There's No Place; Like Home

I'm not sure when I grew out of the hotel experience, but it seems long enough ago now that I can hardly remember any different.  It used to be a major goal of life, to leave home, to drive somewhere far enough away that it became painful after awhile, far enough that picking the right stops for gas seemed like strategy, far enough that you got to sleep that exotic sleep in the womb of the humming car, only to arrive somewhere that was a castle with your own room, the scent of chlorine promising your own blue pool.  Back then the immaculate rooms seemed new, made especially for you. 

Who would have known then that it was all a ruse?  An industry made to make you feel exactly like it was new when it wasn't at all--in fact, the opposite?

Part of disenchantment with hotels is simply the baggage of adulthood--hotels aren't cheap, after all, and when you're left holding the plastic at the end of a stay you realize you're paying someone for a bed in which you didn't feel comfortable in a room that was always either too hot or too cold in which you could only sleep or watch TV and from which you had to venture out into a hostile jungle to procure sustenance anyway.

But for me, now, it also has to do with hotels being no place.  Oh, granted, in the hotel we stayed at recently we could pull the drapes completely in our swanky poolside room so that when I woke up I had no idea if it was six o'clock and dark or noon and broad daylight.  Where else can you have that experience?  Malls and casinos, the other places that try to make you forget where you are on planet earth.  Of course, the point of hotels is to "get away" and to be able to forget the alarm clock, so on one hand it makes sense that one would be able hole up and forget for a night the patterns of the earth.  But when you add the price tag in to doing this, then you realize that sequestering you is part of the strategy for keeping you, part of the plot against you being anywhere else but in a dark room with the intermitting flashes of tv scenes lighting up your face.

And stepping outside, too, just sends you right back in.  The hotel that we stayed at was just off the freeway, next to another hotel, adjacent to a pizza place, across a four lane street from a trendy strip mall with a Spanish tile roof--in Minnesota--and just down from some storage sheds and warehouse-type buildings.  This meant acres and acres of parking lots and pavement.  It was literally impossible to walk anywhere.  From outside, the castle wall revealed cracks; the parking lot moat was turning to rubble.  I went back in, to the facade of the new, but in the hallway the maids--toward whom I tried to be overly cheery becuase I've just reread Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed--were Central American and embarrassed me by the ladder that I knew separated our lives. 

Scott Sanders and others talk about the purpose of travel, of leaving home to experience other places so that one might return home with a new sense of life, so that one might infuse home with the wonder of the world.  And I did hear at least two stories of "city experience" that got passed around by travelers from our town at the state tournament:  two girls and a guy kissing in a hotel pool (ours); a transvestite on the monorail.  Unfortunately, these stories were already being used by the travelers as a perfect reason to return to the womb of home and leave it completely intact. 

Another metaphor for this excursion was pilgrimage, especially since our entire town traveled to the city, mainly to attain the relics associated with the state basketball tournament--"to Minneapolis we wend," that sort of thing.  However, the relics attained were really for adorning the sense we have of ourselves rather than emphasizing the experience of touching something other.

And the places we stayed, I'm saying, helped to insure all of this, to insure an insularity to the travel, to insure that we didn't here stories or experience places that moved us with the wonder of the world.  Sure, my wife managed to eat at Wally's Falafel and Hummus without me, and we had some overpriced Thai food, and I ventured into St. Paul with a friend of mine for coffee at a non-chain place, but the signature experience was sitting poolside as the kids swam till they were drained and their eyes blood red from an over-chlorinated pool, and then we slept, and then we went home.  There was no inn keeper to spin yarns of his childhood or musicians to play a reel we'd never heard before as we shared a pint of ale and forgot ourselves. 

No, no place had been prepared for us in advance, a safe, secure womb of false newness that is anything but virginal, and we indulged it and went home seeminlgy none the worse but definitely none the better. 

Bounce

My son, a second grader, was practicing dribbling a basketball through his legs yesterday, from his left hand to his right, something he no doubt picked up at school or from seeing at a high school basketball game.  I didn't stop him; in fact, at one point I asked him to try going from his right hand--his strong hand since he's left handed--to his left.  After all, it's never too early to work on your weak hand.

I came to love basketball not from my dad, who loved all sports responsibly, as a way to be active and part of something communal.  He played catch with us, taught us to hit; the only time I remember him shooting a basketball was when he showed us how to shoot a freethrow--underhanded, which also showed just what boat he got off of:  Noah's. 

No, I came to love basketball from the pageantry of high school sports, the impetus put on it by an entire community, the wonder of tournament games on the radio announced over scratchy microphones, the frenzy of a live game-winning shot that drowned my own voice and made me cover my ears. I loved it because I heard the older boys talking about the Los Angeles Lakers and then I watched the Lakers perform legerdemain with a basketball on Sunday afternoons and cheered for them as if my life depended on it.  Then I got a Nerfhoop and I was the Lakers and I scored 100 points a game and earned the adoration of imagined crowds and whatever current imagined girlfriend, too.

And so I can't say that I loved basketball in its own right; there was definitely a cultural context that predisposed me to it. 

But I also began to critique it fairly early on.  I didn't do well under pressure, even imagined seventh grade pressure, when I tried to write a story about inner city ballers who were friends but also rivals, characters lightly disguised for me and a friend of mine.  In high school I also critiqued it some, trying to take the bigger perspective that basketball wasn't all there was in life.  Though undefeated my junior year, we ended up losing in the district semifinals.  I'm not sure self-consciousness on the issue really helped anything.

Upon graduating, I went off to play at Bethel College, even started a few games my junior year, then forewent the basketball season in order to go on the England Term program my senior year, where I really sold myself to literature and writing, my major.  This is how "sold" I was:  at one point on the bus, no doubt beset by a certain subconscious homesickness, I had the most intense flashback to a basketball game from the year before.  At that moment I would have traded the whole England Term experience--really a transformative time in my life--to go back and give hoops one more shot.

Now, our family goes to high school basketball games and my son and his friends idolize the players.  The cultural context from when I grew up is largely the same.  It scares me: I want him to be well-rounded, don't want him to get caught in the smallness of the sport, don't want him in that particular small town rut.  And yet I want him to belong to a place, and in this place basketball continues to play a significant role.  And yet, as an insider of sorts, I also find myself wanting to teach him the game; I want to teach him a pretty J, wouldn't mind if he'd become a natural impresario off the dribble, a beautiful skill I never came close to. 

Oh, boy.  Even in my rhetoric, I betray myself.  "An impresario off the dribble?"  "I"?  Who or what is this about? 

There are a million traps in parenting it seems to me lately.  My children are fixated on video games, on obtaining personal hand held devices.  At a basketball game recently, I found my youngest son sequestered in the farthest corner of the lobby, playing a game on the phone of a complete stranger--a high school fan from the other team.  My daughter, 11, dreams of having an iPod touch and the other day asked out of the blue, "Can I have a TV in my room?"

High school sports can be an idol, I know; but the other ruts that are forming in our lives are just as deep and feel even more dangerous and seem to be part of the larger rut that builds itself in our lives: American middle class insularity. 

All my life, it seems, I've been trying to avoid staidness, insularity.  For many of my first 18 years, I made sure everyone knew I was headed for Someplace:  the city.  Then, I went to college in a suburb and wanted out of suburbia;  I returned "home" to teach but often encouraged small town kids to leave for college.  For the last four years my wife and I have had our sights set on moving to Worthington where she works, a small community with an absolutely crazy level of diversity, telling ourselves that the diversity of the place would somehow save us, would push us beyond the boundaries that form in our even smaller community. 

Yesterday, after four years, I took the for sale signs down outside our house. 

Today was black and gold day in the local Christian grade school, in anticipation of the section championship tonight, and so I dug out my high school warm up jersey and sent my son to school in it. 

And so the rut deepens. 

Perhaps ruts are inevitable, but I'm American enough to think I can buck them--until this point, by leaving for Somewhere Else.

But now, with the signs down and the ruts getting deeper every day, perhaps discipleship really begins in earnest.  In my staid life, what does the gospel mean?  In American middle class insularity, how does one truly follow the narrative of scripture?  How does one live out a biblical faith of "faithful improvisation"?  And what part, pray tell, might a crossover, through-the-legs-dribble play in all of this?

Perhaps only this:  it's never to late to work on my weak hand.

Gaining Access to "Otherness"

It's hard for me to imagine a place more "other" than Laos.  At times, as I attempt to look objectively at what attracted me to my wife, I wonder if that's it--her "otherness."  Of course, when I became attracted to her--at 15--I had no idea intellectually about "otherness" or what it entailed.  Rather, I had an American ideal of class-, gender- and racelessness in mind that amounted to something like this: underneath your skin we're all the same--you're exactly like me.  Fortunately, I've learned since then that the midwestern American male is anything but the common denominator in global personality.

My tour through "otherness" first happened through food.  Not long after we started dating, my mother-in-law made me kwa mi, more famously known as "pad thai," literally stir-fried noodles with chicken pieces and probably some green onion.  Of course there was sticky rice and sai gok, dark red-brown Chinese sausage, and that other Chinese staple, egg rolls.  But later there was pho, beef noodle soup seasoned to your own personal liking by mixing four flavors:  sweet, sour, salty, and--that completely "other" flavor to the upper midwest--spicy.  And then there was the unimaginable:  tripe and ant eggs and on and on.  In short, for me the revolution in "otherness" that was Lao food was not unlike Peter's shock at the vision of the sheet coming down from heaven, introducing him to pork: it blew my little mind.

Over the years, I've become exposed to other things Lao if not immersed in them: music, dance, dance, gaming, family customs, sport.  However, a larger reality looms.  We are seriously exploring the possibility of a month-long trip to Laos, which leaves me to contemplate just how serious we are and I am about this trip into otherness.  Why undertake this voyage that will knock a hole in our savings, going to an unpredictable country with children who will probably not see the point of it?  I have visions of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dancing in my heads:  children who are hot and miserable and spoiled whining about just wanting to go home to play video games. 

But after 20 years of my wife's acquaintance, this possible trip to Laos has led me to another level of "otherness"--that of language.  After 20 years of picking up about one word a year (words for food, bathroom, mother, yes, no, thank you, spicy, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, meat, assorted food dishes, go, home, hot, cold, play cards, and, oh yes, I almost forgot, the private parts of both men and women, which have substituted for the English words as we teach our children about the world), I bought a Lao for Beginners book and CD set which I can listen to on the commute. 

It becomes even more apparent to me now how arrogant I've been in thinking I can have access to an "other" culture without knowing the language.  Without language one can't think inside another culture, only think outside it.  This is not to say, of course, that with three beginning Lao CDs--that have taught me such things as that great insider phrase, "Please speak slowly so I can understand you"--that I suddenly have real access to the culture.  Rather, with the hours and hours of work that I've spent trying to learn the difference in tones between "ma" (dog), "ma" (horse), and "ma" (come), I've realized how infinitely far I have to go to really gain access.

And yet knowing even little glimpses into how the language is constructed in relation to reality begins to open up that world of "otherness" in little ways.  For example, the list of family relationships which seems to not just differentiate older and younger brother and sister by modifiers ("older," "younger") but by a special term says something about the importance of family relationships.  As another, the word for river is ma nom, literally (I think) "mother-water," a word that communicates the importance of the Mekong river both mythically and economically to a landlocked country.

In light of this discussion of language and otherness, it becomes striking to me that there is such a lack of emphasis on teaching another language in our schools. It speaks of us being satisfied with the world we know--our world as it's constructed by our language.  But how do we know we haven't maligned our world in the way we see it through our language to a degree that makes it unimaginably different than what it is? 

Perhaps this attributes more power to language than it should.  I don't mean that we necessarily construct a world through language, but it certainly fashions our vision.  However, if--especially as Christians--we're serious about knowing our world and knowing ourselves, then we need to know "otherness," and if we need to know "otherness" we can only gain access to that otherness, it seems to me now, through language. 

The Nature of Improvisation: the Improvisation of Our Nature?

As far as I'm concerned, it's the key to education--the difference between dry discipline and soaring creativity, between earthbound drudgery and ethereal effortlessness, the difference between science and art.

I'm talking about improvisation, that skill that's not really a skill but is built on skill.  The ability to take the basic skills than many can simply do but combining them in a way that includes your own style, that includes heart, that includes that breath of creativity that brings something to life.  Perhaps I'm simply thinking about style--the ability to put your own mark, your own flair upon something.

For me, it was the piano that remained forever lifeless, a monolith that oppressed, that remained flat and two-dimensional no matter how many times I tried to play it--which admittedly wasn't that many times. 

My dad tried to get me to catch the vision a couple of different ways.  One of them was simply by insisting that I practice.  But being forced to sit down to drudgery didn't do it because I didn't have my own spark, didn't have any appreciation for the music that I was supposed to be making, so a second thing he did for me was model what might be. 

It's still one of the grandest visions of my life, a moment of sheer transformation: my dad, perhaps 46 sitting down at the piano, built like a stout piano himself, with stubby fingers at least two keys thick from milking cows for at least 44 of those 46 years.  Immediately he went from Mack truck of a man to light-hearted dancer, dredging up from somewhere in his memory the opening bars of "The Entertainer," his hands jumping with life over the keys, giving off an energy that moved the room itself, his whole torso swaying as if the piano was an alternator generating physical shocks that were animating his body.  I could hear the difference, see the difference.  That was music.  It had life and style--it had the life of him in it. 

But I never made it, never got to any level where I can remember a song I played that I loved, that I returned to just to play and hear it for its own sake.

My daughter takes piano lessons.  Within her first year she'd attained the level that I never did in five years of lessons.  All it took was for me to compliment her on a song or two--one of them with that lilting eeriness of a snake charmer's song; another with the stalking measure of a cat after its prey; a third with the staccato of a rainstorm.  "Ooh, I like that one, Sommer," I'd say with an accompanying description of what it sounded like to me.  Almost inevtibably she'd return to it in succeeding days to please me, and then it was an easy switch to return to it simply to please herself. 

She'd found the formula of style, of improvisation:  a song on the page, plus her own skill, imagination, and life giving the song a life of its own, a new creation put into the atmosphere.

But how many different areas can style and improvisation be applied to?  Professor Bill Elgersma is teaching an education class, something like Strategies for Secondary Education: he can teach his students the tricks of lesson plans and they can plug something in, but if they can't make the students care, can't hit that level where gimmicks and passion get a lesson plan off the ground and airborne where someone might get caught up in it, where the time passing in classroom might cease to matter, the lesson will remain exaclty that: gimmickry.  So certainly it works in education.  Might it also apply in nursing?  In physical therapy?  In accounting? 

I'm certainly not expert enough in these other areas to know where improvisation and style might matter, but certainly in human existence on earth, these elements remain the breath of life, the heart of the creation itself, put there by a Creator who after setting his masterpiece in space pronounced it "very good."

A Mythic Reality

I've known for some time that my paradigm needs shifting.  Somehow my operating system got too existentialist-deist: the mountain of the urgency of the moment has combined with God as the audience of one that we perform for to sufficiently impact how I see activity on the world stage.  Meanwhile, Don Delillo, in Point Omega, suggests that our attempts at self-consciousness regarding our worldviews may be all for naught, that we're tiring collectively of the analysis--especially self-analysis--that the western worldview has awakened us to.  For my part, at least half the time, I agree. 

Two things made me consider again how it is I look at the world.  The first was an accident, a head on collision between two men from town just outside another town.  The odds that these two men would hit each other traveling too and from a community 20-plus miles distant is not huge, but okay. 

However, it was more the manner of the accident--and the response of the lone survivor--that again shocked my worldview. 

The accident, as I said, was head on.  One of the drivers, the survivor, drifted for an unknown reason into the other driver's lane.  Perhaps he fell asleep, since he doesn't remember a thing about it.  In any case, the other car must have popped over a hill and that was it.  No breaks, no swerving, just the impact of 55 mile-per hour metal projectiles impacting each other; one man dead, the other with a smashed face and arm who was back in church three weeks later.

What does one do philosophically about car accidents like this?  Or, worse still, about the young father who was killed by a Sturgis motorcyclist who, leaving the interstate at a random exit ramp, ran a stopsign and hurtled into the family's minivan?  Word has it that the survivor of the former accident chalks it up to God's will--that it was the other driver's time to go and so God used the survivor as the angel of death with the only expense to himself of about 12 broken bones. 

I find this problematic for a number of reason.  First, accidents like this are the necessary outcome of 55-mile per hour projectiles driven by finite, contingent creatures on two lane roads.  The same, I suppose, can be said of any mode of transportation.  Even regressing to horses, a certain amount of injuries and deaths can be expected in the equation.  This means that the cause of these accidents is a bit deeper, built into the fabric of the world itself.  Death will happen as these forces intersect each other; however, in our culture we're willing to live with the possibility of death at every meeting of vehicles.

This realization reminds of part of the philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien, who built into his larger vision of Middle-Earth the idea that death was a gift to the world of men.  Rather than to live on and on in "endless serial living" as the elves did, humans got to escape that circle to the "straight road" of something beyond.  It's a helpful vision for me, one that suggests a possibility for death tied to the garden of Eden, where God ensured that humans wouldn't eat of the tree of life and live forever in a miserable world.  Death is an out into something beyond. 

Still, this doesn't account for the pain of death too soon.  One of my professors along the way recounted the story of a wise Chinese sage, who, when asked for a profound teaching by one of his disciples, said, "Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies."  That is, when the progression of life and death goes as it should, it's a beautiful thing--perhaps as good as can be hoped for on this side of the veil. 

What do we do with do with the trauma of Job, though, with the disruption of that line of orderly succession by horrific tragedy?  It's hard for me to say that the Angel of Death was there at the accident, soothing the survivor to sleep and coaxing him into the lane of oncoming traffic, or propelling the motorcyclist full bore through the stop sign.

But perhaps my faith is simply weak.  I heard the survivor's philosophy second hand in a conversation at church.  Another man in that conversation, whose younger brother died at a crash at an intersection, talked about the odds of that accident ever occurring, how just a second or two difference would have meant the collision never would've happened.  It smacks of destiny, and therefore, to Christians, of pre-destiny. 

It's only recently that I've come to appreciate the Calvinist bent toward God's sovereignty.  At the end of the day, to confess--despite the horrors of the world--that God is in control is an amazing statement of faith, and it's no doubt all one may have left.  However, it seems to me that many in the Calvinist tradition are so bent toward God's sovereignty that they ignore the malignant forces that, by nature of the freedom built into the universe we live in, play an authentic and not simply benign role in the world. 

This is the second reason I find the survivor's explanation of the event problematic: it fails to consider that there may be forces that are simply trying to destroy something, to ruin his life and the lives of others.  To acknowledge God's sovereignty may be to circumvent the lack of faith that evil forces may be trying to engender--or it may simply tell the wrong story altogether, attributing good and evil to a God who is only the source of good.

As I said, this was one of the recent events to challenge my vision of reality.  God was there at that crossroads, at the spot where car meets car.  But so, I would say, was another force.  And this, then, adds up to my revision of reality: the world we live in is much more mythical than we tend to think, much more the place of conflict between supernatural beings that result in conflicts that can only be told in mythic stories--stories like that of Job where ideas, forces, and beings seen and unseen come into conflict in a way that only stories can capture.

My gut tells me that Don Delillo is also right:  self-consciousness about our worldview is no longer enough.  It doesn't work for those people who are not by nature self-conscious or analytical, who don't want to reflect on how they reflect.  Rather, we must return to stories that move people, that allow them to understand how they are actors in a world where forces bigger than themselves are at work. 

And so this entry is call for storytellers and mythmakers.  There are a thousand ways that the Story can get taken captive: by the mountain of the present and scientific reality and dualism and Manicheanism and reductionism and even by a God who's controlling in a way that he may not be.  But to understand the Story of scripture as an over-arching story that continues into our world is a place to start.  And to tell that story in a way that makes sense of our actions--both the daily repetitions and life-changing traumatic events--is a way to makes sense of life in a world that continues to be a mysterious intersection of good and evil, of the physical and the spiritual, of the human and divine.

A Place

I just want to live in a place long enough for the land to begin giving up its secrets.

A place where fathead minnows can be trapped in a wire-mesh cylinder in cutbank creeks of dingy water.  A place where the Topeka shiner minnow, to preserve its mating practices, can grind a whole road construction crew to a halt.  A place where, even in the upper midwest, enough green crayfish can be seined for a seafood boil, turning lobster-red the minute they hit the boiling pot.  A place where scrambling, moss-backed snapping turtles rule the creek like demigods.

I just want to live in a place where the peaks and valleys of fish populations are passed like code words among stern-faced coffee drinkers.  A place where crappies spawn among the rocks strewn by WPA workers in my granpa's day.  A place where people campout along shorelines for spring walleyes.  A place where farm ponds grow so thick with algae you think you can walk across it and where sunnies and bluegills bloom like silver dollars amongst the unnatural fecundity.  A place where northern pike bearing long clouds of orange roe make their fall runs up the rock river to slackwater holes where they smack daredevils like candy.  A place where hard-bodied perch can be taken by too many children crammed in too small a fishhouse, to be tossed on the ice to freeze, to freeze my hands when I scale them in the driveway, to turn crisp when my mother-in-law deep fries them, their eggs popping the oil wildly as they outswell the skin, to be eaten like the original fishsticks with rice on the darkest January night.

I just want to live in a place with prairie grass, with tall grass.  A place where the big bluestem stretches skyward in a matter of hours in late July along roadside ditches.  A place where, as tempertatures linger into the night and the humidity seeps from the atmosphere, its invisible root digs well past the shallow layer of life-supporting dirt and its crow's foot stretches like a crown above the pale gray of the common brome.  A place where the wide head of switchgrass has so much promise mad scientists in antisceptic laboratories seek to turn it into fuel.  A place where prairie cord grass raises its deep green seed heads in a heavy lash.  A place where the story lingers of winding that grass into cords to burn because there was no wood amongst the tall grasses.  A place where each week of summer gives up new wildflowers, even the butter-and-eggs that spurts along our frontage road, a transplant from Europe. 

I just want to live in a place where the wind is always to be leaned into.  Where the wind makes the trees are all of a gallop, bowing and waving, and where the house shifts and creeks as if its materials yearn to be set into motion like that once again.  Where the northwester chills your bones and pulls at your clothes for two days straight, before a wind from the straight south reaches blows so hard and so long that you barricade yourself into your basement, but even there its voice chastises you in fits of high-pitched rage.

What Happens to Idealism

Perhaps college is the time for idealism; perhaps that's one of college's gifts to society; perhaps it's particularly true in Christian colleges.

My roommates and I may have been above average for idealism, but I doubt it. I was idealistic about some vague idea about writing that would lead to something called "a writing life" which meant, as I had learned about Hemingway in Paris, that you got to stumble around the world and experience anything you wanted, which you then wrote about through your superior artistic sense so that others could also experience it.

Another of us was idealistic about being the most buff kindergarten teacher ever; actually, he was a football player who could have benched an entire kindergarten class, but he ended up going back home to manage his dad's ice cream shop.

Another of us was idealistic about a girlfriend he had; a youth ministry major, they were to marry and affect youth forever and forever. Didn't happen with the one he thought, though now he is married and in youth ministry.

The campus pastor's son was probably the most realistic of all of us. A poli-sci major, I think he wasn't embarrassed about wanting to make some money without losing his soul, and he joined the charitable donations section of a banking corporation.

Perhaps most idealistic of all was the pre-med student. Colombian born and adopted by a couple from St. Paul, his one vision was to be a medical missionary to his country of origins--a vision which in at least one manifestation, I'm almost positive, included martyrdom. At the time with the level of violence in Colombia, this part of the vision may not have been all that unrealistic.

Reality has been a lot different for my friend, the once pre-med student. When he didn't get into the med schools he applied to after his first two attempts, he took a somewhat roundabout path to becoming a doctor: med school at Ross Medical School on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. This separated him from the love of his life and drove them even more together. Once they were wed, had six-figure debt, and meshed their callings--his wife had not been called to medical missions in Colombia--the vision shifted. The couple bought a house in Minneapolis--and watched the worth of it crash with the housing crisis.

Not to be daunted, he signed on as a physician at a clinic in an underserved area of St. Paul. The clinic serves a mixed community--black, Hmong, white, and Latino--and my friend is--a fact I find amazing and mystifying--the only male on staff, a testament to the fact that a certain type of doctor doesn't want to work there. That type? Most of them.

He also works with Healthcare for the Homeless, treating the poorest of the poor in the Twin Cities area. Both jobs put him in daily contact with the people whose healthcare gets bought and traded for political clout: at one point, he found himself shuffling his patients among city clinics so that they could get the care they needed, all because of politics.

Regularly, too, I hear stories about some of the difficult cases he works with: complications of diabetes patients where he is left to interpret the work of remote and expensive specialists; teen pregnancies and STDs that bespeak cultural anomie and desperation.

But of all of us, my pre-med friend hit the ideals--that the rest of us thought we had--best of all. Recently, he was named a finalist for a physician of the year award. This nomination came from the people he serves as well as the colleagues he works with. His personal statement regarding the nomination captures how he's been able to live out his vision:

"If my nomination brings attention to those usually left out of the best that medicine has to offer—the homeless, the uninsured, the poor here and elsewhere; If indeed my patients, colleagues, residents, and medical students begin to believe that greatness is not in separating ourselves from sickness, pain, and poverty, but in humbly involving ourselves in the lives of our patients, and that in doing so we heal not only them but ourselves; If even one more bright young medical student decides to give her or his great talents in service to the more vulnerable ones of our world, then I consider this nomination worth it. In the words of my friend and pastor, Greg Boyd, ‘To heal the sick you have to love the sick, which means you have to fellowship with the sick’ (Repenting of Religion, p. 197)."

If this sounds too good to be true, it's not. That is, this friend of mine is not the superman that this makes him sound like. I know his warts--and he knows mine. I know that he struggles with being human in most of the same ways I do: difficulties with family, impatience with children, road rage. Perhaps it’s in these items, the personal flaws we see in the mirror every day, that idealism dies for most of us. But this friend of mine has been able to persevere; he does what he does in spite of the slivers in all of our personal lives--what we're all called to do with our ideals. That's why I say it's not too good to be true—my friend’s not superman; he's real.

I now teach Christian college students, some of them with loftier ideals than I had, some who just want a job and a good life, and many who think they want the former but will find themselves in the world of the latter. What makes the difference among those who truly pursue their ideals from those who sacrifice them?

In my friend’s case, I guess I would say some rather simple things--simple things that aren't really that simple: determination, humility, and love--the love of a good woman, love for the people of God's world, and the love--both of and for--God himself.

In a world where there's more and more spin, where there's more and more levels of cynicism to get through before we trust something as authentic, on this day I'm thankful for people like my friend the doctor in St. Paul and the light he shines in the darkness.

Christian School Back Flip

Each year for at least the past three years, the local high school cheerleading coach has held a "cheer camp" for elementary school girls on a Saturday afternoon in February.  For about fifteen bucks, girls from grades 1-5 learn a simple routine and some of them even make a tumbling run or two.  Most importantly for them, they get a t-shirt and a chance to perform their routine at the halftime of a real basketball game.  As one might imagine, on the night of the performance the gym fills up with moms and dads and grandpas and grandmas with cameras in tow.  It is very cute, and I could very easily argue that the collective sense of worth and being part of a larger unit is very much worth it.

As a fifth grader, this was our daughter's last year.  She had her first basketball tournament in the morning but was adamant about going to cheer camp in the afternoon because--well, because she enjoys that kind of stuff, but also because she can tumble and she knows what that means:  a spot in the limelight.

Thus, at the end of the tumbling runs the night of the public performance, Sommer did a round off back tuck.  That's the term we use around our house, anyway, because that's what it's called in gymnastics jargon.  For everyone else--including me two months ago--it's a back flip.  She runs across the floor, plants her hands sidways on the floor, flips over them landing backwards on her feet, then uses that energy to back flip and land on her feet again. 

When she made her run, the crowd literally "oohed" as one voice.  To put it mildly, I was proud.

Of course, that back flip--I mean back tuck--didn't come from nowhere.  It's an investment:  3 sessions of beginning gynmastics, three years of dance.  I know the price tag on that back flip is significantly over $500, a middle class privilege.

Watching her do it, as I'll watch her again at this spring's dance recital, I have a hard time saying it's not worth it.  It's a combination of grace and power that I think is beautiful, and it's something she loves.

However, in saying that, I immediately realize that it ties me into the narrative about parenting that drives my generation--or perhaps just my socioeconomic tier:  For today's parents, "opportunites" are what matters.

And this is where the narratives get tangley, methinks, because I'm also a Christian school supporter.  For if "opportunities" are what matters but if I also send my kids to a small Christian school where opportunities are limited, then I'm over a barrel.

No doubt this conflict used to be simpler.  Opportunities mattered less than "the story" of Christian schooling.  However, arguably "the story" itself forced this conflict, for "the story" of Christian schooling includes bringing "all areas of life" under Christ's Lordship.  Unavoidably, however, there are "areas" that get preferential treatment in Christian schools:  certain forms of music, certain forms of sports, certain other arts, as money allows and cultural popularity demands. 

Over the years, the local Christian high school has lost a few students here and there to football, but that's been about it.  Repeatedly, too, the local public school has asked to pair with the Christian school, to no avail.  Why?  Because of this emphasis on narrative difference:  "the story" the Christian school tells is by nature unique. 

That all changed this past winter when, in a move that was unprecented locally, the Christian school went to the public school about pairing.  Needless to say, they accepted.  For the first time this spring, public school students will be able to join Christian school golf and track teams, and the Christian school kids will be able to play softball and baseball with the public school.

What precipated this sea change?  Long time teacher, coach, and athletic director Darrel Ulferts once speculated to me that "parents today just want activities for their kids."  Part of the answer, then, is that the Christian school is trying to stop the bleeding.  More students, it seems, are choosing activities over "the story."  I know of two girls who will go to public schools in the name of gymnastics.  Others are staying in local towns like Pipestone and Worthington because the activities plus convenience equal a package they can't refuse--one that they prefer over "the story."

No, that's not quite true.  It's not that they're necessarily sacrificing "the story," but that they feel they don't need the school as institution to tell the story--they feel they can sufficiently tell "the story" within their family and church.

And so the move to pair by the Christian school is a move to survive, but it's also a move to redefine what "the story" is and how we tell it in the current culture.  In greater Christianity as well, there is a move afoot toward "culture making," which happens to be the title of an influenial book by Andy Crouch, one that has found its way into the curriculum of Christian colleges.  (I should know; I teach it).

With these trends abroad, I applaud this move by the local Christian school.  If Christian schools are to survive in a climate where parents take seriously that all areas of life belong in the kingdom, then Christian schools will have to find new ways to allow students to move into multiple areas.  However, they also must show how important their part in telling "the story" is. 

So, back to Sommer's back flip--and, more importantly perhaps, to the cheer camp.  In finding another place to showcase a talent, the school engaged both my daughter and a current cultural trend.  However, equally as important is how they encapsulate that talent in "the story":  there is a place for back flips in the Christian school not because parents are hyper-concerned that their individual child might have a "look-at-me" moment, but because all areas of life are created by God, all moments of human grace are part of humans being made in God's image. 

But this narrative is communal narrative.  And I say that the more people that are involved in it--family, church, and school community--the better.  However, this is a case the Christian school must be able to make loud and clear as well, lest the clamor for activities that feature "my unique and special child" drown out the more important--the all important--Story.