Christian Suicide Bomber

I thought I'd showcase my artistic skills today.

Sometimes Joe Heathen gets mixed messages from us. Which one do you think he's going to pay attention to?

Jesus, and other Unexpected Friends

It was all she could do to control her breathing. Images of an impending doom flashed across her mind like a 1960’s nuclear film, and she wrestled to stay in control.

This was my mom dropping me off for my first day at boarding school.

Anyone who has met my mom knows that she is completely groovy. She is the ‘cool’ mom. One hundred percent real and always ready with an encouraging word or practical joke.

That being said, she is still a mom and is always ready to protect her kids. It was this maternal attribute that she was trying to rein in when she strolled around the corner and walked into my dorm room.

My roommate had already moved in and was in the process of decorating. War photos ripped from the pages of Time lined the walls. A confederate flag was draped over the window, and cast an eerie shade of red over the monochromatic stills of embattled soldiers and trench warfare. Heavy metal music played softly in the background.

I thought it was ridiculously cool. If my roomie didn’t disembowel me before my first REM cycle that night, I knew we’d be fast friends.

The coming year would bring a lot of changes to the landscape of my life. First French kiss. Lost my nerd status. Parents got a divorce. Did my own laundry. Hitchhiked to a nearby city for a crazy weekend that almost got me kicked out of school.

Grade eleven. Good times.

Oh, and I got the Shanghai Flu. Nasty little bug. I don’t remember much about it, so I won’t embellish, but I want to tell you more about my roommate. I was lying in bed sick when he came back to the room after school. I did not want to talk. I did not want to move. So I pretended to be asleep. Maybe he’d just leave and go to the dining hall or something.

He did leave.

Then he came back two minutes later, and with me still pretending to sleep he took a cool damp cloth and gently wiped my feverish forehead.

What kind of self-respecting adolescent tough guy does a thing like that?

Answer: the best kind.

He and I are still friends, as are our wives. I go to church a bit more than he does. He has more tattoos than I do. You could say that the Christian establishment has left a bad aftertaste in his mouth.

But I have hope for him, because when I was a sick, scrawny kid he reminded me of Jesus: often showing up with love and true friendship in dark, unexpected places.

Worm Resuscitation

My daughter Alyssa, like many preschoolers, has made a habit of demonstrating to us the vastness of her intellect.

It has astounded me at times. You can get lost in there, thus it is not territory that one approaches with frivolity. In fact, like her mother’s purse, my daughter’s brain is a place that I explore only when absolutely necessary.

Just the other day we let her go by herself to the end of our cul-de-sac to get the mail. Watching her from our front window, Karen saw her suddenly stop and bend down. The mail was all but forgotten as Alyssa skipped back to the house cradling a dead, dried worm in her little palm.

“Look Mommy! A dead worm!” she called from the porch. Then she carefully backed up a couple steps and as gently as she was able laid her immobile friend on our parking pad. The desiccated fish bait broke in half. “I’ll just put it here so that when the rain comes the water will make it alive again.”

I told you, didn’t I?!

Astounding.

My other daughter Kaitlyn just started grade one, and takes her role as the more educated sibling very seriously. Noticing that the shriveled Lumbricus terrestris hadn’t moved due to days of hot, dry weather, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

This is where the water hose comes into the story.

Kaitlyn gave that little worm… well… let’s call it a healthy squirt, and it disintegrated.

They both shrugged and walked into the house for a snack.

Lesson for this week:

I come across a lot of people who, like Alyssa and Kaitlyn, seem to have the mysteries of the universe all figured out. Their Bibles are nothing less than fifty pound cosmic text books, and their creeds are immobile massifs of ancient meditation.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be sure of some things, or that Truth is all subjective. Not at all.

What I am saying is that the most important subjects should be approached with the greatest dose of humility. We can only breathe and think and love according to what we know today, but the hues of tomorrow’s light might paint a clearer picture.

I’m creeping up on 40 years old. After roughly another forty years I plan on graduating from this preschool. All of us do, eventually. I believe that’s when the real learning begins.

Sharon Irving at Willow Creek

Well... life happens... and this week it happened without me sitting down to write about it. So instead of my ramblings, today I've decided to post this video. I found it unique and profound. See you next week!