Archive | January, 2010

I saw this tweet from CNN report Gary Tuchman last Saturday:

amazing. thousands of haitian homeless singing and dancing in park tonight near our live shot. they are celebrating being alive.

Those people amaze me.

I know my own nature.

In the midst of something like that, I’m almost certain that I’d be mourning what I’d lost rather than celebrating what I still had.

I do it all the time.

I mourn the money, the praise, the job, the respect, the looks, the fun vacation, the quiet time, the 300-yard drive, the wisdom, the humor, the charisma, the _____________, I don’t have.

And that’s absolutely ridiculous. I mourn what I don’t have but I so seldom stop and celebrate what I have. I have my life.

I’m alive.

So are you.

Celebrate it.

Here are a few links to some great stuff I’ve read recently. I hope you find some value in this too:

• I don’t know how he does it, but Jon Acuff just keeps pumping out great stuff over at Stuff Christians Like. I loved this post on Trying to find “your thing.”
• Seth Godin may be one of the smartest guys on the planet. Here’s a great post called The lesson from two lemonade stands
• I’m headed to Nashville in April to run the Country Music Half Marathon. I’ve been training for a few weeks. I’m at a spot where my motivation is starting to wane. (Wane? Is that right? Or is it wax? Whichever one it is when it’s getting smaller.) Here’s a timely post from Michael Hyatt on Why you should sign up for a half marathon.

What about you? Read anything good lately?

Every now and then we have to ditch this house and go stay overnight with our parents.

I guess that’s one of the perks of having family in town.

Last year when we had a serious carbon monoxide problem, we stayed with MC’s mom for a week. This summer after a nasty storm we stayed with my folks while our power was out.

For the most part, life went on as usual while we were displaced. The kids went to school. I went to work. You get the idea.

And every time, we had light at the end of the tunnel. We had the pleasure of knowing that within a few hours, or days at the worst, we’d be back in our own home. We’d be surrounded by our stuff again, re-establishing our routines.

That’s one of the things I consider when I think about all the destruction in Haiti.

For all of those people, there’s simply nowhere to go.

There’s not that sense that, “if we can just get through these few days, things will get back to normal.”

There isn’t going to be a normal. There’s nothing to go back to.

If it were me, I think the hardest thing to find down there would be hope.

That’s why it was a no-brainer for us to text ‘disaster’ to 90999 to send $10 to Compassion International, and why we followed it up with another donation through their website.

Compassion serves 65,000 kids in Haiti.

Those kids – and everyone impacted by the disaster – need relief. And they need hope. Compassion is uniquely positioned to offer both just by the nature of what they do.

While I was at lunch today I saw a tweet from MC that we got our first letter from Lesly, the child we sponsor through Compassion International.

It’s been a few months since we signed up to sponsor her and aside from the picture we received of Lesly after we committed, this is the first link we have to this little girl in El Salvador.

We learned a little bit about her in the initial sponsorship packet. For instance, she’s roughly the same age as our oldest daughter and she lives with her grandparents.

Just as a quick aside, this Compassion thing is going to drive MC and me to encourage our kids to learn about all sorts of places. Here’s why I say that: when we told our daughter that Lesly lives with her grandparents, she assumed that was because her parents had been eaten by wolves.

I know El Salvador has more than its share of struggles, but I don’t think ferocious wolf packs is one of them. But what’s really sad is that I don’t even know enough about El Salvador to be able to look my daughter in the face and say:

“There are no rabid, parent-devouring wolves in El Salvador.”

For all I know, she may be right. But with the benefit of Google, I now know that most deaths in El Salvador are caused by heart disease, respiratory infections and HIV/AIDS. Now we both know a little more about where our little Lesly is growing up.

Anyhow, I was excited to know that a letter from Lesly was waiting when I got home.

Ever since I saw her picture, I’ve wondered about her.

Like I said, she’s roughly the same age as my oldest daughter. So we when pray for Lesly at night, I picture her doing the things my girl likes to do.

I wonder if she likes to draw and color. I wonder if she likes music. I wonder if she freaks out if her sock bunches up in her shoe. I wonder if she can be a space cadet at times. I wonder if she hates having the tangles brushed out of her wet hair.

Maybe it’s because we pray for her every night, or maybe it’s because I can so easily relate to her because of my daughter, but Lesly is very real to me.

So when I held that first letter today, I started to wonder if we’re that real to her. I really hope we are.

I hope we’re real to her because even though kids that age are innocent enough to not be burdened by a lot of the junk that we face as adults, eventually they still bear the weight of the situation they’re in.  Especially when their parents get eaten by wolves.

When those moments come, when that little girl feels lonely or hopeless or whatever, I hope she’ll grab the picture or a letter we sent and know that we’re real. And I hope she’ll find some comfort in knowing that God has people in another hemisphere praying for her.

My iPhone thinks it’s so cool because it’s an amateur meteorologist.

I can touch a button on the screen and it’ll rattle off five days worth of forecasts.

But I think my iPhone skipped a few days of weather college because he/she/it is dropping the ball on a few of the fundamentals.

The best example might be this:

It’s forecasting a high of 36 and low of 22 here today. That’s chilly, but we’ll take it.

Yet when I look at the current temp right next the forecast high and low, there’s a big fat 7.

Seven seems lower than 22 to me.

So at this point in the day, all we need to do is warm up 15 degrees to hit the low temp? Sweet.

Somehow we wound up talking about fears in Sunday School this week.

As the conversation unfolded, it turned out that everyone’s big fears are basically the same: we fear losing our lives as we know them presently (i.e. our families, homes, precious belongings, etc.)

And now that I’m sitting here typing this, what should find itself rattling around in my head but Luke 9:24?

Those things scare me too, but for the sake of honesty, I chimed in with two other things that frighten me to no end.

First, I’d be scared of being on the MTV show Jersey Shore. If you want to see what my life is like, just watch an episode of Jersey Shore and then picture someone doing the opposite of whatever anyone on the screen is doing. When they’re going to bed, I’m getting up. When they’re applying copious amounts of hair product, I’m evenly applying a nickel-sized dollop of gel to keep myself from looking like Alfalfa from The Little Rascals. When their fists are pumping in the nightclubs, my arms are resting quietly by my sides at home.

So I don’t think a 33 year old father of three who goes to bed at 10:30 would mix well with the Shore crowd. Granted, I can’t imagine the scenario that would take me from here with my family to the cast of Jersey Shore, but who said anything about our fears making any sense?

Okay, the second real, actual fear I have is prison.

MC and I watch all these documentaries on National Geographic and I see all the things you have to do to survive in prison and it makes me worry. Have you seen when the inmates use dental floss and toothbrushes and stuff to pass messages back and forth when they’re on lockdown? I’m not coordinated enough to pull that off. And that’s not even saying anything about all the weird prison social norms. How do you know what gang to join? Is it like fraternity rush?

If I let myself think about it too long, I can feel my blood pressure start to rise. And then I remind myself that I’m not a criminal, so the likelihood of a long jail term for me is awfully low.

Clearly, if you look just below the veneer, I’m nuts. But I’d bet you’ve got some irrational fears too. Things you can’t imagine doing or that make your heart beat faster or that just give you the willies to think about.

Got any you care to share?