Well, I’d intended for any manifestos I write to be published well after my death, if not to spare my children the embarrassment, then to avert desecration of my grave. In grad school I learned, by way of a miserable course of study in econometrics, the word “orthogonal.” In two-dimensional space, it refers to lines …
Monthly Archives: January 2014
Do you ever look on your children, and wish they had better than you? Back when we were shopping my embarrassingly confessional first book, my agent at the time told me I needed a ministry to accompany it. She said this as a realist, not an enthusiast. You need a platform to sell your wares. …
“I have a sense,” I once told a counselor, “that I’m supposed to do something great.” He sat back in his chair and smiled. “Oh yeah. Everyone has that feeling about himself. Especially in this country.” I was deflated for weeks. My sense of destiny was just a psychological quirk born of Western narcissism. Maybe …
I come now to the question in my heart when I began: what can my sons say to a deceived and soul-sickened world? You might remember the story of a girl murdered that awful day in Columbine. As this story goes, one of the demoniac boys asked if she believed in God, and when she …
What is the cost of a calling? You can be called to be a parent; you can be called to be a plumber. But having a child, or picking up a pipe wrench, is not—in and of itself—to pursue a calling. The world is filled with parents and plumbers, after all, who don’t do their …