It was the Spring of 2003. I was sitting on the top balcony of Blackwell Hall at Furman University with this girl. I liked the girl a lot. And in spite of my lifelong self-doubt, I had a hunch that she might have actually liked me too. We spent a decent amount of time on that balcony at the end of that semester; mainly talking. Once to throw things off the building and see how they splattered four stories below (I still don’t know how no one called FUPo on us for that).

When we talked, I wanted to impress her. I wanted to convey to her how deep I was or at least my college sophomore notion of “deep.” The “deep” question that became sort of our shared mantra for a time was “Where do you want to be today?’ It is absolutely the product of a 19 year old conveying, like, we need to live in the now, you know? Yet as much as it was the question of a college guy trying to impress a girl, I find myself still thinking about it 15 years later. It’s not as profound as I thought it was, but it is still a good question to ask.

I still want to be with her, my now wife of 13 years. I wonder sometimes if I asked that question with the hope that she could say she wanted to be with me so that I could be with her. I want to be with her exponentially more than I did that long ago spring. I want to be with my sons. There is a 100% chance that they will drive me insane today. There is a 100% chance that they will also do something that makes me love them more deeply than I have before. It’s maddening and beautiful. I want to be with them to let them know that they are loved, to help guide them to being people who give back to the world and not just take from it.

One day the civil rights activist and author P.D. East issued a challenge to his friend, the Baptist minister Will Campbell: summarize the message of Christianity as succinctly as possible. Will’s reply, relayed in his book Brother to a Dragonfly, was not your typical Sunday school fare. In fact, his words would have scandalized a congregation in his native Mississippi if they were uttered from a pulpit.

“We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.”

I have been sitting with those seven words this afternoon. As a culture, we’ve been wallowing in a putrid stew of ugliness for awhile now. Every so often a new wind stirs up its noxious smell anew: a mass shooting here, a tone-deaf tweet there, a bloody battle for a Supreme Court seat that has been going on for what seems like the last half decade. Fingers are pointed. Names are called. People are hurt.

I know people who have suffered the trauma of sexual assault and harassment and the events of the past week including today’s confirmation have wounded them deeply. My heart breaks for them. In my pocket are some text messages from people I used to go to church with who are high-fiving each other that their guy got in. Christians on both sides. People I love on both sides. But we are in a cultural knife fight right now and blood is everywhere.

I usually go with the written word. That is where I feel like I express myself best, but it just didn’t do. I tried to talk it out and I don’t know if I did a great job. I tried to explain how I’m conflict averse and how I don’t like stepping into these things but how I understand the gospel compels me to. One thing I didn’t say and I wish that I did is: I’m sorry. To my friends and people I don’t know for whom this day was gut-wrenchingly painful, I am so very sorry.

The idea was so perfect in my head. We would cap off our youth group about why worship matters with everyone writing their praises to God on a sky lantern, which we would light and send to the heavens. Up to God. The illustration wrote itself. The visual was going to be awesome. It was going to be impactful.

It was going to be illegal.

To release sky lanterns in Tennessee you have to have the same license as someone who does fireworks display.

That’s okay. We could do something else. Something else going up. Up. Up. Balloons. But balloons are bad for the environment. Do they make biodegradable balloons? They do. I was all ready to get some biodegradable balloons and helium and then…

“Many animals mistake burst biodegradable balloons as food causing intestinal blockage and death.”

It’s wrong to destroy God’s creation in an effort to praise God.

I had to let go of the idea of going up to God. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I had fallen into a common trap. I was thinking of God as being up.

Yesterday was one of those unexpected gifts. In a region where summer lingers and lingers like an unwanted houseguest, the air was cool and drizzly. It was as if Nashville and Portland temporarily switched places. I ran in the morning and I wasn’t a walking puddle of sweat at the end. Each time I went outside, I was greeted by mist and breeze. I could get used to that.

I won’t get a chance to get used to that because the temperature will flirt with 90s again within a couple of days. It will be mid to late October before we maybe (maybe) get that kind of cool weather consistently. But, my goodness, yesterday was nice. It seems like it has been summer for a year and, for a little while, we were reminded that autumn is somewhere down the road.

We need fall. I am not a fanatic about the season. I am not one of those people who loves Halloween and starts guzzling pumpkin spice lattes when they appear way too early in late August. I do like football season (although I have some growing internal conflict about the sport; another post for another time). And I am looking forward to wearing my zip-up hoodie regularly because, in my humble opinion, that is the best article of clothing that humanity has conceived.

When I was a kid, there was a big comic book event that I read called Zero Hour. The conceit was a bad guy sought to wipe out all of history by somehow devouring the time stream of history from both ends. I know…but comics. The ending of one issue in particular has always stuck with me. Lois Lane stood on the top of the Daily Planet building and watched as a blinding whiteness consumed the city in front of her. The color on the page faded panel by panel. The inked lines around her lost volume and became dashed marks. Finally she vanished. The panels became white and the last two pages were completely blank.

Everything was gone (everything eventually got better) and that filled my child-aged mind with this existential horror. It was upsetting. What if everything I loved, everything I knew, all just disappeared?

Part of me feels like something that I loved and knew well has vanished. It has been fading for years and yet it keeps gnawing at me. I have been writing about the unhealthy marriage between the evangelical church and conservative American politics for as long as I have been an adult. And I thought that I had healthy distance from it. I moved to attending a Lutheran church and then a more moderate Baptist church and now I work in a Disciples of Christ congregation. 

But as we keep plunging further down a rabbit hole of this present administration, I feel like I am experiencing a genuinely painful loss.

I write this while E.A. is reading bedtime stories to our two sons. They are locked into her voice. They fidget a little, but they are with her. I'm trying to think what we were doing 13 years ago. Were we still talking to people at the reception or had we started making the trip to Charlotte? I'm not totally sure. I can tell you that she was breathtakingly beautiful in her wedding gown on that evening. And I can tell you that she is breathtakingly beautiful as she sits on the couch in our sons' room right now.

Thirteen years ago, I could not have anticipated the twists and turns that our lives have taken. Who could? When you get married, you think you know what the future will hold, but you really are just drunk on the wonderfulness of the now. Young love and all of that. I still don't know what the future holds, but I can tell you that I want this woman to be part of it; even more today than when I meant with all my heart then. She is my absolute favorite person in the world and I can't believe how lucky I am that I get to share life with her.

I'm working on a sermon for Sunday. The text is Psalm 51 and preaching from such a familiar passage is both a blessing and a curse. I've been been examining this song of repentance from every angle. What it says is so simple, but often the simplest things are the most difficult to say. Trying to go to sleep tonight, my brain kept turning the passage like a Rubik's cube and then a refrain from a song made my eyes spring open.

And I totally cannot use it in my sermon.

But it was not your fault but mine
And it was your heart on the line
I really f----- it up this time
Didn't I, my dear?

Yeah...songs that drop the f-bomb multiple times don't really make for good Sunday morning illustrations. But it is post-midnight on Wednesday so I'm going to try to write Mumford & Sons' "Little Lion Man" out of my system so that I can move forward.