We are watching Nate, our eldest son, inch toward the isolating cave of the American teenager.  Really the kid is my hero.  He has a blend of confidence and humility that is a rare jewel.  I think he understands the true posture of humility in ways that most of us would not allow ourselves to comprehend such a trait.

This past weekend we went to the mall; a group of teenagers said loudly enough for our whole family to enjoy, “How can he walk around with his face looking like that?”  I thought they were talking about my unkempt beard, but further along in our consumptive stroll my wife asked, “Did you hear that?  Nate did.”  Nate has a port-wine stain on his face, a birthmark.  If I had realized what was said while we were in their proximity, I might be posting this from jail.  Fortunately for the group of slacking miscreants and for my police record, I am slow.

The boy wears his hair long, over his face.  His personality is dominated by kindness, though sometimes I worry that he might withhold this because of his learned shyness.  Sometimes I worry that he hides behind the hair and the birthmark; I haven’t witnessed him doing this, but people are themselves at home, which is the only place I am able to consistently observe him.  Around here he is confident in his abilities.

The medical procedure to remove a port-wine stain is not considered cosmetic; our insurance covers it due to the way a port-wine stain collects red blood cells – I don’t completely understand this.  So it is an option, one which he neither embraces, nor fully rejects.  He thinks about it.  He talks about it with Molly and I, but then, like someone who understands all of life already, pronounces that we are his parents and therefore wholly void of objectivity.  His comprehension of our relationship is astounding to me.

He was wearing the pre-teen sadness last night, so we asked for some kind of explanation, which he was unable to articulate.  But it comes back to the damn birthmark.  I think the splotch on his face has made him incredibly aware of his emotional make up.  He was looking for advice, but not ours.  So we helped him make a list of people he respected whom he could consult.  Then we told him that talking with these people about it was up to him since he disallows our slanted input.

I don’t know if he’ll be wearing the birthmark when he is 13 or 14.  I do know that because he has worn it the first 11 years of his life, he tends to accept people for who they are.  He has a rare openness.  I wish he learned it from me, but instead he learned it from something he wishes wasn’t there.  I suppose he could be a mean and over-compensating young man because of the way he has often been judged; he is not.

I wish he’d bloody a few lips with his wiry muscles.  Test them out.  “Finish it,” I say, “don’t start it; end it.”  He doesn’t feel the need just yet, perhaps one day he will.  Whether he teaches someone a lesson or if he refrains, he is heroic in his manner and wise beyond his years.  To his father he is a walking lesson in grace and compassion.  “One day,” I tell him, “people will notice and appreciate your strength of character, but for now you’re in middle school surrounded by a collection of idiots.”  I hope he remembers this when it comes true.  Because right now, I’m just a father without objectivity.

I think God is like this.  If so, the calisthenics of self-improvement aren’t very useful.  They’re not necessarily bad, but they do tend to lead us into self-sufficiency, if they are not performed with utmost humility and honesty.  You learn these things if you’re born with a port-wine stain.

What follows is not true.  It does not have a “point.”  It is a story, and as stories go, I suppose it is intended to be enjoyable.  I was growing tired of blogging with a “point.”  Perhaps tomorrow I will write something with a “point.”  “Points” are wearisome, aren’t they?  I feel as if they should always be “wrapped up in quotation marks.”  All is meaningless; have a great, pointless and enjoyable day!

In my homeland round about this time of year, the obituaries began to run together, especially as the Winter weather eclipses Spring.  There are the few days of hope, maybe a day in the upper thirties.  But that day is followed by the doldrums of a two week cold-snap, where the sun tricks hearty, old Norwegians and stoic Swedes into believing the meteorologist might be wrong.

“I can feel it in my knees,” they say, “the weather is changing today.”  And so, with a heart bursting with expectation old men put on their boots

A Personal Blogger’s Lament

As years go, 2009 was one of them.  Not the worst, and no where close to my best year of life, my first, which consisted of drinking breast milk until I passed out and/or messed myself.  Fortunately I believe that I am not alone, and that pretty much the whole of society has lost their damn minds in the last two years.

About a year ago I launched Ream of Paper, with little more than a dream, and the belief that I am so darn interesting, (funny and good looking) who could avoid reading my glorious thoughts.  The answer was shocking. 

His fists flexed closed as he said, “I don’t want a God you can hold in two hands, one if you’re experienced at holding babies!  I don’t want a God covered in afterbirth or crowning out of a young woman.  I don’t want a God wrapped up in a blanket covered in meconium.  I don’t want a God clutching at a woman’s breast.  I want pomp, and God-type things.  I want thunder and rain and lightening, well-placed too.”

I agreed with him more than I thought I might.  I added, “You know, I don’t want to have to wonder when Jesus first realized that he was God.  If he had to come as a baby, I want for him to be lying in a tidy crib, looking up toward the heavens remembering playing golf with Gabriel or cosmic bowling with Lucifer before he fell from the sky. 

I think the day after God made the sun, the third day, he woke up to it’s wooing the following morning and began forming the fish and the birds, resigning, “Back to the ol’ grind.”  It must have been a rough day, the fourth.  Fish, for all of their intricacies, look mostly like fish; and birds resemble other birds with slight variations.  I have this vivid onomatopoeia relationship with God, where I make him speak,

art credit: caroline levis www.levisart.com, click image to veiw portfolio

According to rabbinic tradition and Acts 7, Moses tended sheep in the wilderness for forty years.  His first forty years were spent in a king’s palace.  His final forty years were spent leading a liberated, yet still grumpy people toward the Promised Land.  It’s the middle forty, the desert years, that seem pointless.  He got married, had some kids, and inhaled the smoke of a burning paote bush that led him to believe I AM WHO I AM was telling him to lead his people out of Egypt.  Forty years is a long time to listen to  sheep.  It is a long time to believe the words of a flaming bush.

What’s more is that God tells him the job he is preparing him to do will fail.  Exodus 4 paraphrased says, “You’re going to do all these miraculous things, but I’m going to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he won’t listen to you.  It’s not going to work.  It’s not you; it’s me.”  Encouragement like that probably made the octogenarian long to hear the bleating of sheep. 

Language and Epistemology of Grace

There is this woman in the Bible, if I were talking about her behind her back I might be inclined to call her “that filthy whore!”  This woman was caught in the act!  “We have laws for this kind of behavior,” cried the behaviorists.  So the behaviorists, doing what moral theorists should do, appealed to Jesus.  To whom else would you turn?  Certainly Jesus, filled with the Spirit and moral clarity with settle this one.  The moral lawyers cited Moses vs. the People of Israel