light Show.”

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Two Years Ago This Week (Or, What Heaven Looks Like)

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Copyright Tessa Marie Images. Used with permission.

Two years ago this week, my grandmother died. I will always remember her for her fierce love. Literally. She was a cheek-pinching, chest-thumping, chin-grabbing, back-patting, full-on hugger who refused to give any of her grandchildren a kiss unless it was smack on the mouth. But when I say she loved in a fierce way, I’m not talking primarily about a physical characteristic. This fierce love emanated from her like energy. Her eyes flashed with happiness every single time she saw me, and she would laugh with happiness.

“Well, Shawny, Shawny,” she’d say, chuckling to herself, as if she had thought she would never see me again, but look, there I was, a miracle.

Maile and I lived in England from 2001 to 2005, and during our visits back, whenever we saw her, she was intent on monopolizing us. She wanted to know everything about England, what we were doing there, what it was like in that faraway place. And she’d shake her head in awe the entire time we talked, amazed at how small the world had grown. Sometimes, during her last weeks on earth, she thought we still lived there, and she’d ask me about it.

“We don’t live in England anymore, Grandma,” I’d say, and she’d squeeze my hand as if she needed my physical presence to reassure her that my words were true.

“Oh, yes,” she’d say quietly. “That’s right.”

She was very concerned about us when we went on our four-month cross-country trip. Once we returned, she asked over and over again what states we had visited. She wanted to hear about how we lost our brakes, and she’d hold her hand over her mouth in horror. When I finished the story for the tenth time, she sighed with relief, as if it might have ended some other way that time. Perhaps we had actually plummeted over the side of the Tetons. She was relieved that wasn’t the case.

But the thing I will always remember the most about my Grandma is the way the family came together during her last week on earth. The hospice nurse said she wouldn’t be with us for much longer, so we came in from all corners of the world to my aunt’s house where Grandma sat in her old armchair having whispered conversations with people, one or two at a time. In the evenings, when everyone could be there, we sat around and sang old hymns she requested, and she patted her hand on the side of her old chair, still keeping rhythm.

Many of us spent those nights there at my aunt’s house waiting for her to pass. We slept on the floor and on couches and in the spare rooms, and sometimes, if those who watched at her bedside thought she was passing, we’d gather around her and sing quietly. But she would pull through, and for a while it seemed that she would never die, that perhaps we had already entered heaven. After all, we were laughing together and eating together and spending time with those we loved the most, and we were singing together, and time had become irrelevant.

A country where no twilight shadows deepen
Unending day where night will never be
A city where no storm clouds ever gather
This is just what Heaven means to me

What will it be when we get over yonder
And join the throng around the glassy sea
To join our loved ones and crown Christ forever
This is just what Heaven means to me

But eventually she passed, surrounded by a living legacy of artists and business people, writers and pastors, teachers and mothers. She was 92 years old, and if I can live a life as full as hers, I will be a lucky man indeed.

 

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Why I Was the Security Risk At My Daughters’ Swim Practice

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If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you’ll know we’ve run into a few hiccups in life. Our truck was hit-and-run. Broken iPad. Stolen bike. The normal kind of stuff that life likes to throw at you every once in a while. I know it’s an old cliche, but “when it rains, it pours” does seem rather true. We’ve been sailing along through life for the last couple of years without any major obstacles, but starting this summer things got a little intense.

Anyway, I was sitting at my girls’ swim practice last night. It’s at the city YMCA, a bustling place in our little town, and the indoor pool area was packed. There was a group of older ladies doing water aerobics, two groups of kids doing swimming lessons, and a swim team taking up over half the pool. I sat there on the bench and waiting for some of the people to clear out before I hopped in the water and flailed about swam some laps.

But as I sat there, I felt myself tightening up under the pressure of life. Nothing too specific – just the general abundance of things that were giving us problems. Then, for some reason, I thought about our new Episcopal church, St. James, and how we say the Lord’s Prayer together every Sunday, and what peace that brings me.

I thought, you know what? I don’t care what anyone else thinks. So right there on the bench I closed my eyes and started whisper-mumbling those lines over and over again.

Our Father who is in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven

And I could feel myself beginning to unwind. I took deep breaths, praying on the exhale, surrounded by the sound of splashing water and laughing children and shouting coaches.

Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us
Lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil

My breathing came slower. And it was at about that time that I got the lifeguard’s attention. I guess they’re a little suspicious of grubby-looking white men with straggly beards sitting poolside while the little girls have their swim practice. Especially when said grubby-looking white man has his eyes closed and is mumbling to himself.

“Hey, man,” the lifeguard said, and my eyes shot open.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“What’s up?” he asked, and I caught the subtext to that question pretty quickly, something along the lines of You sicko, what are you doing here and what’s wrong with your brain that you sit here with your eyes closed casting curses on everyone.

“Oh, nothing. Nothing. My daughters have practice.” I pointed vaguely into the water.

“Oh, okay,” he said, smiling with relief. “That’s cool.”

Then he walked away.

For thine is the kingdom and the power and glory forever and ever. Amen.

“Daddy, I passed my deep water test!” Abra squealed as she came up out of the pool and walked towards me, dripping wet. Lucy congratulated her. We picked up Cade at the gym and walked home, through the rain, the cars swishing past us on the wet roads, the traffic lights running in streaks across the pavement. We got to the last light, and as soon as the walk sign appeared, Lucy shouted what she always shouts.

“Last one home is a rotten egg!”

So we ran through the warm night, summer’s last gasp, and galloped up the steps to the porch, then poured into the house, shoes squeaking on wood floors, all in the kind light of home. I sighed, and I felt a lot better.

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Every Day As a Writer, I Have To Tell Myself Not to be Afraid

No.fear from Flickr via Wylio
© 2008 Vincepal, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

Every day as a writer, I have to tell myself not to be afraid.

There are plenty of voices in my head trying to convince me to get a real job, one with medical benefits and a regular pay check. There is the voice that tells me nothing I’ve ever written has really been that great, and there’s no chance that anything I write in the future will be anything special either. There’s the voice reminding me of every bad review, every clients’ criticism of a first draft, every rejection.

Today I stared out my window and I thought about fear. What would my life look like if I gave into it? I’d work 9 to 5. I’d watch a lot of television (because watching television is such a great way for me to forget about everything I’m afraid of). I’d encourage my kids to stay inside, to not try anything new, to keep their expectations low.

I’d stare out a lot of windows.

I wouldn’t let anyone read anything that I wrote – I’d stop writing.

I’d never say hello to anyone, for fear they’d think I was stupid, or naive, or ugly, and wouldn’t say hello back to me.

Fear has a way of leading us in a concentric path that grows smaller and smaller until we are so far inside of ourselves that we are nothing more than a small point surrounded by an unfathomable darkness. There is no question of engagement, no question of opening up. And if we follow fear long enough, it will swallow us up.

Ironically, the best response to fear is not to be unafraid. The best response is to embrace it.

Try new things.

Write or paint or draw. Start a new business or make a new friend. Take a walk. Get outside of yourself.

This is how you move through fear – by moving and by expanding your circle of movement.

Every morning as a writer, I have to tell myself not to be afraid, and then I have to do something about it. So I open a new page and I start typing.

My newest confrontation with fear involves starting a Kickstarter campaign to fund a novel I wrote over the last fifteen months. And I have to admit – I’m terrified…that it’s no good, that no one will like it, that people will snicker about me behind their backs. But I know it’s time to stop being afraid.

You’ll be able to support the launch and publication of this novel starting on Monday, October 20th, so stay tuned for more on that.

What are you afraid of?