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.

Awaiting hope is a post from: Sand in the Gears

“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.

Fine lines is a post from: Sand in the Gears

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 faith is a post from: Sand in the Gears

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 found church is a post from: Sand in the Gears

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.

The latest news is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Happiness Overrated is a post from: Sand in the Gears

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.

A father’s waning day is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Kind words is a post from: Sand in the Gears

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.

Wise parenting is bravest is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Radio prayers is a post from: Sand in the Gears