But I must admit that the best theme is that of friends taking a friend where she could not go alone. The only limitation Sarah has is the limitations of her people. There are places she surely cannot go alone, but there is almost nowhere she cannot go if the right people are willing and able. LIke the story in the gospels when friends lower a crippled friend through the roof to put him before Jesus, there is a time that friends have to do heavy lifting for the sake of grace. That is how we understand this trip. In itself it would be fun to hike the Grand Canyon, but doing it with and for Sarah makes it the trip of a lifetime. It’s funny. A good bit of what we do in this life only becomes sacred when we do it for another.

     As fast as I could, I said, “Of course.” That was two weeks ago. Since then I have had a chance to explore the trip with due sobriety, and it looks anything but easy. The official park site does not encourage hikers to do an an in-and-out in one day, and I don’t suppose that adding a wheel chair to the mix enhances our chances of getting back to the rim by nightfall. But we sure are excited. Every last one of us is ready to throw ourselves against the numbing drive (27 hours one-way) and the prospect of a full mile vertical ascent to get back to the van. We’ll have to practice before we go, walk a lot of miles before we go, and again thank God for the upteenth time before we go. It is a gracious gift.

     Still, people either love the idea or hate it. And I think I know why. We get very risk-averse as we age. I feel it coming on. More and more I wonder why I leap into things that have no easy landing. It seems less and less prudent to stay so busy. Then again, I fear more the voice in the back of my head that promises the best life in the anti-life. They say that the dream retirement is to find a day when you are well-rested and conflicts cannot find you. I’m not so certain that is life. I am personally hoping that this trip is hard. Real hard. I hope we come near to eating the fattest one among us to survive the winter. I want it to rest hard in the memory. That’s a life experience. Limping to the couch may still be ahead, but we’re doing our best to deny that walk as long as we can.

     This happens often, of course. We tend to look at people and presume we know their good work, their bad work, even their mark on the world. But I find we tend to miss their great work of life. Maybe they do, too. The great work is always lurking in the background. The great work lives in the world of secrets and confidentiality. The great work cannot afford to be high profile. We are awash in benchmarks for good, clean living, but when we leave this world our friends face the shock of the real gap we left. It is as if none of us really understood why that life was so valuable. It’s funny how hard it is to see at the time the real worth of someone who loves you.  And it is difficult to understand that we may not ever know in this lifetime what was the real work of our own lifetime. Maybe heaven is a place we get let in on the secret.

And so they get busy. No matter how many times they are told that they cannot do anything to add to the gift of forgiveness through Christ, they still try to add something. No matter how many times they are told that accepting forgiveness through confession and repentance is faith enough, they still work out schemes to punish themselves for past crimes. It is all done in the name of belief, but it is actually a confession of unbelief. They do not believe in grace, in their own forgiveness. They believe in an earner’s world and the weight of a good time card. 

Maybe grace as a grounds for peace is unrealistic. After all, what is an earner to do if he cannot earn anymore? That is a great question worth exploring. And the answers are grand.

But in the back of my mind was the fear that I did not have what it takes to love for the length of the marriage. Most guys feel this, I suppose, but I was acutely aware of my track record with dating. It was not good. I wasn’t focused. I grew bored. And girlfriends grew tired of me. Would Jennifer be any different?

Oh, yes. Very different. Nineteen years into this marriage I am aware that faithfulness to her is in some way faithfulness to God. And loving her might be a way to fulfill God’s will for me. More than just surviving marriage, I wanted to be satisfied with her, to live without the daydreams of walking beside someone else. That is how I prayed. This could not depend on her living without fault, of course, so it would come down to me. While she is eminently easy to live with and appreciate, it was and is up to me to find in her a person I love and a person in whom I find contentment. As I look for reasons to love and rest, I find them. And I do not want to walk beside anyone else. This is the norm for us, and it is deeply important to me.

Is it always easy? Of course not. But it is more than possible. It is an answered prayer. It is a gift to my sons and to her. Above all, as an act of love and faith, it might be one of the more important steps of faith I’ve ever taken.

How wrong I was. It was fun in about two minutes, because that is how long it took for my long-lost, should-have-been-angry-at-my-disappearing-act friends to greet me at the door. Of all things, they were really glad to see me. Hugs abounding. Since I am not accustomed to a line of attractive women waiting to hug me, I took this as a sign from God. (I didn’t know what the sign meant, but I figured it must be something good.) All these people and all these memories–it was like swallowing an ocean. Since I flew the coop in ’83 and never moved back, I had forgotten how much time I spent with these people in that former life. Not only them, but their parents and their siblings, too. It all came back, and it was all good.

It may prove to be my event of the year. The many conversations became one long sermon in my ear. It was a sermon about fleeting time and necessary friendships, hard beginnings and graceful endings, having faith and sharing faith, lingering regret and inescapable dawnings. Twenty-five years is time enough to have a handle on life, and I guess I know enough to know that I regularly underestimate the importance of the people before me and behind me. Perhaps I’ll pay closer attention the next twenty-five years.

That last clause is the giveaway in this article. My son would not have used “chaos” to describe the setting. And he certainly wouldn’t have modified it with “uneasy.” I made the mistake of asking him too many times for an explanation for the more radical outfits and music. As he kept explaining, “you’re old.” I thought to myself, “That’s it? I’m old?” I had hoped for a better answer. We were a pathetic pair. He was the seeing boy leading a blind father through the campgrounds as I asked time after time in my middle-aged, dim-sighted voice, “Why are they doing that?” He grew very tired of the explanations he offered for metal music, metal music musicians, metal music fans, very conservative Christians who like metal, and the like. He might not take me next year. I had to admit that by the end I still could not see the point. And, boy, am I glad to be away from the throbbing pain of metal music ’til 2 AM.

And yet he’s not as observant as he thinks. What he did not see was the remarkable stories of faithfulness in that motley bunch. True, that crowd would put no few mainline churchgoers on their heels with their hair and clothing choices, but I was rightly impressed with the conversations I had and overheard while there. Deep commitments were playing out at Cornerstone. Yes, it was music and leftist politics and college-age energy, but it was also a willingness to make music a part of faith, politics a part of faith, and reunions with old friends a part of faith. Something much larger than music was going on there. And I think I want to go back.

Chris White

That is the word of the place, of course: surprise. Disney works very, very hard to make the park an over-the-top experience. They love to surprise with their level of commitment to guests, and they are quite good at it. But being the guy who watches people, it is hard to escape the greater surprise of iconic experiences like Disney World. That is, these families juggling babies and competing interests and Florida heat are surprised to find that Disney didn’t make them into some other family. No amount of magic cured the typical and traditional family squabbles and birth order rights and bedtime needs. For all that Disney offers, a listening ear in the park reveals the disappointment: It is still us.

I am a fan of good environments, but there are places in the soul that environments do not cure. Disney magic only goes so far. (Although, the fish and chips at the England section of Epcot seem a deeper cure for something missing in me…) We are guilty of projecting ourselves somewhere else that is sure to make us some other person, as if we merely missed the train to our true destination. There is more truth in realizing that we just might be who we are wherever we are. There is a place for considering a new place, but there is usually more wisdom in accepting a personal frailty that is not, after all, tied to an address. And that is disapponting sometimes.

But, paradox of paradoxes, it is a critical first step to experiencing the grace of God.

On the one hand, it is hard to escape the unique angles on that boy that neither his mother nor I created or encouraged. This is not be critical of his virtues and vices, but I don’t know why he likes and dislikes what he does. He is his own kid. And he sometimes seems like someone else’s kid. No, parenting is a rude awakening to the power of Self formed with and without the approval of the very people who formed the body.

On the other hand, influence is real. I do not mean influence as measured in conformity to a parent, even though I am more keen on that than I like to confess. If conformity is the only measure of influence, however, parenting proves quite disappointing and short-sighted; they must ultimately move beyond me. But I see our influence. I lean toward an influence that is far beyond the measure of the boy to explain or for us to observe. I have influenced my sons simply by staying home, staying married to their mother, taking them with me whenever I can, and carrying on a version of authentic faith before them. Now, they may not reproduce all or any that they have seen, but that does not lessen the truth of our influence. It has happened, it is real. There is no way to extricate them from us, no matter what they may say or do in the next ten years. This, for me, is no small confession (and concession). I have spent too much time looking for the first sprout in them after every new planting; I now look elsewhere. I look back on our faithfulness to them, our true influence, and I cannot help but feel that our influence was the best we could offer. The real stuff mattered. Of that I am sure.