Author / Michael

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Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.
by Michael

20 Things Worth Saying

I’m re-posting this as a reminder on the day after my second son’s originally given due date. It’s a reminder as I become a dad all over again in some ways.

In no particular order:

  1. People die everyday but I want you to live a long, full, gorgeous life.
  2. Don’t believe that there aren’t safe spaces for you. We will find them together, protect them, and play in them.
  3. Slow down and be as small as you can for as long as you can, because I only see big things in you. When those things mature, you will turn the world upside down.
  4. Turn off the TV and listen to the words of Jarena Lee, Ida Wells, Booker Washington, WEB DuBois, Benjamin Mays, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Renita Weems, Louis Farrakhan, Michael Dyson, and your pastor if she or he has courage to speak to right-now-issues.
  5. The news does not define you and neither does the pain that envelopes our people. We include the pain in who we are, but we are more than our pain.
  6. I want the best for you, and though I will make mistakes in pursuing that, I commit to you that I’ll live with you in mind for the rest of my life.
  7. Your skin is precious, so precious that it can get you into as much trouble as death if you’re black, free from accountability for your actions if you’re white. This is still the country we live in.
  8. The unmistakable print of God’s finger is on your life and people may not call it that because of their own faith differences, but know deep down that you were made by the most fascinating Creator to live a most fascinating life.
  9. Talk to your oldest relative about the way they make sense of the bottom parts of life, and then write down what you hear and how you feel and how it makes you want to be better.
  10. You are beautiful, you are brilliant, you are beloved. This a benediction I pronounce over my son and I gladly share it with you for your children, for your revision.
  11. Obey those who have rule over you. This is a biblical warrant, so listen to your parents when we tell you “how to act” in public.
  12. Disobey authorities when necessary for goodness sake and do so for a worthy cause. You won’t be the first to “go down” for justice, and when you do, your blood will join the saving stream of God’s heroes.
  13. Make noise in life and be a bit irreverent because the people who’ll complain about your noise will be those of us who have lost our throats, who need you to inspire us, and who will, surprisingly, follow your lead.
  14. Take the helm of something that stirs the hearts of people, challenges the fixed impressions of others, and helps you practice your best values.
  15. Love the women in the world because they will be more reliable than the men and they will support you harder than the men and in your love, you will continually lift them.
  16. Love the men in the world because your love will correct and heal our broken places, places we’ve spent years covering, hiding, avoiding, and convincing ourselves aren’t there.
  17. I do not want you to die, but you will die as will I. Live with that end in mind, and move the world toward something more beautiful, more compelling, more attractive, and more whole while you’re here.
  18. Give something away and get into the habit of giving. It will save you when the world takes and takes and takes because you will have defined yourself and your needs and your hopes in a generous way.
  19. Be a messianic force for peace, tolerating no violence, even the violence in your own soul because that self-control is the strongest grace, the most Christlike offering you can give the world. It may save us.
  20. Tell me what I should have said and feel free to update me as we go along.
by Michael

“…imagine the generous outcomes…”

Photo Thanks to Evan Wise

Photo Thanks to Evan Wise

I’ll be away from writing original content for a couple weeks. We welcomed our new son the other day, and in lieu of posts, I’ll offer a quote of the day. To anticipate that, here is a post by Seth Godin whose good work you can find here.

Depth of field

Focus is a choice.

The runner who is concentrating on how much his left toe hurts will be left in the dust by the runner who is focusing on winning.

Even if the winner’s toe hurts just as much.

Hurt, of course, is a matter of perception. Most of what we think about is.

We have a choice about where to aim the lens of our attention. We can relive past injustices, settle old grudges and nurse festering sores. We can imagine failure, build up its potential for destruction, calculate its odds. Or, we can imagine the generous outcomes we’re working on, feel gratitude for those that got us here and revel in the possibilities of what’s next.

The focus that comes automatically, our instinctual or cultural choice, that focus isn’t the only one that’s available. Of course it’s difficult to change it, which is why so few people manage to do so. But there’s no work that pays off better in the long run.

Your story is your story. But you don’t have to keep reminding yourself of your story, not if it doesn’t help you change it or the work you’re doing.

by Michael

“Talking about the whole city means…”

Photo Thanks to Bob Burkhard

Photo Thanks to Bob Burkhard

This is about our whole city. Talking about the whole city means we have to talk about the environment and arts and culture and tech and infrastructure. We have to talk about all these things. What impacts most people are crime, safety and schools, but we are also rapidly losing green jobs and that the sewer pipes need to be replaced and we have 70,000 people addicted to substance abuse. To be a mayor, you should actually have to talk about all these things.

DeRay McKesson in an interview here.

by Michael

A Parent’s Prayer

This is a prayer from Debbie Pearlman’s Flames to Heaven: New Psalms for Healing & Praise. It’s a wonderful collection of psalms which Pearlman translates for our use, especially around themes of healing and celebration. This is number one hundred twenty-two.

Photo Thanks to Danielle MacInnes

Photo Thanks to Danielle MacInnes

I am trying, Life-Arranger, I am trying

To live with uncertainties.

I am trying to yield control,

To listen for the calm beneath.

My task nearly done, I am trying to trust

My nurturing and modeling

Have grown a complete person

Ready to enter the next territory.

All my caring words, instructions

Repeated and reworded are no armor.

Only faith in Your kindness

Will secure each tomorrow.

Letting go my protecting hug,

Releasing my shielding body,

I relax. And then I feel You.

You alone must be the Shield about us.

Only to be whole and to be happy.

Only to be well-loved and productive.

Giving and friendly, untroubled by terrors.

Parents’ sighs rise to You.

by Michael

Tentativeness + Foolishness

SONY DSC

Photo Thanks to Ryan McGuire

There is a person in the world that I avoid. And yet I meet this person often. Each time I see him coming, I shudder just a bit. Because I don’t like this person.

I don’t like what she brings out of me, what he pulls from my depths. This person is the personification of pride and, to be clear, of the arrogant variety. I’ve known over the years that I didn’t like pride. I knew before I knew that pride was a life problem of mine.

I knew this growing up and while growing up because I had surrounded myself with people who had similar psychic needs. I knew that one of my life’s goals was the constant attentiveness to who I am and who I am not.

I knew that one of my existing internal conflicts would be the exacting appraisal of my true identity—my true self—as opposed to, in opposition to, wrestling with and reconciling with my false self.

That kind of wrestling-turned-reconciliation produces tentativeness in me. In other words, it makes me react with less speed. And I’m a person who knows things. I deliberate but when I know something, I work from that knowing. I have a sense of things. I say that with all humility…

There are things that I get, things that I know. And when you’re used to getting things, it’s hard to be tentative because tentativeness is the expression of not knowing. Why be tentative when you don’t need to be?

And then, of course, I meet all the reasons in the world to be humble. I meet all the things in me that stand between who I am and my true self, which is, for the sake of my written review here, humility.

Humility is the negotiation between who I am and who I am not. It’s landing on the side of reality. In a world that frames days based upon fantasy, humility is hard to cultivate. Humility takes work, and in a world where commercials are filled with hype, the work is too hard to be realistic.

Between tentativeness and humility is foolishness. Foolishness is the experience of life between some epistemological rupture, where old ways of knowing fall flat and shatter—leaving you tentative—and a better, more precise expression of your is-ness. Your “I really is humble.”

The bridge between those two is foolishness. And who wants to look like a fool much less be one?

I have a memory of somebody in my upbringing using as a bad name “Boo Boo, the fool.” Nobody wanted to be Boo Boo, the fool. Whoever Boo Boo was, the name alone was a commercial against him.

And yet I’ve started to aspire to be Boo Boo. I’ve started to look forward to the indispensable role foolishness plays in setting me up to be, perfectly, wonderfully, humbly me.

by Michael

Little Images

I wrote this four years ago and came back to it in my draft folder. The storage unit is not ours anymore since we’ve moved, but the sentiment in this post remains.

Photo Thanks to Nuno Silva

Photo Thanks to Nuno Silva

The other day I spent a few hours rummaging through old things. I went into our basement storage unit and opened a few boxes. I’ve avoided those boxes for two years. My last real vist was soon after the boy came along. Since then I’ve stacked and restacked boxes. I’ve thrown out a couple bags. I’ve given books away.

But I needed to look through things. I need to remember. I needed to let some things go.

I do this regularly: letting things go. My wife is the keeper of things. I’m the one who discards the unused. I used to give boxes of books away–after U of I, after Wheaton, and then after Garrett. I am of the mind that books are worth sharing, especially when they’ve given their gifts to you.

Still, it’s been awhile since I’ve actually gone through the articles and stuff of earlier days, since I convinced myself that I didn’t need as many things as I once did. It’s interesting how what we keep can be its own record.

So I waded through things. There are those cards and letters from my college days and there’s something Mr. Everett gave me in high school. I found a picture with a friend from a dance, the program from a wedding, a hand-written letter from my pastor, a note from my niece, and one of the most creative pieces of writing I’ve ever read, which happens to also be one of the most troubling lies I’ve read. That was from a letter written by a friend impersonating a physician when we were in college.

Each one of these things is a little image of me, a small indicator of the routes my life has taken.

by Michael

Son, Please Forgive Me For…

I’m revisiting earlier lessons from my blog, and here’s a meditative list I could still say, with near accuracy, five years later in asking for my son’s forgiveness. I’m very grateful he’s putting on his own seat belt though:

  1. Not understanding those things I think only you, your angels, and God can understand
  2. Keeping you strapped into your car seat when all those tears fell, asking to be freed
  3. Making you eat more than sweet potatoes and beans
  4. Being less than patient and for moving too quickly more times than I’ve slowed down
  5. Letting your mother make you wear shoes that were too small
  6. Raising my voice and thinking that it would help you understand an instruction
  7. Not forgiving the way you do, quickly and effortlessly
  8. Leaving you in the room with all those relatives you didn’t know in Alabama that day
  9. All those pictures we took
  10. Having strong opinions…about everything
  11. Not finding more ways to put you into the hands of people who love you well and consistently
  12. The mistakes you’ll notice that I won’t
  13. Being angry with you when you were really really little because you cried more than I knew to expect when we brought you home
  14. The times I said you were a “miracle from the Lord” because it was true but didn’t really treat you that way
  15. Failing to love your mother as much as possible to the best of my ability
  16. My dullness when I was tired and too exhausted to enjoy your excitement about some random thing
  17. Overlooking all those moments when you were trying to get me to see something I was too busy to notice
  18. Not listening
  19. Teaching you things by my example and my words which were wrong
  20. For keeping this list so short.
by Michael

“What You Are Really Choosing”

Photo Thanks to Annie Spratt

Photo Thanks to Annie Spratt

No one creates your feelings. No one is to blame for your situation. You are the author of your condition. Whatever you have been doing is what you are really choosing, whether or not you consciously want it. The alternative is to see yourself as a victim of people or circumstances and real change becomes impossible. Taking responsibility always leads to a revelation of what your next step needs to be.

(From How to be an Adult, p. 24-25)