Category / Interior Life

This category includes all the interior stuff that will decorate our lives, things we’ll show outside because they’re inside.

by Michael

Grief: A Looping Line

The path of grief is not a straight line.  You don’t start off in the deepest slough then climb up each step to get back to peaceful.  Grief moves forward, but in a looping line.  You’re going along, making progress then you hit a loop and your stomach lurches and everything is flipped upside down and you land right back where you were a few weeks or months ago.  Eventually, the loops get smaller and spread farther apart, but they’re still there to…well, to throw you for a loop.

Read the full post here.

by Michael

Will You Pray For Me Over This?

I’m somewhere in the process of forgiving a neighbor.  Of actively forgiving her, or them since I’m sure her boyfriend lives there.  She is the homeowner.  They are fond of smoking, which is fine, but their fumes creep through a vent in our bathroom because we share a wall in this renovated pile of bricks.

I’m not sure how long this has been happening, but I can say that we started noticing this when we became parents…three years ago.  It was fine for a long time.  I became a steady purchaser of incense.  That was me you saw at the health food store in Lakeview or Evanston or Hyde Park or Woodlawn.  I was the guy with his kid in the stroller, both of us sniffing the little sticks at random community festivals.  I’ve become fond of sage, lavender, and, of course, jasmine.  Cinnamon tastes good, but I don’t prefer it in the air.  I’ve been to Target filling carts with every possible aide you can imagine.  I’ve spent more time on the web searching for remedies.

I can tell you with reasonable accuracy when the Chicago Police Department changed its 911 guidelines and that they will come if an offender is still present.  I can tell you that I’ve taken all the good steps I (and we as a family) could think of: having a trusted carpenter come and seal every outlet and baseboard, bugging my property manager and board until they agreed to add an escalating fine to my neighbor, which will either increase the expensive habit she already has or change her plans so that she smokes somewhere else.  I’ve done other things.

But I’m more concerned about the split I feel, the one where I feel like I have to choose between being a good father and being a good Christian.  The desire growing in me on good days is one where I’m admitting that the attempt to be a Christian is difficult, where I’m praying to God for my neighbor, where I’m seeing her (and them) as loved by God like my son.  This is what it means.  It means loving people who know that their fumes navigate near your toddler’s room but don’t change.

Then there is that other person.  The guy who grew up and when planning wrong, considered it so that when he implemented his considered approach, it was untraceable.  I was not then and am not now an impulsive person.  I believe that impulsiveness is the act of impatient people.  I tend to be patient.  The shadow of that is that I tend to study my choices for a long time.  And I go back and forth considering a) loving my neighbor and praying for her rescue from this addiction, which several neighbors have commented on actually and b) doing what that little person in me says a good father would do.  And when I listen to the little person, I remind myself that there are some calls that the police will take and some calls they won’t.  And I wonder if they’ll come if I become the less considerate neighbor.  To be completely fair, the police did come yesterday when I called, and we got through the night without fumes.  But every night is a test.

So this is my attempt to expand my circle of accountability.  I’m trying to live in a forgiving way.  I’m trying to be honest that being a father with a small child is hard because I’m a Christian.  That whole thing about forgiving your enemies—loving your enemies—grabs my feet and slams to my knees, if you will.  Though I don’t pray on my knees.  I usually walk while I pray, but you understand my point.  I want to love this neighbor.  Even though she, after a relatively positive interaction didn’t limit her behavior.  Even though I have aggravated my already strange sleeping rhythms by waking up at 1AM, 4AM, and 6AM to burn incense, not counting the days I’m still home between 9 and 10AM.

Will you pray for me?  Will you hope with me?  I want to live as a Christian father.  I’m still doing more to address this.  Indeed, I’ll do as much as I can.  But I want to do it from a place of love.  That even reads weird to me.  Still, it best says what I desire.  I meant it when my offending neighbor said to me, “You must hate” and I answered “No, I don’t hate you.”  Because I didn’t and I don’t.  But I want to love her well.  I want her to be a whole and considerate and good neighbor.  Even if her being a good neighbor comes after I’ve been a good Christian.

by Michael

Dear Pop

I’m not the guy to talk to dead people.  Even when I serve grieving families, I flinch when they start addressing the departed as if they are there.  As I sit or stand in that setting, I say in my head that they are there but that the opportunity before us is to speak first to those who are physically present.

I write that because I need to define this post as an exercise in theological and personal stretching.  It may just be altogether imaginative.  After all, nothing about my framework thinks that you read my blog.  I’m writing as if you’re reading.  I wish you were.

Nonetheless, I’m looking at the next days.  One of them includes your funeral and your burial and words I’m to say over you as a eulogist.  I’m not looking forward to that day.  It’s ahead of me, but I’m not looking forward to it.

Because it means what it always means in situations like this: it means goodbye.  I have never been good at goodbye.  I leave people’s houses without saying it.  I simply walk out.  I figure, they’ll realize I’m gone.  I make little deals out of such departures.  But your goodbye is different.  This funeral is not like the others I’ve been to.  And I’ve been to so many.  I’ve stood at dozens of caskets, dressed in my uniform, and walked people through those dismal moments that are rushing up in my head and keeping me up late at night and making me search through my memory like a catalog so I don’t forget some important memory, some something you said.  I already feel crippled by shock, sad that I can’t remember every single thing.

I tell myself to sleep and that, like mama told me on the phone Friday, I need to rest.  I tell myself to hope.  I tell myself all these good things people have written in emails to me or on a text message.  I remember the people who have left me voice mail messages.  I smile, genuinely thankful.

And then I tell myself to rejoice that your suffering is over.  That you aren’t struggling to stand up and keep your balance or fighting with a nurse because you’ve lost something fundamental to you, independence.  I tell myself that you won’t have some strange, repetitive flash of a memory that I can’t understand because I wasn’t there to live through it with you.  I tell myself that you are resting in an essential way, that you are experiencing something splendid, if my faith is true, even if I cannot give adequate justice to what that life is now.

I tell these things to myself and some hole still persists.  Dark and wide, the gap takes my feet into it, and I feel like I’m slipping again.  I hear you smiling, hear you because of the lift in your voice when you really smiled; it was a personal song to something you laughed at.  It’s a song I loved.  I keep thinking about your nose and unshaven face and how at certain moments in my life, I can really see you in my mirror.  How you shaved twice a week after you retired and always on Saturday night before church on Sunday.  I tell myself that Magic Shave on shelves in Walgreens will never look the same to me because you used Magic Shave.

I won’t write you these letters regularly.  And when I do, I’ll put them in my moleskin.  But I’m writing this one to get started, to look ahead but not exactly forward, to find some courage to train my head and heart for the other words I have to say; these are some of the ones that may not make it to the eulogy.  That assignment is clear enough for me.  It’s not my forum to express these things; not exactly anyway.  I won’t have enough time to write those words well; I’ll stick to that message which is at my core, and it will be the proclamation of the day.

But this is the start of the rambling that comes when the man I love has died.  This is scattered set of sayings I wish I could say to you, even though I’ve said them to you.  This is my first letter to repeat the things I hope and trust you know.

by Michael

I Didn’t Realize He Was Leaving

On Wednesday evening, December 26, I was sitting next to Dawn and in front of Bryce in the B concourse of Midway airport.  We had successfully pressed through the security checkpoint, rearranged our clothes and shoes, and walked to our gate to wait for an hour before boarding a plane.  Bryce was eyeing some passenger’s ice cream, whispering to me about wanting some.  I told him to wait, to let me get settled.  I told him I had just sat down.  I told him to stop looking at the woman’s ice cream like that because he was scaring me and probably scaring her.

We were heading to Charlotte, North Carolina ultimately to complete our annual time with Grammie Joseph.  It would be a week where we would see the Gant museum, walk through the botanical gardens in Belmont, eat at Captain Steve’s, talk a lot, catch up, do nothing.  My aunt, Lynnie, called me while we were waiting to board.  I have a rule when certain people call my phone: I always answer.  I do not observe this rule for most people.  I’m a pastor so I cannot.  I meet with people and they say things to me, and when they say these things, it makes a lot of sense for me to stop the rest of the world as those people present their worlds to me.  So I’m “present” with them as they talk.  I ignore the phone.  I don’t hear rings in those moments.  But I make exceptions.  When my aunt calls, because my father has been in the nursing home in her city, I take her call, even if I need to ask if I can call right back.

As she always does, she asked me how I was.  There was static in the line.  Perhaps it wasn’t static.  Do cell towers allow for static?  It was choppy.  Whatever the interference, I couldn’t quite hear her clearly.  Some voice was droning about a passenger whose flight was leaving or some gate change.  There was Bryce switching to his mother and asking her for ice cream.  He’s been doing that more and more: shifting to her when I don’t answer the way he thinks I should.

Aunt Lynnie asked if I had gotten her message.  I pulled my phone from my ear and looked at it as if to ask it if it had rung without my hearing it.  Perhaps it sang while we were in the cab with the preacher cab driver who I talked theology with on the way to the airport.  “No,” I told her, “I didn’t.”  Then I thought—as she let out a long “Well,”—perhaps she called the house.  I heard her “Welling” and I had a flash of some indication of what was to come.  It was something spiritual, like and unlike the Welling in the black church, when people sometimes rock while they hear the preacher.  They say “Well” as they listen, and something about the “Well” makes what they hear stick.  My aunt’s well was different; she was stalling just for a moment, and auntie, in my experience, didn’t stall.  She breathed and she said it, quickly and clearly, without interference from cell towers or airport clutter.  My dad had passed an hour or so before that moment.

They were just arriving to the nursing home; the snow had prevented them from getting there sooner.  I knew Little Rock didn’t get snow.  I imagined my three Little Rock aunts, wrapped in coats, looking as lovely as always, dressed in care and concern and love and something familiar.  They were there, three of my father’s sisters, a group of faithful friends to him, and he was dead.  I asked her to repeat herself.  Actually, I said, “What?” I had heard her, but something in me got very cliche in that moment.  Or something in me needed to hear again.  Dawn heard me and she knew.  She had been down a path like this one when her father was snatched over six months after his stroke two years ago.  I felt Dawn turn to me.  I saw her take Bryce by the hand.  I was really surprised at that simple sentence from my aunt.  I wanted to turn to Dawn; I wanted to turn away.

I had just seen him.  This was my first thought: I had just seen him.  One week ago at the hospital in Searcy.  He hugged me twice.  I held him, walked with him.  I showed him pictures, something, I realize now, I did often on my trips to see him.  My second thought was: I just talked to him.  It was on Christmas Eve, two days before.  His voice was bright, brighter than usual even.  he talked to Bryce, asked about Dawn.  I thought he was getting better.  I didn’t realize he was leaving.

by Michael

Dancing with Death

When I started blogging, my friend David told me to blog about the things that I think about, the things that matter to me.  Lately I’ve been thinking about the decline of my father’s health.  That’s why I’m posting this on both blogs.  I’ve not had much free mental space over the last few months because my dad has been there taking it up with a thousand questions of varying sizes and shapes.

My dad is demented, meaning, he has dementia.  What is the appropriate form for that sentence?  Is my father demented?  It feels like a misuse of language to have to write that way: my father has dementia.  It’s one word or two too long.  Plus, it isn’t true.  Particularly since it feels most days like dementia has my father, like the synapses in his brain are freezing over or cracking or deteriorating or doing anything but firing in the way all my college classes suggested synapses do.  I paid a lot of attention to those classes at U of I.  I got mostly good grades, though I hated statistics and could have done better in Don Dulany’s course, especially if I hadn’t been devoting all that time talking to schizophrenics at strange hours through the night.  But these days I’m thinking that I could have paid more attention.

Anyway, my father’s dementia and the accompanying decline in his condition is essentially unsettling.  My experience of him and his health feels like all the sturdy things in my history with him are getting up, spinning around, and landing in a different place from before.  It feels like every conversation with him, each road trip to Little Rock, leaves me tired from the passing lane and sweating after a long dance with this disease.

And I’m not the one doing the real dancing.  I catch myself to say this.  Over the last six months, since we found out about the strokes and since we’ve started to confuse (i.e., not be able to tell) the stroke’s grip for the dementia’s, I’ve remembered consciously that it’s my father who is suffering.  And that’s the worse part.  Not our collective suffering as we watch or join in as a family responding to our loss and grief.  His suffering is the basic problem here.  I can recover.  Can he?

And I wonder to myself if there is a little grace in my dad not knowing how much he’s suffering.  And I check myself again at the hint of such arrogance.  Can my father, complex man that he is, be written off by my saying, “Well, he doesn’t realize what’s happening to him?”  How can I trust that?  How can I take comfort in the corrosive way the disease is handling him so that his head is all messed up, his memories following?  How can I be encouraged that his brain, eating or sucking or dropping away all the memories which make him him, is so distorting his reality that he is in some way spared?

I ask these questions because I want to be spared.  My father isn’t spared.  We aren’t either.  And these instances of death, these suspensions of time, when I’m not sure if my dad is “there” or “somewhere else,” are not healing.  They are small deaths, and they are upsetting, unsettling, and disturbing.  He is as pained as anyone in this.  He didn’t wish for this end.  And he can’t find the ways to express that any more.  Not on most days.  He’s the one really dancing.

Even though his feet are inching into a straddle some days and stepping normally on other days, it is my dad’s feet that I’m watching.  It is his pair of legs that my eyes fell to the other day as he walked to me on the arm of that nurse.  I had been buzzed into the acute care facility in Searcy, the place where they specialize in treating elderly men and women with psychiatric problems stemming from the disease I keep thinking looks like Skeletor.

He was shuffling slowly, arm wrapped in a sturdy nurse who introduced himself as Billy.  Daddy recognized me and that recognition was a gift even if I was struck by my dad’s gait.  It was an interior compromise, thankful for the recognition and willingness to overlook the pulchritude.

I could overlook that daddy looked bad, really bad.  Bad the way he was when he had the stroke in July.  Bad like when I first saw him in July, my brother Mark at my side, I was wondering where my father’s weight went.  Bad like I saw him for the first time as a truly different figure, no longer the man with muscles and a bench press in his basement with weights I’d never be able to lift.

My father’s arm was attached to his nurse, straddling, dancing, and I met him the rest of the way, took the other arm, and listened to the music of his experience and started dancing with him.  We walked slowly, really slowly.  And instead of going to the designated room, we sat in the closest chairs.  I suggested them because the distance to the room was too far for daddy after the stint from his room and too far for me after driving those eleven hours.

by Michael

Dear Dementia

I didn’t believe it was you when I first saw the signs.  The missed memories were small, so slight they were unnoticed.  I forget.  I get agitated.  I make mistakes, lose things, get mixed.  I was like everyone else who loved: I wanted more.

I began what is still the dismal existence of a loved one struggling with you and your fingers wrapping and stealing things from my father.  I started to look at all those yesterdays, fading in my own memory, and I grabbed for them.  I called them back the way a grandparent calls for their only child’s offspring when, because of intuition, they know that was the last visit.  The rides in my dad’s white van and then the brown van.  There was a  black van too, I think.  I sniffed for the smell of worms and dirt when we went fishing, when I was so small I felt nothing but incompetence because I couldn’t do what my father found so easy.  I listened to the sound of his laughter, not just his laughter, but the way it sang like a Delta blues man.  I looked at the crinkle that was his smile.  I wanted that grin to be mine.

You pulled me from my memories.  Reminded me that you hadn’t won yet.  That yours was a most sinister work because no one knew, and no one knows, when your job would be done with my dad’s brain and body.  You shouted in the tone that was once was my dad’s.  It was his voice, and it wasn’t.  And the reality of my life—the lives of my brothers, the lives of our aunts and our extended loved ones—is that you and dad are dancing.  And his feet are clipping and stumbling under what was once his best song.

You gave him pain and depression at what he can no longer command.  You made him mad at everybody and nobody.  You snatched his ability to attend to the mundane affairs of bills and greetings and polite conversations.  You made him unpredictable so that he couldn’t travel, so that he couldn’t go home and live on his own and be alone.

I hate you.  You’ve taken so much and you’re not even finished.  You have hardly done to me, to us, what I know you’ve done to others.  But know that I’m not alone in seeing your memory-soaked hand clenching and withdrawing from the collective worlds which have been ours.  I hear the prayers of my friends in my ears.

Roland and the way his hand pressed into my shoulder just yesterday, the words he prayed, the faith he had for me, even though today’s conversation with dad tried hard to erase my faith and my friend’s.  Libby and her careful way of saying just enough to express a deep understanding, a selective and prophetic care, and how she brings a prayerfulness whenever she approaches.  Lisa’s powerful prayers that the ground I’m on is sure and steady and the way she keeps praying, the mirror she is to people I see and don’t see.  Lauren’s steady gaze when she asks me respectfully and compassionately how I’m really doing and dealing with the junk you’ve thrown at us.  Byron and his admonition to take care of myself, to do what I need, to care for me so that I’m not surprised by my own breaks and broken places.  Lucy and the regular ways she brings me before the Presence, keeps me there, helps me see me and see truth and prepare to live from more than pain but love.  Winston, his faithfulness and his ability, through history, presentness, and vision for what’s to come, and how he keeps at the work of partnering with God to help make me good through the terror of unknown trials related to you.

Your hand is hard.  But I do not envy you.  Because you, partner of all that is sinful, will have a lot of giving to do.  Diseases like you must hold the things you take and you must return them.  So, my faith, sometimes thin as cracking leaves at autumn’s end, feels tiny.  And even if it disappears to an invisible quality, it will not leave.  It will not depart.  You cannot take it from me.  You cannot steal it the way you have my father’s best qualities.  You cannot leave in faith’s place depression and sadness the way my father struggles now, even without the words to give to his interiority.  I’m looking at the collective faith of an increasing cloud of witnesses, and while your reach is long, it cannot capture all my friend’s strengths.  There are some things you cannot do.

by Michael

Don’t Fool With Me

The other day my sister, Renee, was over.  She ate dinner with us.  Let it suffice to say that my sister is a personality.  She is an experience.  You have to meet her to fully appreciate what that means.  She is different.  At times we don’t claim her.  At times we over-explain what must have happened when she born.

At the table she was playing with Bryce, fooling with his feet.  I asked her to stop.  Of course, she lied and said she wasn’t doing anything.  I mentioned watching her arm move so that imagining her hand under the table wasn’t an issue.  She persisted.

It helps to tell you that I’m religious about my son’s bedtime.  He was already late for it.  We had come in later than normal.  I was cooking and didn’t finish as quickly as usual.  So my wife was there, quiet and looking at me get upset.  I told the boy to eat.

I went to do something after saying that, and I heard my sister basically undoing what I told the boy.  When I returned to the table, I told Renee not to teach my son to disobey me.  She, again, said what she wasn’t doing, what she wasn’t saying.  I explained that since we didn’t have walls that I could, well, hear what she told Bryce.

And I started thinking about how difficult it is telling people, like family, what they were and weren’t going to do.  They believe that social history gives them permission to be creative when it comes to your child.  Me and Dawn have had these hills develop with family before.  I told Renee that I wasn’t going to let her teach my son to disobey me and certainly not in my face.  She laughed it off unfortunately.  Knowing her, she will endeavor to extend her creativity again.

The dinner moment stays with me.  As clear or hard or stubborn as I am, I’m not going to move on the point of being my son’s father and, with my wife, his main teacher.  I told Renee at the table not to fool with me.  And she knows what that means.  Plus, I take opportunities to explain again when needed.  I’m pretty sure I’ll edit my sister’s involvement until she gets the picture.  And because she knows me, she knows what to expect.  Hopefully she’ll get her self together.  Otherwise, auntie will only have supervised visits where daddy can immediately un-do some things with the boy.

by Michael

“Words Are Too Small”

Emily Allen quotes her sister friend, Sophia, who is reflecting on her son’s diagnosis and experience of Leukemia.  Her son, Jacob, was experiencing hair loss around that time:

I did not cry, not there, but later when going through the pictures of hair falling off. 
It’s just hair, you can say but no, it’s so much more. 
It’s love. 
It’s a statement. 
It’s hope. 
It’s pain.
It’s a side-effect.
It’s a mother’s heart.
Words are too small. 
I have seen my son’s hair fall off, seen the chemotherapy side-effects, all of them.
It is hair, but it is a big deal It is part of our identity, a part we cut and style and color and pay for to feel prettier. 
Without hair we look different, naked, people notice. 
I know God was there, counting, every single hair that fell, every tear. 
And he is there when new grows back, there in every moment.

I read this here at Rachel Held Evans’s blog.

by Michael

How to Walk

Among the hardest walkers for me to watch are small children being hauled along by their wrists.  Parents tell me that this is sometimes necessary, but since I have never been a parent I would not know.  I do know that most of the adults doing the hauling do not mean to be unkind.  They are simply used to walking, while the child is not.  The child has only recently learned how to walk, so she still knows how.  She feels the heat radiating up from the sidewalk.  She hears the tapping of her shoes on the cement.  She sees the dime someone has dropped in the crosswalk, which she leans toward before being yanked upright again.  The child is so exposed to the earth that even an acorn underfoot world topple her, which may be why her adult is hanging on so tightly.  But the speed is too much for her.  Her arm is stretched so far it hurts.  She has to run where her adult walks, and if that adult is talking on a cell phone, then really, she might be better off in jail.

by Michael

Images of Fragility

I was at my aunt’s table last week, looking over my father’s discharge papers from the hospital.  He had suffered a stroke a few days prior, while we were all at his family’s reunion.  He didn’t come, of course, because he was in the hospital.  I had a sense that he wasn’t going to come to the reunion, an apprehension that I couldn’t quite explain.  I didn’t know it was going to be a stroke.

It took a few days for me and my brother Mark to get by my aunt’s.  I had to return home with Dawn and Bryce and after being away for a week, be at the office for at least a day, long enough to begin feeling overwhelmed by all that I was leaving undone.

We sat at the table, looking at him, inspecting him.  We talked and listened.  I had read the physician’s notes to a chaplain mentor friend over the phone the night before.  I think we were in the mode of getting things done by the time my aunt brought another stack of papers.  In that stack was a folder, brightly colored with faces of elderly people.  It was a resource packet on dementia.  She told us a few weeks before that he had been diagnosed earlier this year.  I flipped the pages, scanning the headers, not really reading at all.

I looked at the people on the cover of the folder and thought back to my father’s face.  I looked over to him.  He was sitting in a large chair, seeing what I wondered.  His vision, memory, and cognition were impacted in a dozen ways from the stroke.  His face had that strange openness that I had seen before on him, back when it was simply my dad’s way of settling.  He isn’t a hurried man.  He is cool, collected, almost distant.  So watching him, after the stroke, I wasn’t surprised that he was somewhere else, detached from the moment with its anxiety, even while the anxiety stemmed from concern for him, his body’s constitution, and the next doctor’s appointment.

My dad was somewhere else.  Perhaps he was taking refuge in his own thoughts.  Perhaps he was between gratitude that we cared and irritation that we intended to be so convincing.

And I looked down at the pictures of those smiling old folks.  Their faces didn’t look like my dad’s.  There were individuals and couples.  A family sat together, if memory serves me.  They all wore smiles.  I didn’t see hints of broken brains and torn memories in their eyes.  I didn’t see the early signs which were discussed on the back side of all those happy people. There were no true images of fragility there.  I had to glance up to see them.  I had to look at my father for that.

by Michael

Miscarriage, Marriage to a Bear, & Expecting a Daughter

My name is Nate Noonen and I am going to be a father in about two weeks, give or take two weeks. I have always dreamed of being a dad.  That sounds odd, but children were a huge part of my life growing up.  I married my teddy bear, Tabitha, in a ceremony performed by my father, an ordained minister in the Nazarene church.  I don’t think the ceremony was legally binding since I was three years old at the time.  From that point on, every teddy bear brought into my house was a child of Tabitha and me.  Having four younger sisters meant that Tabitha and I had children fairly regularly.

Tabitha now lives with my mom and the rest of my family back in Ohio and I have since married a beautiful non-ursine woman named Kimmy.  We live in an apartment in Logan Square which used to be populated by a series of pet rodents until the last one died a year or so ago.  After that we were going to get a dog but that was stopped by landlord intervention and a realization that what we really wanted, and felt God had prepared us for, was a child.

Kimmy had a miscarriage a year and ten days ago (July 5, 2011).  We confirmed pregnancy and knew she would have a baby for less than 24 hours before the miscarriage.  People don’t tell each other about those things, but they are all a part of being a parent.  The joy of the positive pregnancy test followed by the agony and shared pain of having to wait that much longer for the first, second, or third child.  I don’t want to get into a discussion on abortion, but I know a God who weeps for every living thing, regardless of age, and sometimes I weep with Him.

Through that sadness and the discussions we have had with other parents, we were prepared to try again, with a more in depth understanding of the fragility of life.  That fragility expresses itself in every offer of genetic testing, every “this is nothing to worry about but,” every realization of just how not in control we are and how petrifying that is.  A belief in a loving God does not shield us from that fear, but it does make the fear subject to the reminders of just how much He loves us, how much He loves my daughter Charlotte and knows her in her inmost being, regardless of the age at which she leaves this realm for another.

My daughter will be born at some point.  That is the only fact that I know right now.  Michael has asked me to write a monthly article for his blog which I will do everything in my power to fulfill.

I look forward to seeing what God has in store over the next year.

Nate

by Michael

As A Father, I Wonder

I wonder if my son’s current ways of communicating—the quick and long strands of words I can’t understand—is a precursor to some other moment or phase in his life when I won’t understand him.

I wonder if the way I stop and listen to him, even when I have no clue what he’s saying, is an indicator of how well I’ll listen to him for the rest of my life or if it means I’ll squander my ability to listen and get irritated and frustrated with age by what I can’t grasp.

I wonder if my method of repeating the ways words should sound is a way of shutting off his creativity to making new things when new things are words I’ve never heard or words he’s re-written because his life boxes and life lines are still being drawn.

I wonder when it’s right to give him room to wander and when wandering slips and stumbles into something dangerous.

I wonder how long I should give the boy to figure out the red house shoes have gotten smaller because I dried them and they shrank or whether, knowing he’ll get frustrated, explaining it right away is the best course of action.

I wonder if it’s right to almost always have to be the first person to tell him no, because the other folks are so frequent to say the other, and if that’s one of the burdens of fatherhood.

I wonder when the report card for being a father is actually drawn up, how often it’s drawn up, and whether there’s a good way to explain all those missed homework assignments, those half-spoken conversations, and those embodied lessons like hugs and timeouts and raised, fatherly voices and potty training.

I wonder, when I look at my son, when some of my fears started, where they started, and whether God can use that little boy to make me unafraid of things that really are powerless.

I wonder how close I am to what other people do everyday with their children, if I’m near where I should be as a father, or if I’m really far off the mark, nowhere near the target of raising a boy well.

I wonder how in the world single fathers do what they do because I couldn’t imagine being like them, teaching and learning and loving and giving without my wife who does things I wouldn’t even find emotionally plausible.

I wonder, when I say things to Bryce, how my father would sound saying them to me or how he would react to the thing itself, hearing me talk to his grandson.

What about you?  What do you wonder?