I have a tough time with the Fourth of July. I enjoy the fireworks and the grilling out, but I have difficulty genuflecting before my homeland. Do not get me wrong: I love this country deeply and am grateful that I was fortunate enough to be born within its borders. But many people today will proclaim that we are the greatest country in the world, a shining city on a hill in a dark global landscape.

And I am not so sure about that.

It is not solely because our present government seems to be a moral and ethical dumpster fire. To be sure, it is stupid difficult to celebrate a country that treats children the ways in which children at our border have been treated. But the reality is we have always had our flaming piles of garbage. Drone strikes that have killed innocent people, sending weapons to what turn out to be terrorist organizations, a place where many a person has to fight tooth and nail uphill because they are not a white man.

To be sure, there is good amongst those stories, but the tenor of Independence Day pretends as if the bad didn't happen. To some people, it seems almost blasphemous to mention the wrong that this country has done. Yet it is hard to shake that we took this land, killed and subjugated the people living here. It is difficult to forget the backs of slaves on which much of the country was built and how those people were seen as property; the ugliness of the Three-Fifths compromise etched into the Constitution. It's slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, "go back to where you came from," and All Lives Matter.

I am not quite sure when posting on here became difficult. For a long time, I chalked it up to a big life transition. I changed jobs and moved to a new state. I told myself that my creative capacity was being diverted to other places: youth group meetings, coming up with games, communion meditations. But there were always other avenues for creativity.

Yet the words on this blog--a practice that I have undertaken for a good decade-plus--have become more scarce. Days turn into weeks turn into a month. I have written here and there, but many times it has felt labored. The feeling that I was forcing something that I have loved for so long has been frustrating and the more frustrating that I have felt the more difficult it has been for me to log on here and put my thoughts into words.

I am getting the sense that this is something other than a big life transition. The last few days I have had this creeping dread that the reason I don't write as much anymore is that I don't think words matter anymore. Or maybe, I feel like I live in a world where words have been stripped of their meaning.

Jim,

It's been a bit of a day. I won't bore you with everything that has happened; it involves a lot of errand running and sitting in Nashville traffic. But there are two things that leave me exhausted as I attempt to write this annual letter to you. And I'll share about them because I feel like they are coloring how I see this day.

First, right before your mom and I headed to your school to eat lunch with you, we learned that there was another school shooting. This time in a Texas high school. This time 10 kids died. And I got hit with waves of sadness and anger and fear. Sadness for the lives needlessly lost. Anger because this keep happening again and again. And fear because you are in a school. Your brother will be joining you next year. Fear because my heart is so intertwined to your wellbeing. I want you to be safe and sound. But the older you get, the less control I have over your safety. It scares me. It doesn't keep me up every night, but every few months this happens and there's that hit in the gut.

Of course, we didn't tell you about this when we came to school. And in those 30 minutes with you in the cafeteria, I forgot about the fear. Because here's the thing, when you are happily full of life, it chases away many of the shadows that exist in my world. You beamed; quietly, but brightly in the lunch room. It was pretty great to be there with you (except that one of your friends who was sitting beside me thought that I was there for him and kept telling me strange jokes that weren't really jokes).

God, I don't like conflict. If there's a fight then I'm likely to avoid it at all costs. It's not that I'm a coward, but it is because I am afraid. My legs will literally quake and a black hole seems to open up in the pit of my stomach. All life seems to drain from me. And it's not even if I am in the center of the conflict. If the conflict is in the room, if its raging storm is going after people I love, then I feel the same way.

As a conflict averse person, entering the fray always seemed like a way to just add fuel to the fire. I never want to make things worse. The idea of putting myself on the line was terrifying. The thought of doing so turned my insides upside down. It seemed to shred any sense of peace I had in decidedly non-peaceful situations.

So I would just close my eyes and pretend that the disturbance wasn't there. I would ride the conflict out like a besieged city white knuckles through enemy fighters dropping bombs. I felt like I could somehow rise above the conflict and achieve some sort of peace in the midst of war. Because I love peace. I need it and I want it for others. I self-identified as a peacemaker long before I had ever heard of the enneagram. By being conflict averse, I thought I was choosing peace.

But I wasn't making peace. I just wanted it and those are two separate things.

It is a strange thing to be in a city of 8 million people and not know a single soul. It is stranger still when low clouds loom over the whole city and make its steel towers disappear into the fog. Those manmade canyons can make you feel so overwhelmingly small. Yet when you can't see the sky, it all feels claustrophobic in a bizarre kind of way.

I hopped a train to New York a couple of days ago. I went alone and didn't really know what I was going to do. But I felt like I should go. This great metropolis was only a ride on the rails away and I hadn't been there in 8 years. Why not? And I'm glad I went, but it was this disembodied experience because I felt small, because I was all alone.

It occurred to me at one point that something could happen to me and no one would know for awhile. Not that I was ever afraid that something would happen to me. But when you're alone in a place that big, you're a stranger on the train. A ghost. And with most subway commuters looking down at their phones or newspapers, with their eyes jutting every which way. It was like there was a fog between us all. I was a ghost to them. They were ghosts to me.

"You'll believe a man can fly."

That was the slogan when Christopher Reeve first donned the red cape for the 1978 film Superman. And when we think about the very first superhero--who celebrated his 80th birthday with yesterday's Action Comics #1000--it is his superpowers that immediately leap to mind. Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound (back in 1938, the slogan actually would have been "You'll believe a man can jump really far and high").

Superman is a character that has been incredibly important to me for the vast majority of my life. I have a strong emotional connection to the character. And it's not about being strong or fast or even saving the day. Those things are cool and I doubt the adventures of a normal guy would have caught my childhood attention as well as those of the Man of Steel. But if there was a Superman slogan that was targeted specifically at me, it would be something different.

"You'll believe a man can be good."

Liam,
Right after bedtime is probably not the moment to write this to you. Bedtime can kind of be a war of attrition with you these days. Tonight, it took so much effort to get you to put on your pajama shirt. So much effort. You can be a super stubborn kid and there are contexts when that is amazing. It is going to serve you so well if you learn how to channel it. But the pajama shirt tonight...dude, I was already exhausted before that mess.

But here is the positive spin I'm going to put on that: I think the reason that you fight going to bed is because you enjoy being awake so much. You enjoy playing and being read to and eating and doing everything else a little boy your age does. You are so radiantly full of life. Even though this force of nature that you are tries to barrel through your mom and I sometimes, I am kind of in awe of it. You seem to go after each day like it's an adventure to be had. Witnessing that is a blessing to your nearly 30 years older dad.

I think I have spent the last 15 years trying to sing a song that I've only heard once or twice. The melody got stuck in my head on a service learning trip to Cuba.

I was 19 and had never left the country before. I had never experienced church outside of my overwhelmingly white Baptist denomination in South Carolina. I had never truly seen a body of believers stand in that gap of poverty on a consistent, week in and week out basis. I had never truly seen the work of the church spill into its community.

I have spent the last decade and a half grappling with that trip because I saw something beautiful in those churches that I had not quite seen before. Their practice and their passion melded in a way that seemed vibrant. They were hospitable. They pulled us into conga lines as we sang "Hallelujah" in a sanctuary full of joy. But they also prophetically spoke to us with concern about the war that our nation was about enter. They backed up what they preached with practice. They sought to bind the wounds of a drug-riddled community through gardens and baseball teams and dance troupes.