The Redemption of the Tourist: Part IV

Post subtitle: “There and Back Again – A Tenant's Tale”

“The dragon was dead, and the goblins overthrown, and their hearts looked forward after winter to a spring of joy.”

This post is very difficult for me to write. I feel as if I’m recalling a dream, somewhat nightmarish in nature, trying to sift through vague, bizarre, difficult details and memories. It’s about a time in my life that was all-too real at the time. Now, looking back, it seems nearly unbelievable.

We really did that? We really voluntarily wanted these roles in this story?

It’s quite the drama, actually: there’s Shackleton-like endurance; a dragon and goblins; faulty and flawed, though maturing, “heroes”; plenty of character development; impeccable comedic timing; real-life lessons in redemption; and it conveniently parallels with Lord of the Rings analogies and narratives.

This story recounts our trials and tribulations as the tenants of Catherine Pickering’s basement, and also how God graciously provided a way for us to move back into our old apartment.

Last September, I wrote about how Lindsey and I had moved into the basement of an elderly lady named Catherine Pickering, and about our adventures with her Gollum-like dog, Jiminy Cricket (Jimmy for short).

I am sparing most of the “juicier” details of this story because this isn’t the place for that. My goal isn’t to vindictively drag out all the problems and shortcomings we perceived in our elderly tenant. It won’t do me any good personally to recount specific episodes that still to this day make my blood boil. The goal here is to show that God does work, he does restore, and he sends us through trying times for a reason. Hopefully this is the message that I convey.

For seven months – September, 2010 through March, 2011 – Lindsey I and rented out the basement in the home of Catherine Pickering, an 87 year-old widow with mobility issues. The agreement was we would pay a very moderate monthly rent, but would pay for all groceries and perform most of the cooking and cleaning duties. Through Lindsey’s time voluntarily cleaning Catherine’s kitchen and bathroom through Disabled Resource Services, we saw this as an opportunity to help a sweet, elderly lady in her waning years, all while cutting down our monthly expenses in order to save up more money for a house down payment.

We loved our apartment – it was our first home together – but we weren’t so attached that we were hesitant in taking calculated risks if we thought the outcome would be worth it. My mother, on the other hand, couldn’t believe we were leaving our “cute, little apartment.” But we saw it as a win-win: Elderly lady gets someone to help her around the house and keep an eye on her (mobility issues = high chance of falling), young, ambitious married couple gets an extra leg up on financial goals.

Or so we thought. I’m writing this from my new old apartment, so things obviously didn’t pan out as we had hoped. Proverbs 16:1-2 comes to mind.

It was messy from the beginning. Lindsey and I made a few communication and “assumption” blunders in the first month or so that wouldn’t have been a big deal if we were renting the basement of someone younger than 60, but with Catherine, they proved monumental in scope. We did a lot of learning on the fly with how to live and communicate with an elderly woman whose expectations of us seemed to be exceeding the written and agreed-upon contract. In her eyes, we did very little right. And whenever we were “to blame,” we were screamed at and berated. There was very little “normal” communication with Catherine. Even discussions that began in civil tones often times ended up with her going off on us, leaving my wife in tears and me having to leave the room before I lost my temper verbally.

It was a cycle. There would be two weeks or so of calm, and then out of nowhere – usually when Lindsey and I came up the stairs into the kitchen first thing in the morning – she would unleash a scathing report of how we had failed her recently. We lived in fear of surprise verbal attacks. No matter how much we implored Catherine to simply talk to us, to simply ask us to do something for her, the negative communication – or lack of communication altogether – continued.

On occasion, her niece Barbara – who, along with her husband, had previously rented Catherine’s basement for nearly a year – would play mediator. And it was through Barbara that we learned – after we moved in, mind you – that Catherine’s kids had long wanted her to move into an assisted living facility. Barbara also enlightened us about Catherine’s poor relationship with her late mother-in-law and how that still impacts her personal relationships and communication patterns. And because Barbara didn’t have a day job when she and her husband lived in the basement, she could attend to Catherine’s every beck and call. Barbara was certain that Catherine was projecting those familial expectations on me and Lindsey, and when they weren’t met, we were sure to feel the wrath of Catherine’s entitlement. We also learned that Catherine suffered from short-term memory loss, which explained a great deal about why she thought we weren’t keeping “our side” of the contract.

In one sense, the things Barbara shared with us were extremely helpful. But in another, they were maddening. Why weren’t we told any of this when we were first talking with her about moving in last July? Furthermore, if Barbara and her family knew all of this, why in the world would they let two 20-somethings move into Catherine’s basement when she was in such a precarious state of mental and physical health? We had no business being there. No one did.

One night in mid November, a couple days after the latest blowup, Barbara came over after dinner to tell us that Catherine wanted us to move out. We calmly and honestly told Barbara our side of the story, she took it to Catherine, and she relented of her desire to get rid of us. She said she would do a better job communicating. We said we would too, and that we would use a white board on the pantry door as a two-way message board in hopes that that would alleviate stress and miscommunication.

But we knew we couldn’t keep living like this – especially when we both worked full time and I was coaching. We didn’t feel like we had a home to come home to at the end of the day, and no matter what we did for Catherine, it never seemed to be good enough. I feared going upstairs in the morning before work. We were exhausted and losing hope. I was openly questioning our sanity for making the decision to move in here. We were desperate.

After the meeting with Barbara, we began looking at houses, as well as any cheap apartment we could find. We even called our old landlords, an older married couple living in Windsor, to see if they had any openings in our old building or in any of their other properties. The experiment had failed.

December rolled around, and things started to improve. No more yelling matches. The white board was proving to be quite an effective means of communication between the two parties. Or maybe all the “joy to the world” and “peace on earth” stuff was getting to us all.

Whatever the case, December, then January, then most of February rolled by without incident. Things were pleasant; we had found a rhythm. Maybe the experiment hadn’t failed. We cut back on our aggressiveness to find another place to live. Catherine was pleasant to be around, and Jimmy was getting more and more used to us. There was hope.

On Sunday, February 20, 2011, it was our turn to host our church small group, and we shared with our team our absolute gratitude and praise to God for coming through like He did. We had been through so much, and because of the trials we had learned more about what true contentment looks like. All of the past trials seemed so dark, but we knew that God was using it to grow us up. But things were good now, or at least remarkably better. God had come through for us. We were completely and thoroughly floored by His mercy and provision. Our team rejoiced with us. It was a milestone of a night.

The next day, Monday, February 21 – the day before Dayspring’s district playoff game – I got a phone call on my way home from basketball practice. It was our old landlords. The exact same apartment we used to live in was going to be available at the end of March. Our old apartment. We had the right of first refusal. They needed an answer by the end of the week.

I shared the news with Lindsey that night. To say we were stunned is an understatement. One day after we shared our gratitude and praise with our small group for the work God had done in our situation with Catherine, here, literally, was an open door to get out while the getting was good. So what if we didn’t have enough for a down payment yet? In the midst of the darkest days in the basement, we told ourselves that if our old place opened up again, we’d take it. So here was God, in our minds, really outdoing Himself with generosity, with a place for us to enter into and be revived and restored. After a few days of praying, thinking and talking with friends about what to do, we called our landlords and told them we were in. We didn’t want to chance a Catherine “relapse” into her former ways. We also didn’t want to keep living at such a frantic pace, always walking on egg shells and wondering if we’re doing a good enough job. We were ready to go home.

The move-back-in date was set for March 26. Welcome home. Again.

Sometime on the morning of Monday, February 21, I got a tweet from @JRRTolkien quoting The Hobbit. It read, “The dragon was dead, and the goblins overthrown, and their hearts looked forward after winter to a spring of joy.” I found it an inspiring and interesting quote when I first read it, but after I got off the phone with the landlords, the pieces immediately came together.

Catherine, so often full of verbal flames of false accusation, disgust and disdain, was the “dragon.” Jimmy, petulant, ugly and of dark complexion, was the “goblins.” Or maybe the dragon was the experience of living in Catherine’s home, and the goblins had to do with working at AMG Creative. At any rate, the long winter was coming to an end. God was pushing aside the clouds, letting the light of opportunity into our lives.

He had redeemed our living condition. (I told Lindsey that I felt like a hobbit, that I was going “there and back again.” She didn’t get it.) Maybe He would provide a new place of work for me, a job I could be passionate and excited about. Oh, the hope we felt in the last week of February was so rich, so promising.

“. . . their hearts looked forward after winter to a spring of joy.”

On Saturday, February 26, we told Catherine of our decision over dinner. She took it very well. We were a bit worried she would feel betrayed or abandoned. But she was cordial and understanding. It was going to be OK.

Two days later I was fired from AMG Creative.

Still, our “hearts looked forward after winter to a spring of joy.”

In spite of our reduced income and desire to save for a house, we stayed committed to moving back to our old apartment. March passed slowly for several reasons. Basketball was over. I was unemployed and trying to get my head around that. (Quick side note: being unemployed and living in the basement of an 87 year-old woman is a killer to the male ego. God was really working now.) And Catherine was becoming difficult again. We don’t know if it was in “retaliation” to our decision to move out, but within a week of telling her, her actions and words had made it plain to us that we had made the right choice.

March 26, 2011, dawned warm and glorious. Four hours and two trips with the U-Haul were all we needed to be back where our story began. We said goodbye to Catherine, even giving her flowers and a thank-you note. It didn’t seem to have much of a positive affect: she withheld our security deposit and demanded another 30 dollars because she thought we packed up some food items that were hers. We turned the cheek and paid the extra amount.

We felt bad – and I still do, to some extent – that she felt so ill-treated by us. But I will go to the grave with the peace that God will judge our time and actions there. James 1:27 is no small edict, and we knew the implications of our service when we first moved in. We busted our tails for her. I hope one day she can see the good we did; that God will redeem our time in her basement.

As for Lindsey and I, we love being back home. I don’t think “home” as ever carried as much meaning for us as it does now. Not that I necessarily took that concept for granted before, but being back here, being restored to our former residence, it’s a shadow of Heaven in a lot of ways; it’s an ever-pertinent example of God’s redeeming work and stubborn lovingkindness. We are thrilled for this opportunity, to be with old friends and to live with a revived intentionality to bring God’s love to our new old home.

Not that everything is fully or instantly cured by a change of scenery. I’m still looking for work; Lindsey and I are still sinful people who have unique challenges in our marriage; we are wrestling with spiritual disciplines, time management and making the most of our time in this phase of life; God is still making us into His image – that didn’t stop just because we moved to a “better” place again.

And even though the first official day of summer is only a few days away, we are still eager and hopeful, our hearts looking forward “to a spring of joy.”

Just don’t expect us to sublet your basement anytime soon.

The Redemption of the Tourist: Part III

Post subtitle: "Moving in a Different Direction"

"Snow is of a loveliness beyond my most secret thoughts. . ." - J.R.R. Tolkien

It was a Monday. The last day of February. Six days after our loss to Heritage Christian in the district playoffs (see part II). I walked through the doors of AMG Creative at 8:03 a.m., ready to bid the first full week of work sans basketball a good morning.

Instead I was immediately ushered into the conference room by Terry, the VP, and Bill, the owner (also Terry’s father-in-law). They closed the door, we sat down, and I knew this wasn’t going to be good.

Terry did all the talking: Let me get straight to the point…we’re moving in a different direction with your position…this is your last day…here’s your last paycheck…you don’t have any vacation time left.

He opened up a manila folder he had with him and slid my paycheck across the desk. He seemed to be enjoying this – or, at least, he wasn’t finding it difficult.

I asked if I could ask why I was being fired so unceremoniously, so out of the blue nowhere.

A brief allusion was made to my performance review back in early December, but Terry repeated more than once that AMG was “moving in a different direction” with the Assistant Creative Director position.

“So, that’s it?” I said a little defensively, a little incredulously. “Nearly three years working here and I don’t even get a one-week heads up?”

Silence.

Finally Bill spoke up. He seemed distraught; almost remorseful. His words betrayed the non-verbals on his face. “Do you want to gather your personal things now or later?”

“I’ll do it now,” I said, snatching up my check and quickly exiting the conference room without another word.

I was able to say a brief goodbye to the two graphic designers (we shared a common work space in the back of the building, the “creative den”) before Terry came back and called them into the conference room. They had no idea what was going on. It became clear then that my dismissal had been a well-kept secret in a company only eight people large.

Bill was polite and calm while I packed up my stuff and cleaned off my computer. I was a mix of anger, confusion, and a desire to try to save face and not douse this bridge with lighter fluid before I crossed it one last time.

Somewhat strange was how Bill hovered over me and frequently came back to see if I was done packing up my things. I later learned that my replacement was waiting in Bill’s office for me to vacate the premises, hence Bill’s sense of urgency for me to get out the door. Classy.

By 8:45, I was out the door. I offered a brief thanks to Bill as I left, hands full of boxes and books, but I don’t think I would have shaken his hand if mine were free, anyway. I sat in my car for a couple minutes, trying to figure out what had just happened, and thinking that this wasn’t how I wanted to part company with AMG.

Not because I loved the company and its management. Far from it. And it wasn’t because I was going to necessarily miss my job duties. Writing ad, website, direct-mail and personalized-letter copy for dental laboratories has a pretty short shelf life of passion/interest, and I had passed that expiration date several months prior to Feb. 28, 2011. But I was going to miss Mike and Mike – the designers – and Ben, one of the account executives. The three of them made my time there worth the struggle.

Now that basketball had wrapped up for the season, I had time to do some job searching and exploring of options. In this economy, I did not want to leave this job until another one had been secured. My animosity towards all things dental aside, I knew that this was better than nothing, and I was still mentally prepared to work as hard as I could, biding my time until another door opened. Lindsey and I were saving up for a house down payment, enjoying every perk that came with being DINKs in this day and age.

As I sat in my car, the future suddenly a blind curve in the Poudre canyon, I felt a little like George Costanza after being served up a deceitful helping of “It’s not you, it’s me.” We’re going in a different direction with your position. It’s not you, it’s the company. From Terry’s indifferent disposition, to the secrecy of the decision and the shame that accompanied the catastrophic suddenness of it all, I was in a state of utter shock and disrespect.
How dare they. I was raw. I had wanted to leave this place on my own terms, and instead I was dusted off their shoulders like an annoying speck of dandruff.

Bill is a certified dental technician, and started AMG specifically to help dental labs in their marketing efforts towards dentists. I would say that 95 percent of AMG’s clientele is from the dental lab industry. I joined the company first as a project manager right out of CSU in 2008, then worked my way up into the creative writer position. In January 2010, I was made ACD. By February, 2011, I was ready for some new scenery, a new stretch of road to experience – even though I was grateful for being employed right out of college. I was tired of writing about fake teeth and dealing with the nepotism and selfishness of AMG’s leaders. I wanted something new, something I was passionate about, something I actually wanted to do. I wanted to start the next journey of my life and career.

But not like this.

I sat in my car, not knowing where to go. I sat in my car, motionless. I sat in my car, thinking that at least I didn’t have to write dental copy anymore.

Events and activities over the next couple of days remain somewhat of a blur. I know there was lots of time talking and praying with Lindsey. I know I started treating my relationship with God like it actually mattered, and the Psalms became my hiding place. I know I tried to get over it too fast, resulting in my first mental and emotional breakdown. I remember going down a long and terrible rabbit hole in my mind, then “snapping.” The tears came as if through an overwhelmed dam on the Missouri somewhere in South Dakota. I cried for minutes on end, clutching my wife like a life raft, confessing my fear through the sobs. I could barely breathe.

The next morning Lindsey texted me Psalm 30:5 from her work and said she was praying for me. My prayers that morning were earnest, feeble, but enlightened with a slight awareness of hope yet to be fully realized.

I needed to get out. Being unemployed and living in an old lady’s basement aren’t exactly the greatest for one’s self-image and self-confidence.

I went snow shoeing in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. Just me and God and the snow that fell periodically throughout the day. I was wanting to go all the way to Lake Isabelle, but the weather looked to be turning for the worse. Gray clouds crashed on the peaks above me; the pass was shrouded in cold secrecy. The high crags passed in and out of view as the clouds swirled. The snow fell harder. I turned home, my back to the wind.

The Redemption of the Tourist: Part II

Post subtitle: "The First Season"

It’s not easy being a head coach when an assistant coach thinks I’m one of the players the first time we meet.

So I look younger than my ripe, 26 years of age. And at 5’9”, I don’t exactly possess the gravitas of Phil Jackson, John Thompson or Rex Ryan. The only players I stand above are the foreign exchange students from South Korea.

If these opening paragraphs let on a slight sense of self-consciousness and insecurity, well, welcome to my first year as a high school head basketball coach.

I came into Dayspring Christian Academy with pretty lofty ambitions: being a role model of godly masculinity for my guys, instilling life values through the framework of high school athletics, and turning Dayspring into a basketball powerhouse, because why should football get all the glory? But mostly, with this being my first time since 2005 coaching boys, I wanted them to teach, show and gird them with practical and meaningful insight about what it means to be a man. I didn’t want to just win games; I wanted to make them into men.

Except I had no idea how to do that. Or, at least, not a very intentional or mapped-out idea of how to build them up in the ways they needed to be built up. I was flailing and failing to connect with the older players, the captains. When outbursts and sarcasm trickled through my actions and words as a result of not getting respect or not meeting my exact goals or visions, it became easier to focus on wins and losses and not on how well I was lovingly leading these boys in greater pursuits of manliness and maturity.

As it turned out, the one who learned the most in my first year as head coach at DCA was me. A little about leadership, a little about the game itself, but mostly about my shortcomings, my inconsistencies, and the things I was keeping from God. These painful glances in the mirror were the clearest when personnel issues had to be dealt with, and in my five years of coaching, I have never had a more tumultuous in-house season like this one. My girls’ teams at Thompson Valley in Loveland were less dramatic and contentious.

This first year wasn’t a complete failure, though some of the parents may beg to differ. For the first half of the season I rarely felt like myself, and the team seemed to share in my struggles for authenticity, perspective, self-discipline and faith.

Harley Lowe, the AD, was a much-needed support and sounding board during these early trials. His insights were critical in my own, as well as the team’s, development. Towards mid February, many of the on-the-job lessons I had learned began to bear fruit, and our lopsided losing record began to straighten out. I was being (more) encouraging; the guys began to buy into what we were selling; there was respect and optimism; we were actually looking like a team.

Two games will always stay with me from this season. One was a raucous home win against Longmont Christian, who had beaten us by three back in January. When they came to our place with district seeding implications on the line, we blew them out of the water. My guys played with grit on defense, patience and execution on offense, and our crowd was fantastic. This was the basketball I dreamed about before I was a head coach. This was fun.

With only one game left in the regular season after Longmont, we finally felt our chemistry and purpose coming together. As it turned out, this win didn’t boost us in the district standings – we were basically locked in as the sixth seed – but we weren’t playing like the sixth seed. Heritage Christian would have its hands full with us when districts started in a little less than a week.

Thus, the second game that I will carry with me is the district playoff game against the two-seeded Heritage Christian. We had played Heritage twice during the regular season and lost both meetings by a combined total of 10 points. The recent win against Longmont gave our confidence caffeine high; we had a Cinderella story on our minds. We were a senior-heavy team; Heritage started three sophomores and two juniors. We thought we could handle the playoff pressure better than them. Even though the game was at their place, we knew we could win. After our last regular season loss to Heritage – in their gym – I guaranteed my guys we would beat them come playoff time.

Did I allude to Rex Ryan earlier? My guarantee came up begging. The game started off disastrously: we laid an egg in the first quarter. Yeah. No points. But our defense was playing well enough that Heritage had only scored 11 in that first period. We went into halftime down 15.

I don’t remember exact details from my halftime speech. Looking back on it, I can remember a general sense of what I said. There was a lot of imploring to keep fighting, to stay together, because that’s what we had been doing all year: fighting, playing our butts even when no one believed we could it. This is a football school, look at those poor basketball players, aww, aren’t they special, look at how hard they play. No, no more patronizing. We hadn’t come this far to go out quietly into the cold of late Colorado winter. I think I told them that this comeback would be our finest hour, that life’s great challenges require great resolve and faith, and this was a test of who we were as men.

Andrew Garcia played point for us most of the year, but it had been a massive struggle. Last season’s starting point guard blew out his ACL playing football, and Andrew, a natural scoring guard, was forced to learn how to lead a team. Kind of like his coach. A game or two before the Longmont win, we moved Andrew to the 2-guard spot and Thomas Martin, another senior, to the point. We liked how the experiment had worked so far, but nothing could compare to what happened in the second half.

Andrew came out of the locker room swinging. Three after three after three. Our crowd got into it. Heritage played tentative basketball. We chipped, chipped, chipped away at the lead. In total, Andrew hit six 3’s in the second half. He should have been playing this position all year. With a little over three minutes left in the fourth quarter, we were only down six. We were really going to do it.

But a goose egg in the first quarter of a district playoff game is too steep of a hill to overcome. I think we lost by eight or nine. Heritage hit their free throws down the stretch. When our bus pulled up in front of our school around 10:30 that night, Andrew approached me with a strange request: “Can you open up the gym?” I said I would, but asked why. “I want to say goodbye,” he said.

So he said goodbye, and the tears were still on his cheeks when he exited the gym for the last time about 10 minutes later. This was the same kid who volunteered to help a teammate finish running his 45 suicides because he was 45 minutes late for practice. A kid no more.

Can I get a redo? Can I start this season over again, so I can give Andrew the senior year he deserved? Can we restart this whole thing over again with the perspective, lessons and attitudes that I now have? Please tell me something is redeemable from all of this. I want another shot.

The line between success and failure is very blurred when I look back on this season. There is nothing wrong with failure. It’s a great catalyst; the best of all teachers. It is the best motivator to check where your joy, identity and fulfillment are grounded. But I’m still left wondering about what could have been.

Part of me believes that the reoccurring struggles throughout the season were manifestations of larger stresses in my life. Work wasn’t helping my overall mood and outlook on life. I was coming in early and working through lunches in order to be able to leave early for practice or games. On game days I wouldn’t get home until nearly midnight, and was up in a few hours to start it all over again. I sensed a giant bulls-eye on my back, and the bosses were constantly taking aim at me. On top of that, I was beginning to look for a new place of employment anyway. I had been at AMG Creative since graduating from CSU in 2008, and three years of writing dental laboratory copy can be a little wearisome. I wasn’t checked out mentally, but I had my books in hand and was looking in my wallet for the library card.

And at the time, Lindsey and I were subletting the basement of a house owned by an 87 year-old lady. She was demanding and angry. There was so much going on – basketball issues, work issues, an incredibly delicate situation at “home,” and, oh yeah, I’m married. Our next date night, babe? Try two months from now. Lindsey was more than a trooper; she was so patient, so supportive. I don’t know if I’ll truly know how hard this first season was on her. She was a renewing spirit throughout it all.

Naturally, due all of everything going on and no time for any of it, my quiet times and prayer life suffered. How could I be a godly role model to these boys if I wasn’t being a role model to myself? I was so unbalanced; life was moving too fast. I was running a spiritual deficit: imploring and teaching principles and values that I myself wasn’t practicing in my own life. I honestly don’t know how we got through it, or how things improved later in the season. God’s grace was pulling overtime. I don’t know if I fully realized it at the time.

Coaching is for the young. But the life Lindsey and I were living is for the dogs. We couldn’t keep up that pace. It’s no wonder that God pulled the rug out from under us only a few days after the season ended, but I’ll explain more about that in later posts.

This offseason, I’m reading all I can on leadership and resting in God’s joy. Season of Life by Jeffrey Marx is an invaluable read for coaches, parents and boys; it was convicting and inspiring all at once, and has provided a paradigm shift in my approach to coaching. I’m also reading Tony Dungy’s The Mentor Leader and N.D. Wilson’s Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl. Dungy’s book is tremendous, and Wilson’s is, well, it’s “poetry with testicles,” as he would say. Get all three of these books.

So, you ask, here at the end of this bittersweet tale: Do I think my first year as a head coach was a failure or a success?

With a record of 7-and-10, it’s easy to say it was a failure. But one thing I’m learning is how to properly define “success” and “failure.”

This season was a success – but only because of the failures.

The Redemption of the Tourist: Part I

"Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end." - Legolas in The Two Towers

I will not apologize for the amount of time in between posts. This space is not a diary; I don’t have to confess my lack-of-posting sins to the existential, or metaphysical, or whatever-isical nature of this space in order to be restored to the blogosphere’s good graces. Or yours, for that matter.

I’ve been on a long road since October, 2010, and my circumstances, emotions and duties have demanded every last second of time and energy. Every exit has passed by in a blur, and, as Garth would say, that white line just kept getting longer and longer. This road has gone ever on and on.

Until recently, anyway.

Finally, a rest stop with a view.

It probably sounds like everything since October, 2010 has been total crap. Not quite. There was actually a lot of good. Yet even the good brought its share of trials and stress. Here, from this brief respite along Highway Life, is what I see when I look back on this road, this weary stretch that's enough to turn the most seasoned tourist into a recluse:

• Coached my first season of high school basketball as a head coach
• Got fired from my first job since college
• Moved out of the basement of an 87 year-old woman and her 87 year-old Chihuahua back into our old apartment
• Took a two week sabbatical in central/eastern Europe
• Ongoing introspection and career counseling in hopes that this 26 year-old will figure out what he wants to do when he grows up
• Still looking for gainful employment in this intrepid economy
• Went on a church flood/geology expedition to Moab
• Am daily getting my teeth kicked in by the tough-loving, determined-to-grow-me-up God of life, the universe, everything

I will take all of these items in turn. Not because I enjoy baring my soul to you, but because God has been incessantly working on my heart and mind throughout this journey, and if there are others out there now who need perspective, encouragement, or hope, maybe they will find glimpses of whatever it is they’re looking for in my story. Life is narrative. This is for the greater good, I suppose, with a little bit of catharsis thrown in for good measure.

So, this is what’s on tap. Hopefully one post per day over the next week or so. Pull over with me if you have the time. Your destination isn't the most important thing, anyway.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

At least no one is taking Juan Williams to court over his opinions on Islam:

A Tale of Two Headlines

Two headlines caught my eye yesterday, one at National Review Online and the other on the BBC website. They speak Dickens-esque volumes about the current and future state of Europe and the West:

“What the Wilders Trail Means”

“Merkel says German multicultural society has failed”

Germany and the Netherlands share a border, and their respective capitals are only separated by roughly 400 miles. But these two countries are oceans apart when it comes to understanding the impact that foreign (read: Islamic) immigration is having on their societies.

Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the multiculturalism Germany has practiced – especially in respect to the assimilation (or lack thereof) of immigrants from Islamic countries – for the last few decades has “utterly failed.”

Meanwhile, Dutch politician Geert Wilders is being tried for “hate speech” against Islam. What makes the Wilders trial so ridiculous/crucial is that he’s the leader of the third-largest political party in the Netherlands. In essence, this man’s own country is trying his party’s platform to ensure that no one’s feelings are hurt by said platform. Holy consequences, Batman!

It’s a good thing Chancellor Merkel isn’t an established political leader in the Netherlands, otherwise her “utterly failed” comments could be construed as “hateful” and land her in court.

This dichotomy lays bare the utterly self-defeating and un-multicultural foundation of the multiculturalism. The Dutch are apparently so accepting and inclusive that they can’t quite bring themselves to accept and include a certain culture/worldview if it isn’t, by their definition, “multicultural.” As Mark Steyn put it, “tolerant” liberal democracies pretty much suck at tolerating those who reject the “multiculti pieties.”

Germany, though, appears to be realizing the error of her ways.

Luther as the Rugged Individualist

I’m slightly perturbed by the bad PR that the concept of “rugged individualism” gets from the Tim Keller/Tullian Tchividjian brand of evangelical Christianity. This hyper individuality, the narrative goes, is a uniquely American ego trip that places the individual above community, relationships, and even the need to be saved. In sermons and books, I’ve been told that “rugged individualism” is a deterrent to godly fellowship and true, Gospel-oriented lives. By pulling ourselves up by our boot straps, we deny total reliance and affection for Jesus, and fall into the American/Western capitalist cowboy trap: living life on our own.

Obviously and of course, there are pitfalls, downsides, and levels of emotional emptiness in this rugged individualist stereotype. I would just ask for some perspective on the issue. The way I see it, this super-individualized, American cowboy trope that is lamented by a popular evangelical leaders actually got its start with one of Protestantism’s founding fathers: Martin Luther.

It was Luther, after all, who nailed home the point (literally) that you don’t have to go through a certain church, or a certain group of anointed men, or succumb to herd-mentality religion to be saved. His message focused on the fact that you – you, the individual – are capable of having an intimate, redeeming and personal relationship with the Creator of the universe. Some guy wearing a big hat and fancy robe has no business arbitrating your relationship with God.

Luther made salvation personal again. The Protestant Reformation was revolutionary precisely because it called attention to the individual, but not in a way that glossed over our sinful nature and need to be saved. Luther recognized that we each have a sin debt owed to God, and no amount of corporate worship activity can redeem and regenerate the individual soul.

The pervasive quality of freedom enjoyed by Americans was born precisely out of this same belief: that the individual alone is accountable to himself and to his God. The government shall have no “positive” rights over the individual, and our fates – as well as spiritual/religious affinities – should not be tied to the “collective” population. I am free. Hear me roar. The Catholic Church heard that roar via Luther, and the British crown heard it all the way across the Atlantic in 1776. What’s the lesson here? That once an individual realizes his freedom in God’s eyes, he can then begin to free the rest of society.

Sure, maybe two hundred years down the line this individualized society has taken that freedom to some unfortunate outcomes: The value, need and importance of building healthy communities – especially the church – can be downplayed in this environment. iPod spirituality says I can still belief in God, pray and read the Bible, but I don’t need those hypocrites at church telling me what to do. Or, individuals become so confident in their own abilities, wealth, and mistaken assumptions about the nature of sin that they don’t think they need to be saved. Epic fail on both counts.

But I fail to see how that is only an Americanized problem – let alone the direct result of “rugged individualism.” Are we the only society in the history of the earth – bloated by wealth, arrogance and pride – to not seek God for fulfillment and purpose? Are the social democracies of Western Europe, crippled with group-first socialism and “let’s all get along” multiculturalism, teeming with spiritually-alive, God-seeking populations? By devaluing the importance of the individual, Europe is choking under a “tyranny of good intentions,” where over-regulation trumps creative choice, and the State poses as a benevolent (albeit a financially insolvent) deity that doles out service after service for the “good of the whole.”

The rampant socialization/communalization of government and society is just as much of an anathema to vibrant, Gospel-focused communities as unchecked rugged individualism. It might behoove evangelical/Reformed leaders in America to pay tribute to the heritage and value of Western individualism, while still exposing and correcting the dangers that come from blind self-reliance.

Otherwise, I think we risk alienating a good chunk of the population that sees “rugged individualism” as more virtue than vice – especially in an election year featuring heavy evangelical involvement and rife with backlash against an increasingly socialized, anti-individual government.

All the Sexy Halloween Costumes Have Daddy Issues

Steve Silverstein, president and CEO of costume retailer Spirit Halloween, is an unlikely source for commentary on the critical influence fathers have in the lives of their children. But here he is, explaining the basic relational needs of boys and girls and what happens when those needs aren’t properly met by daddy, via the Halloween costume framework:

“Guys want to be funny or horrific so they stand out at the party. . . . Girls want to be beautiful, and when they grow up they want to be sexy.”

Translation: Guys want to be noticed and important, seeking to add value, worth and creativity to their societal and social surroundings. When they don’t learn from their fathers what that significance should look like, they resort to slapstick, superficial means to achieve that end.

Girls need to know they are loved and beautiful. If this security, love and acceptance isn’t firmly established by the dad, she will play up her sexiness so that other men will give her that attention and appreciation. Even if that means dressing like a mini-skirted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

They Don’t Believe We’re Made in God’s Image, but Their Nutrition Advice is Spot On!

I came across an interesting post at the Resurgence website the other day, titled, “Pastor, You’re Probably Fat: 6 Things to Do About It” by John Catanzaro.

I am not a pastor, but I wanted to see what the Resurgence folks had to say about the cross-section of nutrition and Godly living. This particular post was part of a larger topic about the theology of the body. I briefly read through some of the previous articles, and liked what I saw – humans are made in God’s image, the body is a temple, it will be resurrected again, God cares about how we take care of our body, no physical/spiritual dichotomy, etc. etc. All good stuff.

But tip #5 on “Pastor, You’re Probably Fat” really threw me for a loop:

Cut your calories by 50% and get them from wholesome food. Eat more green vegetables and quality protein (fish and organic sources of meat). There are wholesome weight reduction programs that include excellent food choices and assist in changing the negative hormone behavior. When a person is fat for a long time the body forgets how to metabolize fat and needs help. I would recommend you see a qualified doctor who can assist you with this. (Emphasis mine.)

This is great. Christian theology of the body is this awesome, awe-inspiring thing and is way better than the secular/materialistic view of human bodyness, but let’s still the follow the out-of-date nutritional advice of the secular humanists to take care of God’s special creation!

Eat more vegetables and organic meat? Who’s been pushing that nutritional worldview if not the secular humanists who run our government health agencies and environmental non-profits? The science behind “more vegetables, less meat – unless it’s organic” becomes more dubious by the day. Everyone at Resurgence is so culturally aware and on top of things, but somehow they missed this study released last summer that found there’s no nutritional difference between organic and non-organic foods.

They also apparently aren’t aware of the latest realization that saturated fats – mostly found in red meat – are actually pretty darn good for you, and that it’s not the caloric intake that matters, but rather the kind of caloric intake that determines your healthiness. The American obesity plague is a result of diets high in carbohydrates (not fat) – especially of the white flour/sugar carbs.

Gary Taubes wrote the monolithically impressive Good Calories, Bad Calories (roughly 1 billion pages long and very technical) and is following it up this December with the streamlined, easier-to-read Why We Get Fat. He debunks decades’ worth of bad fat science that resulted in the detrimental Food Pyramid, among other things. Taubes gets to the heart of the modern diet/nutritional paradigm and why, based on science, its premise – saturated fat is bad for you – has never been proven.

(Here’s a great article by Taubes that serves as a phenomenal introduction to the ideas in his books; I’ll post more nutrionally-oriented links at the end, too.)

I guess the point of all this is that, if Christians are going to have a theology of the body, how much sense does it make to have a theology of nutrition that isn’t backed by verifiable science and that follows the narrative of very non-Christian sources? It just seems a little self-defeating. I don’t necessarily know what a Christian theology on nutrition would look like, and it’s definitely not a “Gospel” issue, but I’m pretty sure the prophet Daniel got fat because he didn’t eat the king’s ribeye.

On a personal note, I really have a hard time when Christians advocate for organic foods. If we’re supposed to be stewards of God’s planet, organic food production is about the last route we want to pursue (requires more land, resources and money to produce same amount of food as “conventional” production methods; it is therefore less “environmentally friendly” than conventional agriculture). The United States hasn’t fed the whole world by using organic production methods. Guys like Norman Borlaug used those eeeeevil genetically-modified foods to feed starving Indians and Africans. In other words, conventional agriculture has performed some of the greatest “whatever you did for the least of these, you did for Me” acts in the history of mankind.

The advances in food science are also amazing fulfillments of the Cultural Mandate: we have taken God’s creation, and in light of the obstacles of a sin-cursed creation, we have done more with less and “subdued/cultivated” our food sources in the most efficient, globally-helpful ways possible. Only once we emerged from subsistence farming (read: “organic”) has the world enjoyed its unparalleled wealth, abundance and health on such a wide scale. Organic farming is marketed as a central tenet of a caring, responsible lifestyle. It’s all very romantic and noble. But organic farming was all the world had for thousands of years. There’s nothing romantic about starving to death and continually being held at the mercy of the land (that’s not very Gen. 1:25-28, if you ask me). What’s environmentally or culturally responsible with using more land, more resources and feeding fewer people just to have a USDA “Certified Organic” label on your carrots? But it’s a great self-esteem boost, isn’t it?

(Full disclosure: my dad works for one of those immoral and malevolent animal pharmaceutical companies that sell antibiotics and synthetic growth hormones to greedy ranchers. So there.)

If anyone from Resurgence happens to catch this post, which I doubt (thanks for your support, all seven of my subscribers!), I would love to get your feedback/comments. Here are the rest of the links to nutritionally- and scientifically-sound articles that you should find helpful/thought-provoking:

“Study: Organic food not more nutritional” by Jessica Daly, CNN

“High Yields: The Only Farming Answer” by Dennis Avery, Hudson Institute

“What if Bad Fat is Actually Good for You?” Men’s Health article

“Can A High-Fat Breakfast Be Good For You?” by Jonny Bowden, That’sFit.com

“Should We Avoid Saturated Fats? Studies Say No” by Jonny Bowden, That’sFit.com

Type Casting

Daniel Dae Kim still can’t get off the island:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb-ejxJEgqE

The Globe’s Not-a Warmin’

I’ve always liked Bob Dylan:

. . . Dylan is an old-fashioned patriot who wears cowboy hats, loves Texas as much as Greenwich Village, and spoke warmly to Rolling Stone of George W. Bush, whom he’d met when the latter was governor of Texas, while also wishing President Obama well. . . .

During an interview with Jann Wenner in the 40th anniversary edition of Rolling Stone, Dylan replied to a question about the urgency of solving global warming with the mocking, “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.”

When Wenner pressed him as to who would solve the world’s problems if not politicians, Dylan came out with words so Biblically harsh or nakedly Libertarian they are frankly astonishing to the modern ear. Forget politicians: “The world owes us nothing,” he told Wenner, “not one single thing.” And: “Human nature really hasn’t changed in 3,000 years. … It’s not meant to change. It cannot change. It’s not made to change.”

Full article about Dylan and how he is the antithesis of the leftist “ruling class” of which he still holds generational clout:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-bridge-bob-dylan-the-ruling-class-and-the-country-class/

The Gollum Upstairs

Sorry for the silence. The second half of my summer got jammed full of more trips, activities and stuff than a lifetime worth of Summers of George could dream of.

July 14-18, Lindsey and I went with a group from our church on short-term mission trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I helped plan/lead the trip with one of our pastors (I took on this responsibility shortly after I took over as the boys’ head basketball coach at Dayspring Christian, so I had lots of free time).

At any rate, I’ve decided that participating in a mission trip is easier than planning one. Over the next several days, I will be posting a multi-part series about the Pine Ridge trip. It was a very moving and memorable experience, and I want to share some of the thoughts and stories that shaped my journey.

Once we returned from Pine Ridge, it was time to pack up our apartment – our first home together – and move. Just down the road, actually. To a basement. Into the basement of an elderly lady’s house. For almost rent-free.

It’s a nice basement –about the same square footage as our two-bedroom apartment: Living room, dining room, bathroom, two bedrooms and a utility room. The only thing we share with the lady, Catherine, is her kitchen. She has a bad hip and can’t drive, so her two-car garage is ours to use, as well. And she has a huge backyard with maples and ashes and a place for a garden. It’s a great opportunity for me and Linds to save for a down payment. It’s not too shabby of a setup, either – that is, if you can tolerate living in a basement and fending off Catherine’s hell hound, a yippy, nippy little rat terrier: Jiminy Cricket. More on him in a minute.

Earlier in the summer, Lindsey came to know Catherine because she had volunteered to clean her bathrooms a couple times a month. Catherine and Lindsey hit it off well, and Lindsey enjoyed spending time with her when she went over to clean. The only thing that wasn’t enjoyable was Jiminy Cricket, or Jimmy, as Catherine usually calls him.

Catherine found so much promise in Lindsey, however, she thought it would be a great idea for us to live in her basement for practically nothing as long as we cooked, cleaned and took out the garbage. By the end of August, we were in – much to the consternation and constant disapproval of Jimmy.

Jimmy is a Katrina dog: he survived the hurricane and came to Colorado with other pets orphaned because of the storm. Somehow, Catherine found him. Orley, Catherine’s husband, had been dead a couple years by the time Jimmy arrived, so they took to each other right away. Catherine had someone to talk to again, and Jimmy also served as a home-security system. Jimmy adores Catherine, but he utterly despises every other creature on the planet that walks on two legs.

Especially those who live in his master’s basement. Every time we come up the stairs, every time we’re in the kitchen, every time we walk into the living room to talk to Catherine as she sits in her chair, the mongrel lashes out with a torrent of grating sound. He’s bitten my heels more than once and has nipped Lindsey’s on occasion. He is without a doubt the most loathsome, vile piece of flesh I have ever known.

It’s difficult to over state the hideousness of Jiminy Cricket. His legs, bony and knobby, support a fat, aging body of graying fur. The mass of his upper body is so disproportionate to his legs, that when he walks or runs, it appears that he moves sideways; it’s as if his legs are swaying his body from side to side, and he is incapable of walking in a straight line. His coat is course and very off-putting to touch; his ears resemble those of a jackrabbit; his nose is long and skinny. But his eyes – his bulging, black eyes – are the center of his disdainful repulsion. They are dark and putrid, thoroughly black and unmoving, like an orb that has no color or life. When you look into his eyes, your throat tenses with the sensation of disgust; every part of your being wants to shrink away from this foul, filthy animal. Jimmy’s ugliness is of the creepy sort. His tinny, high-pitched yelp pierces skin and shrivels ears, breeding contempt at every meeting.

So there he sits, on Catherine’s lap, raising all manner of hell as you try to have a conversation. There he charges, low and stooping, growling and foaming at the very scent of you. There he stands guard on the back of the sofa that looks across the front yard and driveway, always ready with a snarl and a shriek the moment you set foot on his master’s property. He is completely sold out to Catherine; anyone and everyone not of her is a threat to his peace and happiness.

But one day as we brought over a small load of boxes in mid August, Catherine was out, spending the day with her family. We were ready for whatever venom Jimmy would spit at us. Yet as the garage door slowly slid open and Jimmy appeared in the doorway into the kitchen (Catherine left it ajar so he could use the backyard), he let out not a single rumble, not one skin-curling bark. He even let us pick him up and take him back inside.

It was then we realized that his depraved nature only surfaced when Catherine was around to “protect.” This was a puzzling revelation, one in which I failed to fully understand until a few weeks later.

We had been in Catherine’s basement (or should I say Jimmy’s?) for more than two weeks, and still he treated us like he had never seen or smelled us before. He hated us. And I hated him. I would plot how I would silence him with the spray bottle when he would come barreling into the kitchen spewing hate and envy to greet me as I came home from work. I relished the chance to bombard him with a loud and terrible “Tssst!” if he ever brought his snarling anger too close for my comfort. I was put out by the very thought of him. He was enough to make me move out. He was my nemesis, and I was his thief, coming to steal his master away in the night.

Then just the other day, one morning after Lindsey and I left for work, Catherine fell. They took her to the hospital for x-rays, and as of this writing, she’s still there, recovering and receiving physical therapy.

We knew Jimmy acted differently without Catherine around, and now we would see what he would do without his precious master around for days on end. He warmed to us to fairly well, actually: he sat at our feet during dinner as we fed him bits of food from our meals; he came when we called him to go to the bathroom outside. One afternoon over my lunch break, I sat in the backyard reading, and he ran up to me to sit for a minute, then ran off somewhere else and repeated this activity multiple times.

He even sat on my lap for a few minutes as I watched TV from Catherine’s chair. This, I thought, was unthinkable two weeks ago.

But it is painfully obvious that he misses Catherine. He seems lost and hopeless without her. He sits on the back of the sofa looking out the window, sure that at any moment she’ll be dropped off at the end of the driveway. Every time we open the garage door, he comes bursting into the daylight expecting to see his master coming up the drive.

We don’t know when Catherine will be back. So he waits, despondent and full of longing. And what is this feeling that’s coming over me? Could it be pity for the poor wretch?

Yes, pity. Last night as I did dishes in the kitchen, I heard a cry from the living room. I glanced up to see Jimmy facing Catherine’s empty chair. He let out a series of low, mournful howls – cries of desperation and loneliness. His scrawny head thrown back and his black, vapid eyes closed in sorrow as he wailed for his long, lost precious.

Yes, “precious.” I use the term knowingly. It was that afternoon in the back yard when I first realized that Jimmy is my Gollum and that Catherine is his “Precious.” Sitting in the backyard, watching him run up to me then scamper away again reminded me of Gollum’s interactions with his Hobbit masters, and it was then I knew that he wasn’t just a revolting, angry little dog.

Jimmy is Gollum and Catherine is the Ring. She poisons him with such a deep dependence that he rages whenever anyone threatens her attention. He can’t stand the thought of not having her. He is more than content to sit in the dark with her, to sit at her feet while she sleeps, like Gollum, deep in his cave below the Misty Mountains.

When she is gone, he is somewhat civil, and is even capable of befriending others and feigning sincerity – like Sam and Frodo experienced as Gollum guided them through Middle Earth. Jimmy is trapped within himself; he is Jimmy and he is Jiminy Cricket. Sméagol couldn’t overcome Gollum, and I’m afraid the Jiminy Cricket we’ve come to pet, feed and take care of the last few days will dissolve away into horrible Jimmy the minute Catherine returns.

And I, like Bilbo, Gandalf and Frodo, feel pity for the lowly thing. I nearly choked as I witnessed his cries of loneliness in the thick of his grief. It was a completely different perspective of the natural world for me, and I learned more about Creation’s deep and fatal connection with Mankind, as well as its intense need to be repaired.

Gollum got to hold his Precious one last instant before he melted away. I don’t know what fate Jimmy has with Catherine, but I’m sure she’ll be back soon. I wonder if he’ll remember how he fell asleep on my lap like I’ll remember how he wept.

In the morning as I let Jimmy outside and fill his dish, I’ll look on him with the same dubious antagonism like Sam did with Gollum. But I’ll also see him through eyes softened by pity and grace, like Frodo, who knew the sad history of Sméagol and believed the poor creature was capable of being redeemed.

The Eco-Jihad

The greenest kids on the block aren’t your Whole-Foods-buying, Prius-driving neighbors with the wind turbines in the backyard. No, the real champions of earth-friendliness are the faithful followers of Islam.

Or so says the Prince of Wales, the royal highness of eco-absurdism.

Speaking at the Sheldonian Theatre on June 9, in a lecture to mark the 25th anniversary of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Price Charles urged mankind to save the natural world through the means of “sacred traditions.” In the Prince’s ecumenically-patchwork doctrine, our ruthless destruction of the environment stems from an ignorance of these sacred religious and spiritual traditions – most notably Islam.

The Fresh Prince of Fresh Air bemoaned the fact that Islam’s “treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge” – these “priceless” gifts to the world – are being overshadowed by the “dominant drives towards Western materialism.” You know, the barbaric notion that “to be truly modern you have to ape the West.” If only we could only follow Islam’s “spiritual principles,” said Charles, then our environmental worries will be over!

It’s all very clear now. For the last decade, we right-wing Islamophobes have had it all wrong. We’ve thought that bin Laden and the like were waging their jihad in the name of Allah. But in reality, their global struggles have been about the restoration of a clean, un-Westernized eco Eden.

Ergo, if you’re of the Islamic tradition and you want to save “the environment” and still get a guaranteed spot with the 72 virgins, fly planes into buildings. Blow up the London Tube. Smuggle C4 on a plane via your underwear. Park a car bomb in Times Square. Stage a “massacre” on a flotilla in Israeli waters. Because the worst polluters and CO2-contributors to Allah’s delicate creation are those materialistic Westerners with their abnormal carbon footprints. Felling the Great Satan – surprise-surprise – has nothing to do with a world-wide caliphate after all. Just greener lives for those of us still alive.

This Islamic eco-platitude works just fine if you view the world through multicultural-colored windows. But reality has a way of smashing thinly-paned glass.

Not more than a week after Prince Charles’s hour-long tribute to Islam’s greener side, members of the Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC) group berated British soldiers during their unit’s homecoming parade in a neighborhood of Barking, Essex. Prince Charles was undoubtedly surprised that the MAC’s protest had nothing to do with the soldiers’ Westernized affluence and environmental unfriendliness.

“'This is a protest against parading in a Muslim area. We love death the way you love life,” shouted one MAC member. “Butchers return” and “Murderers” were also common refrains from the MAC contingent.

Muslims cut from this kind of cloth care nothing at all about the state of the “environment.” And about their “sacred traditions” – I wonder if Prince Charles includes female genital mutilation and honor killings among said traditions. Like the rest of the multicultural establishment, Prince Charles probably considers Islam’s “contributions” in areas like architecture and math as evidence of the faith’s noble, culturally-positive legacy.

But as scholar and author Rodney Stark points out, Muslims never “had” it. “The civilization we typically associate with Islam was in fact the civilization of the Christians and Jews they were ruling,” said Stark in a recent interview. “When those Christians and Jews finally disappeared, so too did that advanced ‘Muslim’ civilization.” Oh, well. At least NASA is here to make them feel good about their cultural and religious legacies.

One of the more dangerous revelations from this episode is that environmental doomsayers, like Sir Charles, will bark up any tree they think can help them “save” the “planet.” Climategate and Glaciergate brought the pure, wind-driven science of climate change urgency to a screeching halt, and now it’s time for religion – Islam – to save the day. Allah has gone green. It’s absurd simply writing that. How absurd must it feel to actually believe this nonsense?

I’m not normally a fan of Christopher Hitchens, but he made some pertinent observations about Charles’ speech. In an article in Slate, Hitchens assures us that the Prince’s remarks drew some “wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience.” Hitchens then went on to quote a document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe – “a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate” and not the saving of the environment – stating that the “primary work” in establishing a global Islamic state “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furor about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”

And the Prince of Wales is first among the vacuous.

All is Not Lost: My Lost Series Finale Review

Those last 15 minutes. Oh, those last 15 minutes. They will go down as the most controversial/gripping 15 minutes in television history.

What was shaping up to be a series finale to end all series’ finales, the last 15 minutes of Lost airtime took a Titanic-sized turn for the bizarro.

I’ve been with Lost since the beginning, and I’m torn in a bajillion different directions about the finale, “The End.” Tuesday morning (I wasn’t able to watch it Sunday night – yea for the interwebs) I tweeted that the whole thing was like the Chronicles of Narnia meets Titanic in a Unitarian church. And because I’m so torn about “The End,” what you are about to read is most likely going to be very random and incoherent. Consider this a “readability” alert.

But before we begin, a few things need to be understood:

1. Any serious viewer of the show knew that going into the finale (and even the last season) there would still be unanswered questions. Even the show’s creators admitted as much. So for all you what-about-the-polar-bears people, just drop it. TV shows aren’t created in a vacuum (especially this one); some things will go unexplained or completely abandoned altogether (more on this later).

2. Even if we knew that some things were going to be left “open for interpretation,” I think it might have also been naïve of us to think that the series would end with a nice ribbon tied around it. Wasn’t in the cards. That’s not how this show rolls (er, rolled). Unconventiality was the norm, so, in some ways, “The End” stayed true to the ethos of the show as a whole.

3. In TV critic Alan Sepinwall’s review of the finale, he said that your enjoyment/disdain of the finale probably depended on where you fit on the character-development or plot-mystery spectrum. Take a second to determine where you are on this spectrum before we move on.

There. OK, let’s get dirty. Thoughts, muses, questions and comments about the good, the bad, and the “what the…?” of “The End.”

To begin, we must go back to the end of season 5. Juliet falls down the hole of the yet-to-be-built Hatch and “detonates” Jughead – the nuclear bomb that somehow ended up on the Island back in the 1940s. As far as I know, the “conventional” wisdom has it that Juliet smashed the bomb with a rock and it exploded. Giant white flash. Fade to black. End of season 5.

Too bad the bomb never exploded.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a truly novel idea in the whole universe of Lost theories, but I’ve never really heard much talk about it, even amongst my other Lost friends. I don’t believe Jughead ever went off. Maybe it “neutralized” the energy so that the 1970s-Dharma folks could later build the Hatch, but I don’t know how a nuclear bomb “neutralizes” something without blowing that something to kingdom come.

Season 6 starts with the Island in-tact, and the time is “present day.” The Island time-skipping was already halted by Locke before “The Incident,” but somehow Jack, Kate, Sawyer and everyone else are in the 2000s again and not the 1970s. Whatever the bomb did (but I’m fairly certain it didn’t explode), sent them back to “present day” after Desmond blew up the Hatch (end of season 2).

As season 6 opened, we were all under the impression that Jughead’s detonation created a parallel universe (the “flash-sideways”). As Brian Regan might say, we were way off: they were all dead, in heaven! Everything that happened on the island really did happen, thus the bomb didn’t explode, because of it did, the ISLAND WOULDN’T BE THERE. This is one of my main puzzlers that season 6 didn’t do a very good job of clarifying, and maybe I’m making too big of a deal out of it.

But it’s a big deal because until the last 15 minutes of “The End,” all, if not most, of us were under the impression that Jughead’s explosion inexplicably created a different plane of reality, some “real” parallel universe.

Apparently not. Well, it was real, but it wasn’t real in the space-time continuum. All throughout season 6 we thought our lovable bunch of castaways/survivors were living two “real” lives. Nice con by the show’s creators, sure, but what did this purgatory consciousness have to do with resolving six seasons worth of plots and character arches? Why did season 5 come down to this defining moment of blowing up the Hatch when, in the big picture, nothing was ever really defined by it?

This is where the last 15 minutes of frustration and all of “what the…” sentiments come to a boil. The first two hours and 15 minutes of “Then End” were killer. Absolute killer stuff. From Jack’s duel with Not-Locke in the rain (with Jack holding the literal and figurative high ground), to Jack anointing a teary-eyed Hurley as protector of the Island, to Ben finding some peace and purpose in his life, to the many reunions – especially Sawyer’s and Juliet’s – to Miles finally coming to grips with his belief in duct tape, to Jack finally being the man he was never able to be (more on this later), to Locke forgiving Ben for killing him…I mean, how can you fit so many lump-in-the-throat moments in 2.25 hrs of TV? It was true art. It was meaningful from a fan’s perspective and also from a show-completion perspective.

But as “The End” got closer to the end, and some major plot questions were still unanswered, I started to get worried. When Jack’s dad blew the cover off the purgatory existence, a good chunk of the plot, characters and narratives from the last six years – including many introduced in season 6 alone – just kinda fizzled out. What exactly is the Island? Where does the light come from? What was Widmore’s angle? Why was Desmond so important? Why wasn’t Nadiya Sayid’s true love? What new lessons did the Oceanic survivors learn in purgatory that they hadn’t already learned in their time on the Island? Why was so much of season 6 focused on the Temple? They left so much material completely unanswered or “open for interpretation,” and then they have the audacity to end the show by telling us that they’re already dead and running around purgatory waiting to wake up and be with each other?

In some ways, the purgatory consciousness/remembering where they’ve come from makes sense: in the end, everyone goes to “heaven” (apparently God is a Unitarian) and everyone (well, not quite) is together. How many times in the last six years has Desmond said, “See you in another life, brother?” Even in “The End,” it was Jack who said those exact same words to Desmond. This wasn’t completely out of the blue.

The irony is that a sizable portion of Lost viewers (and also actual characters on the Island) thought that the Island was purgatory. Yet in the end, it’s this “other life” that ends up being purgatory. The show’s creators had a good thing going with that purgatory thread, and it makes sense that they wouldn’t abandon it – unlike other major plot devices. The power behind everyone ending up in “heaven,” in the church together, fading into the light, is that like any myth worth its ology, the story doesn’t end in death. We’re left knowing that the cast we’ve come to love over the last six years will spend TV-eternity together. Death isn’t the end; in many ways (especially when viewed in light of Christian cosmology) it is the beginning.

My question, from a purely story-line perspective, is why devote so much time in season 6 to this afterlife place when it had very little to do with the major narratives, questions and character developments from the “real life” on the Island. Yeah, it’s a nice sentiment that they all remembered their lives on the Island/learned their lessons (poor theology aside) then got to spend all of eternity together. But looking back on this season and the show as a whole, this purgatory thing didn’t add a ton to its resolution and Island-centric mythology.

The whole purgatory/let’s all go to heaven bit just seemed…cheesy. Unimaginative. My wife pointed out that it was like Titanic, that after everyone dies (as Jack’s dad explained), they all end up in heaven, be that a universalist church or the ballroom on a big ship. Ending one of the greatest TV series of all time like a James Cameron movie isn’t the way you want to go out, is it? Especially for a show that had proven itself to be very deep, literary and non-run-of-the-mill.

Also, not everyone from the Island was there – like Mr. Echo or, heck, why wasn’t Richard there? He had been on the Island longer than anyone. But Penny, who had never been to the Island, was there. It just felt poorly thought out. It was another incomplete narrative that wasn’t completely needed.

Thankfully, they nailed Jack’s final moments. His life-giving sacrifice to re-cork the Island was beautiful stuff. Here’s a guy who for six seasons has sucked at fixing things and being a leader, and now finally he is able to fix the biggest thing in his life: the Island. As he stumbled back through the bamboo, I couldn’t help but think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when the Pevensies found their way back to the wardrobe – the place where everything started.

Beginning and ending a show with the same character lying in the same place was true literary genius. Jack’s character went through several developments. He started out strong (though somewhat reluctant), then in the middle he wobbled in uncertainty and weakness. So, for him to act with such faith, clarity and purpose in the end was masterfully orchestrated. Talk about a dynamic character. Seeing him die in the bamboo grove after saving the Island and his friends provided complete closure to his narrative – arguably the crux of all of Lost. (It’s just too bad the confusion and irritation over the purgatory scenes interrupted/de-climaxed his noble march back to the place where everything began.) Based on what we learned from the purgatory scenes (one of this concept’s few pluses), one could even make the case that Jack didn’t start living until he crashed on the Island, and so for him to die in that same place is incredibly symbolic. It’s a great scene, perhaps the defining TV moment of my generation, although it was somewhat robbed of power and vigor by the ambiguity of the afterlife scenes.

So, where does all this leave us? In many ways, in the same place we started. Lots of “whys” and “whats” are still unanswered, many of the threads we had hoped would all come to one singular point at the end didn’t necessarily connect, and Jack lies dead on the same patch of earth his journey began – only as a changed man who found a balance between faith and action.

Maybe that’s what “The End” is trying to tell us: Like those who struggled on the Island, it’s not about how many questions remain unanswered, but the amount of faith we apply along the way and the person we become.

Maybe we’re like Ben, who even at journey’s end and the happily ever-after is at arm’s reach, we still need a few moments outside the church to reflect and assess everything that’s happened.

As a series finale, “The End” does well, but falls short in some areas. If you’re disappointed in the finale and judge Lost likewise, I think you’ve missed the point. Yeah, maybe the creators didn’t have everything as perfectly planned out as we all thought. As for me, I would do it all over again, with the comfort of knowing that in the real world, all of the plot devices and character developments do matter and will eventually come together in one all-encompassing, resolving point.

Well, that’s all I got. My brain hurts. What do ya’ll think?

The Land Before We Knew They Indoctrinated Kids via Animated Movies

I watched The Land Before Time on VHS with the wifey last night. A few random thoughts:

1. That movie felt a lot longer when I was a kid. Maybe because my soul was so awash in anguish over the death of Littlefoot’s mother, and his ensuing depression, that my sorrow made the movie go by slower.

2. Animated movie story lines haven’t progressed very much since 1988. They still follow this basic pattern: “Hey, I know, we’ll take like five different kinds of [insert category here], have them go through [insert a cataclysmic, life-altering, dangerous event here], and in the process they’ll learn to get along and be tolerant of each other’s differences, and in the end everything turns out OK!” Yeah. Time for some innovation, Hollywood writers.

3. Petrie is gay. No other way to look at it. He “can’t” fly, but then he can. Come on – how can I not read that to mean that he’s coming out of the closet. And with that lisp of his, it’s just a dead giveaway.

4. Holy blatant evolution, Batman! And my parents let me, an impressionable 5-year-old, see this movie and allowed me to think that dinosaurs lived before mammals and human beings. Unconscionable. Maybe they were just too mesmerized by Pat Hingle’s deep, sultry narration to notice the overt evolutionary indoctrination. If there was ever some sneaky liberal agenda smuggled into a kids’ movie, this has gotta be the big one.

5. Littlefoot, Cera, Petrie, Ducky and Spike were really, really tiny dinosaurs. Right before Sharp Tooth smashed Littlefoot’s tree star, they were all sleeping in a dino footprint. Where’s the proper scaling? These were dinosaurs, not field mice.

6. Was that big, old spiky dinosaur that Littlefoot bumped into shortly after his mother died supposed to be a Yoda-like figure? Old, wrinkly dude with bushy eyebrows gives sage/Eastern-religiousy advice, then just wanders off, leaving the poor kid to fend for himself. Real original, George Lucas.

7. How many of those rubber hand puppets from Pizza Hutt did y’all have? We had dozens of them. Pretty sweet stuff.

8. I now know where Spielberg got the notion that he could pull off the ending in Jurassic Park, where the T-Rex “suddenly” appears and snatches the raptor out of the air – all without a single sound, tremor or anything. So, in TLBT, right before the gang dumped Sharp Tooth into the “pond”, Ducky goes into the cave to bait him out into the open. Ducky peeks behind a rock, sees Sharp Tooth, then cowers behind the rock when Sharp Tooth roars. When Ducky looks back up, Sharp Tooth is nowhere to be found. Ducky backs away from her hiding place, then – BOOM! – out of nowhere, there’s Sharp Tooth, right behind her! In other words, Spielberg barrowed a ridiculous, implausible scene from a 1988 kids’ movie to end one of the most ground-breaking films of the last 30 years. Way to think that one through.

All-in-all, watching the Land Before Time as a 25-year-old married, young professional really helped me figure out a lot of things in my life. Plus, it was more entertaining than watching LeBron James suck it up against the Celtics. (Always beware the MVP-award game.) And, most importantly, I was finally able to accept the death Littlefoot’s mother. I’ve been carrying that burden around for far too long. An enormous weight has been lifted from my soul.

IP for 4.29.10: Celebrate Pantheism

The environmentalist in me likes to stretch out Earth Day celebrations for a whole week. So, in honor of Earth Week, here’s some great articles about the environmental movement, the coming (no, really!) environmental catastrophes, and why hunters are the true conservationists. Thanks for being so enduring, Earth!

This Earth Day, Thank a Hunter by Humberto Fontova

“To date, hunters and fishermen have shelled out over $20 billion ‘on behalf of the environment.’”

Apocalypse Soon by Mark Steyn

“The ‘markets first’ approach was notable by its absence in, say, Eastern Europe, where government regulation of every single aspect of life resulted in environmental devastation beyond the wildest fantasies of the sinister Bush-Cheney-Enron axis of excess.”

Earth Day Turns 40 by Roy Spencer

“In fact, almost all forms of life on Earth feed off of other forms of life. What we consider to be pristine nature is in reality a battleground between different forms of life that are all competing for the same natural resources — if not each others’ heads.”

Earth Day: 40 years of imminent catastrophe by Laura E. Huggins

“Four decades later, the world hasn't come to an end. Most measures of human welfare show the Earth's population is better off today than at any other time in human history. Life expectancy is increasing, per-capita income is rising, and the air we breathe and the water we drink are cleaner.”

Happy Pantheism Day!

Weather.com posted a list of “50 Green Tips for Earth Day and Beyond” on their site today in honor of Earth Day #40. It’s more like a list of penances enviro-pantheists can perform to cleanse their soul of carbon-footprint transgressions. If the contemporary environmental movement isn’t a religion, then I don’t know what is. Here are some highlights:

15. At holidays and birthdays, give your family and friends the gift of saving the earth. Donate to their favorite environmental group, foundation, or organization.

27. Teach kids about the environment.

39. Go zero! Log on to the Conservation Fund's Carbon Zero Calculator (www.conservationfund.org) and in less than five minutes, you can measure and then offset your carbon dioxide emissions by planting trees.

44. Build a greener home.

49. Plant a forest and feed a family while you're at it.

This, as you can see, is a works-based religion. There’s no saving grace here. You’re not only saving yourself – via carbon offsets or cloth diapers or eating your dog – you’re also saving the divine (the earth) from eternal damnation.

One has to wonder, as Roy Spencer does, if Earth Day is “being used to teach our children the way the natural world works, or is it being used to indoctrinate them into performing rituals that will help absolve them of their eco-sins?”

Oh, and these gods of earth, wind and water are hard to appease.

Allah is an Icelandic Volcano

I once heard Hendrik Hertzberg say with all seriousness that the God of the Bible/Judeo-Christian worldview is a “Saddam Hussein in the sky,” arbitrarily doling out oppression, pain and suffering on the earth below.

If this is the case, then Allah, god of Islam, is an Icelandic volcano blowing its top.

Said senior Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi yesterday, “Many women who do not dress modestly . . . lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes.”

This is only slightly-less insane than Danny Glover’s explanation for earthquakes: Gaia. See his analysis below. Personally, I think he’s just getting too old for this s***.

“What happened in Haiti could happen to anywhere in the Caribbean because all these island nations are in peril because of global warming. When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I'm sayin'?”

Yes, I know what you are saying.

In other news, Pat Robertsons' dog has died from what appears to be a pact made with Kibbles 'N Bits. Official autopsy results have yet to be released or confirmed.

FoCo Tea Party

Sights from yesterday's Tea Party at Washington Park in Old Town.

There was some pretty good signage going on. I was particularly fond of mine, which read, "Independence Day: July 4, 1776. Declaration of Independence signed by 2nd Continental Congress" on one side, and, "Dependence Day: March 23, 2010. Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama" on the other. Pretty sweet.

There was a decent crowd, what I thought was around 700 or so. But the Coloradoan reported it was 1,500. It mighta just been me, but it seemed to lack the energy and urgency that last year's party had. The speakers were unimpressive and the whole thing just seemed a little flat. Dunno. Maybe a more detailed post coming.

Anyway, enjoy the pics.

Intertextual Paralogues for 4.14.10

New “series” here at Notes. Each week (theoretically), a list of similarly-themed “must read” articles will be posted with the goal of connecting the ideas/thoughts from the separate articles in such a way to increase understanding of the world, as well as generate conversations and dialogues about content of said articles. Hooray for big words.

Today: postmdoernism’s intersection with the American Presidency + postmodernism/social science’s influence on big-L liberalism. Happy reading.

A Postmodern Presidency by Victor Davis Hanson

“So what Obama has done is ‘contextualized’ the world, and ‘located,’ as it were, the seemingly hostile anti-American rhetoric of ‘enemies’ into a proper race/class/gender narrative.”

The Descent of Liberalism by Michael Knox Beran

“Liberalism today has lost this equipoise; the progress of the social imagination, with its faith in the power of social science to improve people’s lives, has forced liberals to relinquish the principles and even the language of the classical conception of liberty.”