Home by Another Way

I heard this old James Taylor song on the way to pick up Katie today. It is one I rarely hear, but it is on my Ipod:

Those magic men the Magi, some people call them wise or Oriental, even kings.
Well anyway, those guys, they visited with Jesus, they sure enjoyed their stay.
Then warned in a dream of King Herod's scheme, they went home by another way.
Yes, they went home by another way, home by another way.
Maybe me and you can be wise guys too and go home by another way.
We can make it another way, safe home as they used to say.
Keep a weather eye to the chart on high and go home another way.

Steer clear of royal welcomes, avoid a big to-do.
A king who would slaughter the innocents will not cut a deal for you.
He really, really wants those presents, he'll comb your camel's fur
until his boys announce they've found trace amounts of your frankincense, gold and myrth.
Time to go home by another way, home by another way.
You have to figure the Gods, saying play the odds, and go home by another way.
We can make it another way, safe home as they used to say.
Keep a weather eye to the chart on high and go home another way.

Home is where they want you now,
you can more or less assume that you'll be welcome in the end.
Mustn't let King Herod haunt you so or fantasize his features when you're looking at a friend.
Well it pleasures me to be here and to sing this song tonight,
they tell me that life is a miracle and I figured that they're right.
But Herod's always out there, he's got our cards on file.
It's a lead pipe cinch, if we give an inch, old Herod likes to take a mile.
It's best to go home by another way, home by another way.
We got this far to a lucky star, but tomorrow is another day.
We can make it another way, safe home as they used to say.
Keep a weather eye to the chart on high and go home another way.




The first way home was blocked by Herod. Or cancer. Or divorce. It doesn't mean we can't go home by another way. And it is best to find that way with a companion.

can't sleep

I don't know why I can't seem to go to sleep tonight. I am yawning as I type this, but I laid in bed for half an hour without going to sleep, which is way unusual for me. Though this has been happening more frequently recently.

It was a good if nondescript Saturday. My dad came home from his week in Minnesota for a class. He does this every summer, and it is a real treat for him to meet teachers from around the country. Interestingly, this was the first time he was the longest-tenured teacher in the group. I guess that will happen when you are about to start year 35. But the main reason it is fun for me and my mom is that he comes home energized about whatever new he has seen. And energized about the new school year approaching, too, I think, and just feels more a part of the community. My dad loves places; he loves National Geographic and reads atlases just for fun and so on. I have never shared that directly; I don't much care for places as such one way or the other. I don't take backroads just to see small towns that I never would have otherwise encountered. But I do enjoy how much he enjoys it.

I am looking forward to Sunday school tomorrow. We have a good topic on tap - friendship - and I think we should have a good crowd. I have a great passage from a novel I was reading a couple of weeks ago to bring in to the discussion. More and more this class is my primary connection to the church. Though that isn't fair to say exactly. I guess what is fair to say is that when the business model is to exploit people committed to the church by asking them to accept an embarrassing salary, you cannot be surprised when people respond by lowering their committment. And that, in a nutshell, is where I am. I feel some remorse about that. But it is more disappointment than it is anything else.

Ah well. I am going to knock out a spreadsheet and then try again to go to sleep.

lunch with one of my favorite people

I got to have lunch with one of my favorite people yesterday, a woman who I thought was gorgeous when she was 17, but little did I know how she would blossom at twice that. It has been one of the treats of the last several months having an ongoing e-mail conversation with her.

It was a lot of fun having lunch, and just an important reminder of how important it is for me as for everyone to live out of the deep parts of our lives. We too easily get caught up in the competition to be perfect and to have everyone think that our lives are flawless, when in fact all of us are broken in some ways. I got to have a lot of those conversations this week, from the deep end of my life, and that has made it a wonderful week, excepting the bit about Katie and I being sick at the beginning of it.

happy birthday to me

When I started this song I was still 33
The age that Mozart died and sweet Jesus was set free.
Just today I had my birthday; I made it - 34.
Mere mortal, not immortal, not star-crossed anymore.
I have a problem with my aging I no longer can ignore:
a tame and toothless tabby can't produce a lion's roar.

Harry Chapin

I have had a good birthday today. Katie was very funny this morning. As we were leaving the house, we were talking about a friend of ours who happens to be 37, and she said something about me being older. So I asked her how old I am, and she said 33, and I said no, and she said yes, and we went back and forth a couple times. And then she remembered it is my birthday, and she smiled and then frowned and said, "Just because it is your birthday doesn't mean you have to be so happy."

But she perked up and by the time we made it to her daycare, she darted in and told everyone it was my birthday, so I got a preschool chorus singing to me this morning. And then there were cupcakes at work, which was very nice, and dinner with my mom and brother, which was fun, too.

So all in all it was a good day for this tame and toothless tabby. I will go to bed not roaring, but purring, which is probably better anyway.

The Book of Bebb

It is a series of four novels that are breathtaking. I think I have mentioned them before on here, but I cannot imagine a more interesting couple of characters than Leo Bebb and Antonio Parr the narrator. Bebb is part charlatan and part preacher and part philosopher and completely a saint. I am halfway through the fourth book and I can't tell if the main character died in the third book or not. But one thing is for sure: I am going to have a day of sadness in a couple of days when I finish this last of the series.

"The trouble with people like Brownie," says Leo Bebb, "is that they hold their life in like a bakebean fart at a Baptist cookout and only let it slip out sideways a little at a time when they think there's nobody noticing. Now that's the last thing on earth the Almighty intended. He intended all the life a man's got inside him, he should live it out just as free and strong and natural as a bird."

There are moments like this of profound insight but told through simple and even vulgar ways. And then there are moments of sheer poetic majesty, like this scene from the end of the first novel:

"Terrible as an army with banners" were among the first words Bebb had quoted from the Song of Solomon in an effort to describe her to me once, and for the first time I realized what Solomon if not Bebb must have meant by such a curious image was that one way mortal man has always reacted to beauty like hers is with terror in his very bowels. I was scared stiff as I saw her picking her way toward me through all the Indians, and as nearly as I can tell, I was scared not so much because of the terrible power her beauty gave her over me as because of my own terrible inability to respond to it in anything remotely like the way the stars themselves cried out for me to. In face of such a sight and mystery as a girl can present when she walks toward you through a firelight in a moon-colored dress, it is possible for any one of us to be like whichever prophet it was who, when he beheld the Lord himself sitting high and lifted up among his angels, could only cry out "Woe is me, for I am undone.....I am a man of unclean lips....."

Any man who has ever been in love can relate to that, methinks....

There's No Way

I heard an old beauty from Alabama as I was riding around today. The refrain runs like this .....

There's no way I could make it without you
There's no way that I'd even try
If I had to survive without you in my life
I know I wouldnt last a day, oh baby, there's no way


It is one of those lyrics that is so true and yet so false.

a friend

I have a good friend who works at the bank across the street from the church. We became friends several months ago when she found out I am a CPA because her fiance' was injured in the war a year or so ago, and the government has given him a settlement, and I hooked her up with my money manager in Nacogdoches to get their money invested intelligently.

Anyway, she decided recently that she needed to end her engagement, and while I am sad for her, I also am proud of her for doing this. They are so young - she is having her 21st birthday next week, and he is not much older - and almost all of their time together has been with him dealing with the surgeries and rehabilitation dealing with the loss of one of his legs. And now that he is healthy, no more surgeries required, and is moving forward with going to school, he is no longer as dependent on her, and their relationship has changed dramatically since then. And so I applaud her for not rushing into to something right now.

I guess this story is largely the reason I have taken a break from dating. I had a wonderful evening out on Saturday with an amazing gal, but I have gone out of my way not to label it, potentially not to jinx it, I guess. It is why I would try to convince my friend of a friend Kristin to stay away from guys even as she feels ready to be out there again. I am changing so quickly; maybe not so much now as the first couple of years of this experience, but probably as quickly as anytime since I was a teenager. And it just seems unlikely that anyone I would have been compatible with a year ago would stand much chance of being compatible with me now.

I think I am turning the corner on that. I certainly feel more ready for a relationship than I have felt in 2006 anyway. But part of that readiness is also not actively looking for a relationship the way I have been. I don't know if that makes sense or not. I am open to the idea, but I am reasonably happy where I am right now. I wish work were less stressful, and I wish I could get a better handle on losing weight, and I wish I had more discipline in general. But I am also getting better at turning things over to God so that I stew on them less. So all in all, I am happy in a way I haven't been since Becky died.

I think one of the things that can happen when we enter relationships while grieving is that we tend to push aside a lot of the grief work. But the closet is only so big, and the door only stays closed so long. It is just not wise. Because when the new relationship hits its inevitable bumps, the doors open and so much of the old hurt gets projected onto the new person. I want to be past that. I don't know if I am, but I want to be.

But back to my friend. I think she is wise to postpone the wedding. She hasn't ended the relationship, and my biggest wish for them is that after time to have the new relationship settle down, that they can decide anew that this is what they want for the future. But I applaud her courage for making the decision she has made, as difficult as it was to convey to her fiance and their families. Please pray for them all in the tough days ahead.

why is it .....

I feel like I have so much to say on here that I can't even get started. I have so many questions about my life right now. I wonder so much what to do with some things going on in Katie's life. I wonder what to do about work. I wonder whether to go to seminary. I wonder whether to ask a cute girl out on a second date. I wonder why I am so lonely after having a good first date. It never fails. It seems weird, but it is true.

I guess most of all I just wish I could share responsibility in my life again. I want to be part of a team again where I am not always the captain. Katie and I do make a formidible pair, but it is not quite what I am looking for. Every now and again, it would be nice to give my input into a decison and then trust the decision another came to, but I can't do that.

It is a part of spiritual discipline. I want to give these questions over to God, but I am not even sure what that means. I pray about these things. I try to lay them at God's feet. But I don't get burning bushes or the stars rearranged into words or voices telling me what to do, so in the end, it still seems like me making decisions. Hopefully more peacefully and in a better frame of mind, leading to better decisions, but they are still mine.

Katie tonight listened to a message my parents have saved from almost four years ago now. It is a call Becky and Katie made to them not long after we moved to Nacogdoches in 2002. Of course, they saved it because of Katie's voice, as Becky tells her what to say, but they have kept it all these years at least as much because of Becky's voice. I hadn't heard that recording or any recording of Becky's voice in quite a while, and yet when I heard her talking it was as if not a minute had passed since the last time I had heard it. It reminds me of a bit from a Paul Simon song:

"She comes back to tell me she's gone.
As if I didn't know that.
As if I didn't know my own bed.
As if I never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead."

And then,....
"I may be obliged to defend
Every love, every ending,
Or maybe there's no obligations now."

I sat at the concert on Saturday night, and the first couple of pieces in particular were very lyrical and peaceful, and I found myself praying about the stuff going on in my life, the stresses I listed above. And then I found myself praying about the woman next to me, who I have known for a while that God put into my life. Why, I can't say yet. It is not for me to know yet, I reckon. Which got me thinking about the other people that I would say without question God has deliberately put into my life. There are men I would say that about, certainly two in my life right now. But what amusing to me at the time and since is how the list of women all seem to be slender brunettes between 5'3" and 5'6".

Things that make you go, "hmmmmmmm." I guess the immediate lesson is that if you want a message to get through to me, send it in that kind of vehicle. They don't have to struggle much to get or keep my attention.

Anyway, my prayer settled on a simple request - let me be the person she needs for whatever purpose You have for us.

It is a prayer I haven't formulated so explicitly since Becky had cancer. Then it was let me be the husband she needs to battle this successfully. I guess I needed to be a little more explicit about whose definition of success I was after, but that is a whole different post. As I am sitting here, it strikes me as funny that I have never articulated my prayers for and about Katie in quite that way. I think I shall from now on.

And now I am off to bed.

it's been a while

Since I posted. I have been very busy; work has erupted in the last several weeks, and so most of the time I spent at home when I could reflect and write, I have been working on stuff I could bring home. Which is not good. I need the time to reflect, and I haven't been getting it.

In general, it has not been a good couple of weeks for me. The family reunion was not the outright disaster it had been the last couple of years, but it was not good. Work has sucked recently. I am tired of the personality conflicts and the politics. Two of my best friends were on vacation at the same time, and gone for far too long, and I missed them and the organization missed them as well.

But there has been good stuff as well. I met a wonderful woman last night for a delightful evening. I am hesitant to call it a date, maybe a friendly date is the way to label it. We went to a concert at the church that was just lovely, but the music paled in comparison to my companion. A half dozen people at church this morning came up to me and asked about her. It was certainly a nice evening, a well-deserved one for both of us as well. We have had a series of delightful phone calls over the last several months, but we both need to be taking things slow. I am not sure what I am capable of right now, and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew and then have to retreat from it.

Who knows? I am tired and going to bed.