Awaiting hope

Somewhere between a speed too slow to get killed and too fast to get away, a grasshopper found himself clinging to my windshield wiper. He wrapped his thin wire legs around black metal and held on with that baleful, narrow-headed look grasshoppers have. I kept waiting for him to let go, to tumble and topple into my truck’s wake until the turbulence subsided, until he knew ground from sky again and found himself a hundred yards or a half mile from home, feeling reborn or let down or just plain grasshopper lucky.

But he held on, and as I went faster he worked his striated legs and turned until he faced the wind, his antennae bent backward in tight arcs, his tapered body quivering. Then he turned again, and crawled behind the wiper, making it his shelter. He hid behind that long piece of metal and rubber, and I hid behind my windshield, and together we flew down the highway.

I watched that grasshopper hunkered down against the violent wind and it occurred to me that I had intended to write about hope and love and I really just can’t bring myself to say anything about them that doesn’t sound false, that doesn’t seem more ridiculous with each pretty word. First there was love and then there was sacrifice and then there was the church to explain these things and even give us a bible to help with the explaining, which is where we read of faith, hope, and love. We read that the greatest of these is love just as the beginning of these is love, and I realize that I don’t really know much at all about what love means or how to live it or how even not to kill it.

And if you can’t keep from destroying the love that finds its way to you, then you don’t have much hope at all, do you? Not here or in any life to follow. But I’m stubborn and so I wrote and wrote and wrote about hope, stacked word upon word, because this is what you are supposed to do when you write about the church you have found and the faith that has found you, you are supposed to write next about hope and then about love and at the end of it you are supposed to say something that means Something, if only to whisper it back to yourself, because while most people first make sense and then they say it with words, sometimes the best you can do is say words until you come to your senses.

You can’t admit hopelessness. This is why you lie, when someone asks how you are doing, because this is your sin, to have no hope, and if you confess it they will try to fix you, they will try to get you to manufacture it before their eyes, because no one knows how to grieve with anyone any more, raised as we are in a fix-things-up culture. This is why you lie and say that things are okay, or hard but passable, or peachy damned keen. You are not supposed to look at the arc of your life, and come to the conviction that it will only get worse from here, that at best you are fighting a holding action, that you are hunkered down like that grasshopper for only as long as your quaking arms will hold you, that the wind will not stop, that the spirit of the air claws and grabs until it takes what it wants.

Some days I haven’t a scrap of hope, but I have the hope of hope, or perhaps something like faith that hope will come, if only because it has to. Maybe it’s when your tired grip fails that hope rushes in, or salvation, or just a cool spot of water on your straining face. Maybe our story here really is like a fairy tale, and this is why we write so many stories about last-minute rescues, because something beneath our skin tells us this is our story, that it has to be our story, that everything can be redeemed, which means anything can be redeemed, which means the likes of you or me can be redeemed.

And maybe this is all hope ever can be, a faint whisper of itself. What need we of hope, until all hope is lost? You look back at the long, crooked, down-tumbling path of your life, and you peer forward into darkness, and everything tells you to despair. This is when hope has to rush in, if hope means anything at all. So I haven’t hope, but I have hope that hope will come rushing in, or soughing slow like a breeze in summer, or welling up like warmth in your belly when you are in love. I hope to one day have hope, and if that isn’t the best kind of hope, maybe it’s a kind of hope all the same.

Fine lines

Home yesterday afternoon. The boys drop toys and ditch bikes and jump off swings to come hug me, before I’ve even all the way out of my truck. Isaiah insists on being held. He wraps his arms and legs around me, like he is a bear cub. I lug him and my luggage and my computer bag into the house.

“Daddy,” he says, peering around my arm at the brown leather bag hanging from my shoulder, “is that your purse?”

“No. It’s a . . . a man bag.”

“Oh, a man bag. It’s Daddy’s man bag.”

Somehow this sounds patronizing, even though he doesn’t mean it that way.

The found faith

Faith is this knowing in the center of you that will not leave. It has been to you a light that guides, light that illumines the worst of yourself, weight that steadies, weight that holds you where you do not want to be. Perhaps, when it first stirred inside your chest, you tried to build a home for it in your head. You read the books, learned the phrases, spouted your word-filled prayers. You learned how to speak of it to others. You studied clever ways to prove it to them. You resented them when they rejected your clever words. It became, for a time, your self-worth, your assurance that you inhabit a special place in the universe.

But your faith would not live in the house of your intellect, only your pride, and your self-love, and your anger, all of which you clothed in righteousness and labeled God. Then you stumbled, or the world destroyed some part of you, or took someone you loved, or maybe all of these things, and then the house you constructed for your faith held only the echoes of your catechisms, the hollow encouragements of your well-meaning, faith-minded friends, the obligatory notion that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us more holy.

Only it didn’t make you more holy. It left these holes in you, this world, and so perhaps you cast what passed for faith out of your mind, and set about the business of self-medication or self-destruction, which in the end come always to the same place. You shuttered the house built for faith in your mind, and perhaps you told everyone or perhaps you told no one, but you next tried to live a life without faith, ran from faith until you were empty, empty and broken down and not knowing any more what you had ever known or why you ever thought you knew it.

And then you find that faith will no more leave you than it will take wings at your bidding. You find that it will never live in your head, that it will never be fine thread to weave with words, that it will never adorn you as something crafted to make you more complete.

You find, instead, that it persists in the deepest parts of you, in the places where you most desperately need and fear it. You find that you have run all this way and never departed from it, because it has never departed from you, because it was never any more your choice than is the beating of your heart.

And so you come, at the end of your running and rending of flesh, to faith, which long ago came to you. It is weight and it is light and it is knowing. It is belief in the midst of unbelief, quiet truth uttered after lies. It is waiting, it is silent prayer. It is whispered thanks for the way your child sighs in his sleep, and for wind that soughs the trees. It is knowing you are unforgotten. It is what bears you homeward.

The found church

Church is light streaming in, mingled voices, the expectation — sometimes against all experience — that this time God will meet you here, or at the very least, that you will leave your miserable ways long enough to meet Him.

It doesn’t happen every week or even more than a few times in your life. Maybe this is because we have made these buildings into theaters and lecture halls. Our plays are passionless — we act out neither bliss nor despair, only the shabby optimism of elevator music and morning television. The lectures you have heard before, even the weepy, sentimentalized ones, because one does not survive the modern American church without having been lectured about what the words mean, or about what one ought to feel, or about how one ought to feel about people who don’t have the right way of thinking about what the words mean.

But sometimes even the words of men cannot keep out the Word, and then you know the God who is neither text nor calculus, who is past the intellect, past anything your meager tongue might utter. Then church is voices in unison with the voices of angels, the soft thump of a child’s head against a smooth wooden pew, the merciful hand laid upon the bowed shoulder, the indrawn breath as tears come unbidden.

Church is the child tasting bread, the man stooping low, the cloud of witnesses who for once are not weeping at what we have made of things, the sudden realization that all of it is true, the parts we yearn for and the parts we dread and the parts we ignore or twist to fit our tiny theologies — all of it is true, and it is true the way your fury and love and secret shames are true.

You find church and you weep, because you know it is a rare thing and it should not be this hard to find. You stand in it, as you might a quivering ray of light slipped through a cloud-burdened sky, and you pray that it will not end, that the light will spread or only stay, that this could be every day, forever and ever amen, not a spot of mercy but the way of all creation. You stand in the light already going dim, and you think you might be better, if only you could touch God.

The latest news

The fact is that I’m a terribly neglectful blogger these days. If it’s any consolation, I have been up to some writing here and there. For example, you might enjoy my latest essay in The Wall Street Journal, about my copyright odyssey. And I’ve been working on a short story in which John Calvin joins a community college creative writing workshop. It’s funnier than it sounds. I think.

I know, I know, many of you would rather hear about my youngsters. I don’t blame you; they’re cuter and smarter than me. I’ll see if I can’t give you an update on them all soon. I find any more, what with all the extra work and travel, my writing about them (aside from the book, of course) comes in little microbursts on Twitter, as often as not. If you’re interested.

Happiness Overrated

Some of you might appreciate my “Case Against Happiness” over at Megan McArdle’s site, which got some angry comments, as well as some nice words from Rod Dreher and Joe Carter.

A father’s waning day

As I write, there are nine minutes left in Father’s Day, which is just right, given that every father I know feels like he has so much left to do, and just a scrap of time in which to do it. I’ve had two and a half lovely days at home, and tomorrow as well before I’m back on the road. They are all asleep, my little ones, which leaves me these dark quiet hours to reflect on the ways I fall short, on this selfishness that permeates every part of me.

We like to think that it is we who benefit them, but the truth is that they benefit us, if we will let them, if we will simply lay down ourselves and die, which is alien talk to people who are not aliens in this world. But every father with ears to hear knows he must lay down and die, today and the next and the next, and pray for grace in the interstitial places, and give thanks that there is more watching over them than our weakling prayers.

They need us, to be sure, but we need them more, for where would we be without them? Somewhere happier, perhaps, and certainly more peaceful, but also more empty and shallow, and in now wise more holy. It’s only when we abandon thought of living for our own happiness that we can truly begin to father, to make that a word bearing heft.

Tomorrow I will mow and mend, and in the hot summer evening we will all go to see Caleb play a baseball game. Once I’ve tucked them in I will pack — I will pack my clothes and any tenderness away, and go once again across space to where money is but my heart is not. I will eke out another week, wondering if I will get this task of fathering right in the months to come, and if at least there is redemption in the striving.

There has to be redemption, in the striving.

Kind words

The folks at Image Journal have some very nice things to say about my new book, which I’ve added to other reviews.

Wise parenting is bravest

Bruce Barcott argues in The L.A. Times that parents of 16 year-old Abby Sunderland, recently rescued from the Indian Ocean after trying to sail around the globe by herself, are not irresponsible for letting their daughter attempt such a feat, but exemplars of brave parenting. I wonder if this isn’t another false dichotomy, “helicopter parenting” on the one side, and brave, let-your-daughter-sail-around-the-world-despite-the-existence-of-pirates-and-slave-traders parenting on the other.

The latter — though not in Barcott’s case — seems to cater to career-anxious parents who seek solace for their daily decisions to engage only minimally in the lives of their children. The research shows parenting doesn’t have much effect on the outcomes of children anyway. And at least I’m not one of those hovering ninny parents.

I’d like to suggest middle ground, which we can call wise parenting. A wise parent, when confronted by a 16 year-old girl who wants to sail around the globe, would go with her. If she balks because her goal is to be the youngest female ever to accomplish such a feat alone, the wise parent might remind her that there’s an asymptote, that perhaps no one younger has accomplished such a thing because attempting such a thing alone at a young age is foolish and narcissistic, not daring.

Radio prayers

My interview with Moody Radio goes live tomorrow at 7:40 a.m. CT/8:40 a.m. ET Tuesday, June 15th. You can listen live by clicking on the “Daybreak” link here. Also had a delightful interview with a station in Melbourne, Australia. After we finished recording, the host asked if he could pray for me. It’s a sweet, humbling thing, to hear someone pray for you. Go pray for someone soon, so they can hear you. It’s something they’ll not soon forget.

Dressing up

In London, parents decry high heels for little girls as another instance of oversexualizing children. Their opponents say that little girls simply want to be like grown-ups.

Which seems to be precisely the point of the protest. But in an age when we’ve hypersexualized everything, and then refuse to see it as such, the logic breaks down. When suburban moms dress like strippers, but call it “fashionable,” it’s hard to find any traction when one suggests that little girls shouldn’t follow suit.

Here, there

Today is the liberty-loving writer wedding of the century, as my friends Megan McArdle (The Atlantic) and Peter Suderman (Reason Magazine) tie the knot. Megan is a super woman, but she’s not Superwoman, which means I’ll be one of several guest bloggers during her absence.

In other news, I’m also blogging for World again. On occasion I might even write a thing or two for the blog that has my name on it.

Get to know me

Catch me live today on Pittsburgh’s 101.5 FM radio with John Hall, at 4:00 p.m CST/5:00pm EST. You can listen here. In other news, I’ve started back blogging at World, which you can find here.

Not that science matters to the true believer, but…

It was already suspicious, the timing of Pediatric’s publication of a study purporting to show that lesbian couples parent more effectively than husband-wife couples, so that it coincides with Lesbian/Gay/Sexual-Deviancies-Too-Confusing-to-Name-Here Month. But Carolyn Moynihan points out numerous flaws in the study, from failure to provide truly comparable control cases to inadequate exploration of alternative causes of the results. Referring to a published critique of the study, Moynihan notes:

“That writer expresses surprise that there was no attempt to adjust the results for these differences, and that the study was accepted all the same by Pediatrics — the journal of the country’s leading professional group.”

But should we be surprised? Can any of us genuinely imagine a journal publishing a study with the opposite result, namely, that gays and lesbians make worse parents than straight couples? Of course not. The conclusion, in other words, is foregone, and now it is up to a host of sympathetic researchers to torture the data until they cry out the proper catechism.

Me on NRO and in Pittsburgh, all in one day

My interview with John Miller in his “Between the Covers” program on National Review Online is up today, you can listen to it here. He also has some very kind things to say on his blog, which includes a pic of me and the boys holding my book.

We are standing inadvertently in front of a sign that says “Religious Fiction,” which I hope isn’t a sign or a judgment from God or anything, but rather just a reflection of the fact that when your last name is Woodlief, you get shoved to the end of whatever section happens to be yours in the bookstore. If memory serves, Somewhere More Holy is sitting between a book on angels and Phillip Yancey, which isn’t such a bad place to be.

In other news, Friday I’ll speak with John Hall on Pittsburgh’s 101.5 WORD-FM at 4:10 p.m. CST / 5:10 p.m. EST. You can even listen to me live.

UPDATE:

John Miller says, re the pic of me and the boys on his blog, that what he noticed was not that we are standing in front of the “Religious Fiction” section, but that we are standing in front of the bathroom. There’s a chapter in my book devoted to the bathroom, perhaps the funniest of all the chapters, and so I suppose that’s fitting.

Tickle Monster

Tonight I introduced Isaac and Isaiah to the Tickle Monster Game, which I used to play with Caleb and Eli. (And which I write about in my book. Have I mentioned the new book today?) I armed them both with rubber swords and told them I would be hiding somewhere in my bedroom. When I heard them giggling in the doorway, I let out a low, tickly-type growl.

More giggling. They took a step inside the room. I jumped up from behind the bed and roared. They screamed. Isaac shot out of the room, arms raised above his head in terror and delight, rubber sword flailing. Isaiah turned to escape, and ran straight into the doorjamb with a thump of his head.

He lay there and wailed. I picked him up to look for blood. There was a bump and a scratch, but no gusher. I loved him for a minute, and then he demanded to be put down so we could resume Tickle Monster. I put him down. I gave him his sword, and he left the bedroom under his own, wobbly power.

I hid again. I heard them approach the doorway, giggling. I growled. Isaiah growled back, and came charging through the doorway, a fierce snarl on his face. I jumped out from behind a dresser, aiming to scare him, but he didn’t even slow down, he simply adjusted course and charged into my legs, sword flapping. I picked him up, deposited him onto the bed, and commenced to tickling. Isaac came roaring in next, demanding that I let his brother go.

And so we played until we were all sweaty-headed and out of breath — hiding, seeking, attacking and counter-attacking, all of us laughing deep from our bellies. I remembered those evenings with Caleb and Eli, and was thankful for them, and for these littlest ones, and for whatever days we have left to run with abandon through this house, this sanctuary, this home.

Attire

Wife is gone with the older boys for a few days, leaving me with two year-old Isaiah and five year-old Isaac. We’re going to have some man time, I tell them. This evening, Isaac comes to me before dinner. “Dad, is it alright if I just wear a t-shirt and underwear?”

Alright? It’s the classic man time uniform. Clearly the boy has much to learn.

The upside of getting one’s head squished

Driving down the highway a few days ago, we pass a motorcycle. “Dad,” Isaac says to me, “do you know why that man is foolish?”

I know what he’s going to say, but still I ask, “Why?”

“Cause he’s not wearing a helmet.”

“I know. That’s foolish, isn’t it?”

“But there’s one good thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If he’s a Christian, when he gets his head squished, he’ll go up to heaven.”

Isaac is my glass-is-half-full child.

Millstones

Yet another way we increasingly fail children in our supersized, high-fructose corn syrup besotted, electronics-enslaved, why-walk-when-I-can-ride culture: fat kids.

“At the core of the problem is the fact that less than one third of all children ages 6 to 17 get regular vigorous exercise, defined as at least 20 minutes of physical activity that makes them sweat and breathe hard, according to a new joint report from the American Heart Association and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education.”

I’m not sure what to make of a world in which a ten year-old can’t find an hour to run and play, but I have a feeling there’s something very wrong with it.

Still listening

When it rains it pours; this afternoon at 4:05 CST / 5:05 EST I’ll be on the Paul Edwards Program, WLQV-AM 1500 in Detroit. You can listen online by following the link here.

News flash: parents affect the behavior of their children

Scientists finally confirm the age-old wisdom that parenting matters — in this case with a study showing that parents with permissive attitudes about underage drinking have children who — be sure you’re sitting down for this one — are more likely to get falling-down drunk once they’re living on their own.

This reminds me of a highly educated person with whom I worked years ago, a slovenly father who let his five year-old watch horror films and rated-R movies because “kids are gonna see that stuff anyway.” Especially if they have twits for parents.

So the lesson is this: don’t be your child’s best friend, or the cool parent, or the permanent child rebelling against your own strict upbringing. Be a parent, for crying out loud. Because it really does matter.

Less passion, more principle

I’m sure Bobby’s a nice guy, but I want to register my objection to the notion that what qualifies one for the U.S. Presidency is passion. I know it’s an antiquated view, in a culture where voters are comfortable selecting presidents according to the same criteria they use to select American Idols, but if we’re all unhappy with the sorry state of things then perhaps we ought to start trading in some of our modern views for the antiquated ones.

I’d trade presidential passion, in other words, for rock-solid commitment to the U.S. Constitution as something other than a “living document” that magical affirms whatever it is that a majority of voters think their government ought to do for them.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good

Yet another reason to rid yourself of the notion that you should be perfect: new mothers who labor under this weight are more likely to suffer post-partum depression.

Piecemeal reform rarely works

Chicago’s school administrators discover that “performance pay” doesn’t work when it’s a small portion of compensation and divorced from individual performance. In other words, performance pay tends to work better when it has something to do with one’s performance. No doubt a host of education bureaucrats and their apologists in academia will now refer to this program to claim that market-based reforms won’t work in education.

Again with the listening

Today at 10 a.m. CST/ 11 a.m. EST / figure-it-out-for-yourself-if-you-live-west-of-me-ST, I’ll be interviewed on Missouri-KNEO’s Author’s Corner program. You can listen to it live by going to their website and clicking the little button thingy in the upper right corner.

UPDATE

Got it wrong — taped the segment today, but it will air closer to Father’s Day. Will let you know when it’s up.

Listen

If you’re in Charlotte you can tune in to the Coastal Daybreak program on WTKF-FM (107.1) / WJNC-AM (1240) tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 8:15 a.m. and listen to me talk with Ben Ball about my new book.

For the love of Christ

My friend and recovering Reformer Trent sends me this clip from John Piper, displaying once again a terribly muddled sense of the Trinity:

“God is very dangerous apart from Jesus. He’s angry apart from Jesus.”

Whenever I hear people contrast God with Jesus, it makes me wonder who in the world they think Jesus is. Those of us who affirm the Nicene Creed understand Him to be fully God, and of one essence with the Father.

This then makes me wonder, of someone who thinks like Piper, just who does he believe crossed the veil in order to effect the salvation of man? Jesus, the nice guy? Jesus the superman? Jesus, the perfect Lamb?

We’re getting warmer, but we’re not fully there until we confess that this Jesus is also fully God, and of one accord with the Father. Thus it is God — the Just and the Justifier, as St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans — who effects man’s salvation from sin and death. Is there judgment for those who reject this gift? Absolutely. But to speak of Jesus coming down to spare us from an angry God, as if they are separate in mercy and will, or as if the chief enemy of man is God, is simply false.

As an added treat, notice how Piper, towards the end, suggests that he’s hewing to tradition when he appends “in the name of Jesus” to his prayers. Those who attend to Church history before the 16th century might suggest a better tradition, which is to pray in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Don’t put on that Miley Cyrus pendant just yet

Looks like Miley Cyrus’s people have been making their jewelry in China, given its high levels of poisonous cadmium. In a move that doesn’t fool anyone but makes them all hate corporations, Cyrus and Wal-Mart, her distributor, are claiming that the jewelry was never intended for children, who are particularly threatened. Wal-Mart points to the fact that the jewelry is carried in its ladies’ apparel section as proof that children and tweens weren’t the intended target audience, but it’s a thin reed given Cyrus’s undeniable demographic.

Every day a memorial day

Yesterday the Eastern Orthodox celebrated the saints, and today many Americans celebrate fallen soldiers, and in the midst of remembrances of saints and soldiers I find myself thinking on a little girl who fought a great battle, and endured worse than a bullet, and who now watches from the blessed cloud of witnesses.

It’s a good thing, I believe, to remember the dead — especially in a culture that trivializes death. We shunt it aside to the fantastic realms of video games and movies, and call it by other names when we do it to old people and unborn infants, and all of this is a way, I think, of grasping life in the wrong way, in a way that reveals the underlying belief, for many of us, that our lives are about our gratification.

That’s such a big word for an experience that is so very small. Gratification is as far removed from joy as hunger is from a great feast, and yet we forsake the latter in pursuit of the former because joy, like a feast, requires sacrifice.

So it’s a good thing to remember those who gave their lives in sacrifice for others. Think on them, and if you like you can light a candle or mutter a prayer, a prayer that you and I and the rest of the world will, if only for a slender day, give ourselves over to loving someone other than ourselves, which means the great sacrifice of setting down our hurts and lusts and grievances and entitlements, all of which are chains with heavy anchors, but which we gather to us like treasures. But today, if only for today, what say we lay them down?

It is a good thing to remember people who have laid down their very selves, and maybe to be a little more like them.

And still there is this girl. Why is she in my thoughts so heavily this day? Perhaps because she so infuses the book that I cannot talk about it without talking about her. Or perhaps it’s Isaiah, who in his voice and laughter and even tears sounds so very much like the sister he hasn’t met. Maybe it’s the approach of Father’s Day, or the slant of light, or the smell of fresh rain on the leaves.

I don’t know, any more, why some days we remember, as we all do, all of us caught up sometimes in the hurt of missing someone we cannot see again so long as we breathe.

But it’s a good thing, to remember. Tonight I’ll make spaghetti. It’s not a Memorial Day meal, but in another way it is, because it was her favorite, and so today it’s my favorite too. We’ll all sit together and eat, and we’ll talk about the sacrifices of those who have gone before, and in the chatter and bustle of my children I will quietly remember her, and this is good. We should make all our days memorial days, if only to be reminded that we ought to live bigger lives than forgetting allows.

Listen

Those of you with satellite radio can hear me tomorrow morning (May 31st) at 8am cst/9am est, on Gus Lloyd’s program, “Seize the Day.” It’s live, so who knows what will come out of my mouth.