Ambition Should be Made of Sterner Stuff

No one is likely to stab me for being ambitious. Sometimes I wish someone might see the flame of self-promotion in me and seek to snuff it out with his steely blade that I might not interfere with his rise to the top of whatever it is that we’re duty bound to rise to the top of.

I’m just not a riser anymore. But, I can’t work up any shame in the fact. Once upon a time I was. I wanted to achieve lofty goals; I wanted to be the best at everything I set my hand to--- in that competitive ME way. I wanted the trappings of the best, recognition and stuff. But then my son’s battle with cancer stripped the ambition away.

When he got sick, I didn’t want to be the best anything but a Dad.  I had always wanted that, but the battle with cancer whipped that desire into overdrive. The nagging feeling that time as Jacob’s Dad would very likely be short pressed in from all sides, but intuitively I knew that the only way to be the kind of Dad I needed to be meant teaching and treating Jacob like he would live to be 80. Yet, an 80 year old man wouldn’t be enough. Really, I wanted to build a man suitable for eternity.

Cancer invests fathering with a sense of urgency. For the longest I couldn’t decide if my urgency was a lack of faith that Jacob would be healed or simply the recognition that fathering requires urgency at all times because death keeps no clocks and runs on no schedules. I had every confidence that the Lord could heal Jacob but no assurance that he would. No assurance that His will would bend to mine and my son would live a long long time.

It wasn’t so much that I crammed stuff in, but the battle afforded uncounted opportunities to teach. Every difficulty proved to be a teachable moment. Every difficulty required that I father and that I be Fathered. Every difficulty required the mustering of courage, the mustering of faith, the mustering of perseverance. And even still the doubt would creep in, the feeling that God and Scripture could not be trusted. I taught Jacob what Scripture said anyway. Feelings are liars. I know that now.

For a little over three years, we fought on, Jacob, Heather and I. I fathered she mothered Jacob grew into a man. He died a man at the age of nine, the best man I have ever known.

After he died ambition lay moldering in the ash heap, without the power of a phoenix. It will certainly never rise again in its former iteration. I’ve learned to love different things now.  It’s just that none of them are things. 

Listening to Myself Talk

A power beyond reckoning lies in telling our own story. I had the strange sensation today of actually being able to listen to myself as I recounted an abbreviated version of my life story to someone. I had started my tale the day before in my classroom as part of an interview for some school publication but had to continue it today in the office of my interrogator. I had come to the part of my life where my son Jacob had been diagnosed with cancer when I began to hear myself.

Most of the time I ignore me when I talk; it’s just noise to me, but today the words found traction in my ears as I shared Jacob’s fight with cancer. It crashed in on my thick noggin that his story, my story were compelling testimonies of the grace of God. I listened to me tell about his resilient faith in Christ despite the terrible disappointment we all had when he first relapsed. I heard about the gracious kindness and patience he showed in the midst of difficulty and inconvenience. I heard me once again tell about his last words to me and his mother. He told us to “Be Strong”. Then he went to be with Jesus.

I wasn’t the only one listening today though. Another overheard the recounting of my story, his story. She was moved to tears and even moved to a sense of awe that I could even share so difficult a story. Then it occurred to me yet again that not only can I tell the story I must.

I have always known the story of my son Jacob had power for other people, but today I realized the power it has for me. That story is mine and no one can tell it like I can. No one can convey the joy and no one can convey the pain like I can. And no one can convey the grace that Christ poured out on me like I can.

My wife Heather has a different story. Many of the events are the same, but the telling must necessarily be different. That is her story and the power is great indeed. It is the power of a mother telling what a mother knows and feels. It is the story of the grace of Christ poured out on her and no one can tell it like she can.

We all have a story. And the story of all Christians is one of power. The power of grace poured out, running over us and spilling out into the lives around us. May we be faithful to tell our story. 

Stout Fences

“They were testing the fences for weaknesses systematically.” --- Robert Muldoon, Jurassic Park

I cannot help but think that there is something savage and carnivorous in us all that requires us to be hemmed in by stout fences. It doesn’t require much introspection to imagine the possible destruction I could bring on myself and others if my baser inclinations were allowed to run free. But even now the use of free in this instance is a lie. The phrase should run more like if my baser inclinations were set loose…sounds more like the releasing of an animal and would be more accurate.

We live in a culture that cries freedom but has only really cried let us be animals. Ours is a degenerate, base freedom that has grown only to mean lack of restraint. Our culture has tested the fences for weaknesses systematically and has breached the barrier that long held us back from the destruction that must come when men become beasts.

The beasts ripped a gaping hole in the fence of Marriage. Men and women in search of freedom dashed to pieces the idea that sacred vows are just that, sacred and inviolable bonds that can only safely be severed by death. For the freedom of sex with anyone and everyone, they dashed to pieces the idea that being constant and true are of greater worth than the treacherous pleasure of adultery. Destroy this fence and be free…. to wreck and maim countless lives, especially those of your children.

Having started down that road and destroyed the image of the sacred, absurdity and rabid insanity rush to pull up the posts and throw down the rails still standing. The sacred image and symbol of marriage that adultery defiles would be corrupted utterly through the ultimate perversion of same sex “marriage”. The fence once breached is the more easily destroyed in the name of freedom… the freedom to be absurdly less than even animals and defy the very nature of anatomy. And lives are destroyed and lies masquerade as truth.

We are so free now that we can destroy with impunity the weak and the helpless who prove to be inconvenient impediments to our freedoms. We are now so free that for years without interruption a man in Philadelphia can slaughter children by the thousands, get rich doing it and the silence is deafening. Animals have been known to eat their own young.

In so many places the fences lie in ruin and the velociraptors are free. Cultural destruction at the hands of free animals is inevitable… unless the men who are left hem us in again with stout fences.