All I Want For Christmas

 As a child of Chicken Creek, some things seemed out of reach when I was young. I was an only child and spent plenty of time alone. That’s not a sad statement, it was in solitude that I was able to cultivate an imagination and develop the ability to self soothe and be content in silence. Movies, books, video games, and television programs became a playground of sorts and in the amusement park of my mind I would encounter fascinating people and places that seemed so far from Pulaski. Somewhere in those years I became fascinated by the symphony. I’ve never been musical, but I have always been a lover of music. When I was sixteen three of my great loves converged and created within me a new fascination. As I mentioned, I loved movies, and I loved music, and I loved books, and one of my favorite books was Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” In the fall of that year a movie version was released and I was all in. I saw the movie, multiple times, had the movie poster on my bedroom wall, and even bought the soundtrack. The soundtrack to the movie was all classical music, and this was probably the first time I’d ever listened to classical music. Around that time I started wanting to go to a symphony and hear classical music performed live. I can’t say why for certain, but I think it was because I believed that going to symphonies made you classy and dignified, two words that weren’t thrown around much in my circle of influence. Still, I really wanted to go to a symphony. As an adult, I often found myself traveling long distances, alone, at night. Most nights I would spend some of that time listening to classical music on public radio. The first piece of classical music to truly resonate with me was Mussorgsky’s “Pictures At An Exhibition.” It was also the first classical CD I purchased, intentionally. When I bought the Dracula soundtrack at sixteen I didn’t know it was going to be orchestral music only — just another of life’s happy, fortunate accidents. 

As my fascination with classical music began to grow, I encountered a symphony that spoke to me like no other, Handel’s “Messiah.” It was written nearly three hundred years ago, and it tells a story that is nearly three thousand years old. The symphony tells the story of Israel’s coming Messiah from the pages of the prophet Isaiah. Today, after decades of hoping, wanting, waiting, wishing, dreaming, I attended my first symphony, “Messiah” at the Schermerhorn in downtown Nashville. Sometimes in life, things we wait for fail to deliver and we are left crestfallen and disappointed, but this was not one of those days. It was everything I imagined and more. When my son later asked me what I thought of it, I told him it was painfully beautiful. The musicians, the vocalists, the conductor, the chorus were awe inspiringly talented performers. So many times I had to wipe away the tears streaming down my face, sometimes from the beauty of the performance and the message and sometimes from the pain of the story. Majesty and misery simultaneously. The morning began with a beautiful worship service and the symphony, at least for me, became another one. Today will be one of the days that I remember as one of the best days. A day when reality lived up to the hype. The cherry on top was getting to experience it all with the love of my life. Everything is better when shared — pain, pleasure, beauty, everything, except Oreo Cheesecake, that is best enjoyed alone.

This isn’t one of those humble brag things where I have an ulterior motive of wanting you to be ever so slightly envious of the life I’m living or validate my insecurities with comments like “That’s so amazing!” or “You’re so lucky.” Even if it was a humble brag it wouldn’t be very good one. Most people I know experience zero FOMO about me going to the symphony — we literally couldn’t give away our two extra tickets. I’m sharing this to call our attention to a woefully overlooked and undervalued part of life that I want to share with everyone: perspective. 

Today I have a couple of different perspectives that help me to see this Christmas season for what it is, a magical, undeserved, but greatly appreciated, gift. Perspective number one is all about Christmas past and Christmas present. This morning I thought about the Christmases we spent at the jail, just to see our incarcerated loved ones on a video monitor. We could have done the same thing with our phones, but going to the physical jail, knowing they were on the other side of the walls, brought the smallest degree of comfort that can come from being so close, though mingled with the pain of feeling so far. The only place sadder than a jail at Christmas is a cemetery at Christmas, and we’ve been there too. Though painful, these are the places that provide perspective. Somehow the lights twinkle a little bit brighter, the music is a little more joyous and the fellowship a little more comforting when viewed from that perspective today.

The first perspective is all about a humble and lamentable disposition, but this second one is a bit more literal. In the last twenty-four hours I’ve gotten to spend time with both of my grandchildren. Both of them stacked together are less than five feet tall, so you really have to get down on their level to enjoy them. With Rougaroux that means sitting in the floor, no matter how painful it is on your hips and back and no matter hard it is to get back up again. Christmas is beautiful from his level because everything is a joy, well almost everything. The word “no” in any capacity is not a joy for this little boy on the cusp of two. From his perspective Christmas is a bit weird, but a good weird. Suddenly there is a giant tree, filled with decorations, lights and gifts in the middle of his living room, but he isn’t supposed to touch it. If you’re wondering how enthusiastic he is about the “look but don’t touch” policy, let me share two little details with you. 1) For awhile, when he would walk by a tree and spot a ball shaped ornament around eye level, he would swing his right hand like a baseball bat and launch the ornament across the house. 2) All of the ornaments within reach are now held onto the branches with a rubber band. True story. Besides the tree in the midst of his living room, ornately decorated with irresistible forbidden fruit, there is the random appearance of his beloved Gumbo, adorned in a Santa Claus suit, bearing gifts that can be as enthralling as a truck or as pedestrian as a shirt. Despite the bizarre and confusing rituals, and the occasional “no”, he seems to love the holiday as a whole. 

And then there is Nola. This little lady doesn’t think much about anything yet. Her timeline consists of only about two hours. Eat, changed, sleep, repeat. In the rare moments where she is wide eyed and observing this new universe, she mostly wrinkles her forehead, seemingly perplexed by the things she encounters, though occasionally entertained by things like ceiling fans and Christmas lights. Our time together is much more subdued than my time with Rougaroux, and less dangerous since there are no flying objects. My day in Nashville was such a joy, such a blessing, so much fun, and the fulfillment of decades of desire, but from the perspective of Sunday morning at about 5:30 am, it was the second best thing I did today. The best part of the day was sitting and drinking coffee, watching Nola sleep, with seasonal worship music playing in the background, a fireplace in the foreground, and a beautifully illuminated Christmas tree as the centerpiece. All the pomp and circumstance of the symphony was merely the pretty paper in which this priceless and fleeting gift was wrapped.

Perspective is a priceless gift because it has the ability to make all the gifts in our lives priceless, whether great or small, common or rare. To borrow from Handel, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Halle-lujah!" That’s best I can say it, but it pales in comparison to the poetic way Beth Moore expresses it, so I’ll give her the last word. “Tears fill my eyes often these days and as often over awe and gladness as sadness. The gifts to be had here — stubborn beauties among thorns — grow sacred with age.”

From Scrooge To Santa

When I was about eight or nine years old I heard the nativity story for the first time. I grew up in a religious tradition that drew strict boundaries between the sacred and secular during December, so I was largely unfamiliar with the story, the songs or the imagery. This particular year my family broke with tradition and visited a local outdoor nativity play, complete with live animals. To say that it made quite an impression on me would be an understatement. After the play we returned to my Big Mama’s house and I can remember looking out the window at the night sky, hoping to see the star I’d just heard so much about. As you can imagine I was disappointed, but I wasn’t discouraged, in fact, I was fascinated. One of my greatest joys then, and greatest memories now, was listening to the Christmas records that Big Mama would play in the living room or her house. The living room was largely off limits to us kids, being the closest thing to a formal room that she had in her tiny house. The living room, unlike the den, was unspoiled by messy, grubby handed little children. The carpet was in good shape, the furniture looked new and there was a nearly coffin sized cabinet that housed a radio, eight track, and record player. The one time a year I was allowed in this room was during Christmas, when Big Mama would play her Christmas records. Those angelic sounding carols coming from her console stereo only fueled my fascination with this side of the Christmas tradition. This fascination would eventually fade into the background, being replaced by things more interesting to teenage boys, like baseball, video games and girls, but it would come roaring back unexpectedly in my forties. 

Oddly enough, the revival of my fascination with the nativity story began in sunny Florida, nearly ten years ago. There were many things I loved about life in Florida, but the winter holidays was not one of them. Growing up in Tennessee, Thanksgiving and Christmas had a certain look and feel meteorologically. The changing color of the leaves was met by cold nights and soon after, bare landscapes. Christmas just never felt like Christmas to this Tennessee boy in Floridian exile. At this point in my life, I had been living away from home and extended family for five or six years and I felt it most during the holidays. For most of my life, my holiday traditions were pretty deeply ingrained. Being a part of a very large family, holidays were crowded and loud and so much fun. During your formative years you don’t realize how important these traditions will become to you until the time when they are no longer available. Time moves on, children grow up, marry and move away, beginning their own families, older folks die and we all begin to drift into different directions. Every year, around Thanksgiving, I found myself longing for some connection to the holidays as I’d always known them back home. I needed to feel connected to a place in spirit that I was separated from in body, and suddenly, those songs and images from my childhood began to reawaken and call out to me.

Some backstory might be helpful here. For many years I was a Scrooge, a Grinch, when it came to Christmas. The only side of the season I saw was the receipts for purchase. My obsession was on how much it all cost and how much trouble it all was. I hated putting up the tree, the decorations and the lights. I hated the shopping. I hated the expense and the hassle. But that all began to change the first Christmas we spent in Florida, due in large part to a visit from our mothers. My Honey has always loved Christmas and she got it honest because her mother really loved Christmas. For Honey their visit was certainly a breath of fresh air and for me it was reinforcements. While I was at work during the day, Honey and our mothers transformed our sunny Florida home into a winter wonderland and it was magnificent. Perhaps it was the mixture of the beautiful decorations, having home come to us, and spending a few days enjoying a Seaside Christmas with our mothers, but my small heart grew three sizes that day. If my heart swelled during their visit, it would burst a few days later.

After the moms went back to Tennessee, leaving us with tableaus of Christmas past, I was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window, washing dishes and cooking dinner, while listening to Christmas music. I was very much in the Christmas spirit now and had pulled up a generic YouTube Christmas playlist to run in the background. In a sentimental sneak attack, the song “O Holy Night” as performed by David Phelps and the Gaither Family Singers, came on and took me out. I’m sure I’d heard the song before, I mean, who hasn’t, but I don’t know that I’d ever really listened to it lyrically. Standing in our kitchen, Christmas magic was being worked as memory, longing, and faith mingled together and the dam in my heart burst. Tears streamed down my face as I thought of Christmas past, was grateful for Christmas present and longed for another “Tender Tennessee Christmas” in the near future. I can tell you that my new found love of all things Christmas was born in that moment. 

In the days that followed, I found great comfort sitting in the early morning or late night hours, when it was still dark, drinking a cup of coffee, with only the light from the tree illuminating the room. I would sit, sip, and sing. Those traditional Christmas carols that Big Mama used to play — Silent Night, O Holy Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Away in a Manger, Do You Hear What I Hear, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Joy to the World — became a source of comfort and joy, to borrow a phrase. Those moments of solitude, faith, family and feelings mingled together in a magical way that was equal parts nostalgia and theology. 

Nearly a decade later, this is still my favorite time of year and I am all in for all things Christmas. I even enjoy going with Honey to Hobby Lobby and looking at all the Christmas decorations that invade every aisle, starting sometime around late September. For me, there is nothing better than sitting quietly, looking at the lights on a tree and listening to those beautiful old songs. They had the power to transport me back in time to a living room in Tennessee, a stable in Bethlehem, and to transform me from Scrooge to Santa.

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining

'Til He appears and the soul felt its worth

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

Fall on your knees; O hear the Angel voices!

O night divine, O night when Christ was born

O night, O Holy night, O night divine!

Truly He taught us to love one another;

His law is love and His Gospel is Peace

Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother

And in His name, all oppression shall cease

O little town of Bethlehem

How still we see thee lie

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by

Yet in thy dark streets shineth

The everlasting light

The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight

Happy, Happy Birthday Baby

 The first birthday we celebrated together was her 18th, December 7, 1993. We had only known one another for four months, but I’m pretty sure that was the night she fell in love with me — I had already fallen in love with her the day we met. We didn’t do anything amazing and had Instagram existed back then it probably wouldn’t have even warranted a photo, but it did create a memory that is still vivid three decades later. That night I took my record collection over to her house and I sang her Elvis, Conway Twitty and George Jones songs until the early morning hours. 

Subsequent years would be spent in more exciting ways, but I don’t know if they can top — at least in my mind — the first one….that is, until this one. The most mesmerizing way to view someone you love is to merely observe them doing what they love, and for Honey, what she loves is serving the people she loves. The circumstances surrounding the birth of our granddaughter have necessitated we stay with our children during the first few days since the baby was born. 

I told her last night that God always has a way of working with what we bring to Him. I can’t remember the last time she was able to sleep through the night and that played to her advantage this week. She’s gladly joined in to help with the overnight feedings and diaper changes that our sweet Magnola has needed. Additionally, she has cooked food, washed dishes, done laundry, played nurse and gone to doctor appointments, all with an ear to ear smile on her face. It’s not a burden or a chore, she genuinely loves it and thrives when she’s needed.

For Honey, service is always with a smile. Serving is her love language and she is fluent in love. Seeing Honey helping others is as natural as observing a fish in water or bird in flight. It was what she was created to do and she does it with a skill equivalent to an artist.

Recently a quote I came across has become one of my favorites, and today it reminds me of her. “The monk wakes at 4am to pray. The young mom wakes at 4am to warm a bottle. God meets them both.” She’s not a young mom, but she is a new grandmother, and there is nothing more divine than watching her with her grand babies. Time may erase our youth, but it engraves our lasting beauty. When I met her at seventeen I’d never seen anyone prettier, and watching her all these years later I’ve never seen anything more beautiful. Our first birthday together we were just children and this birthday we get to enjoy with our grandchildren. Every time I watch her with her grand babies I fall even more in love with her.

I’m reminded of a George Jones song thinking about her this morning. “Loving you could never be better than it is right now.”

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go sing her a song.

She's as sweet as Tupelo honey

She's an angel of the first degree

She's as sweet, she's as sweet as Tupelo honey

Just like honey, baby, from the bee,

The Border of Life and Death

 

Neither of my grandchildren were born in a conventional fashion. “Difficult” labor and delivery has kind of been a family tradition for my branch of the Britton family tree. When my mother delivered me it was only after more than a day of labor, followed by an emergency caesarean. My first son was born following a twenty-six hour labor and ended with an emergency caesarean. Our first grandson was delivered naturally, but he was also induced due to critically high blood pressure in his mother, resulting in a six week premature birth. He had to spend two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, and due to COVID protocols, we were unable to see him in person until he was discharged from the hospital. Most recently, our granddaughter was born, but not without extreme duress on the part of her mother. Three days after induced labor produced no baby, she was sent home, only to return two days later, beginning 24 hours of hard labor that ended in, you guessed it, a caesarean. As if to add insult to injury, her mamma endured all of this while having the flu and then had to make two more trips to the hospital for two more surgical procedures postpartum. Today I listened as the labor and delivery doctor described this as the most difficult one she had personally witnessed. I have witnessed enough births to be able to say without hesitation, in labor and delivery, our mothers straddle the border of death in order to drag us into the land of the living. There is a reason that delivering a child is referred to as labor, or if you prefer the old King James Version term, travail. Bottom line, creating, sustaining, and delivering a human life is so incredibly hard only God and women can do it. William Makepeace Thackeray said, “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”

We didn’t have to wait two weeks to meet our granddaughter like we did with our grandson, but we did have to wait two days. Since mamma and baby were in flu protocol, no one was allowed into the room with them for a few days. Generously, the OB nurse offered to escort us outside the hospital so that we could see her through the window. As the five of us were walking back into the hospital, I stopped and looked back to snap this picture. There are two images in this picture, each of which represents polar extremes on the spectrum of life and death. 

On the right is the hospital window for the room that was housing this brand new life, just twenty-four hours old, that we were all there to celebrate, but on the left was the helicopter pad where my father, in the midst of a heart attack, was loaded up and flown to Murfreesboro just two months earlier. Fred R. Barnard taught us all that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll only share a few more with you here. 

I paused to take this picture because I wanted a reminder of the frailty, brevity, tragedy, and beauty of life. At once it can be both magical and horrible, or as Michael Franti says it, “Life is amazing, then it sucks, then it’s amazing again.” In October, I left my office, rushed to this very hospital and stood in the cramped ER exam room five, along with my mother, sons, father, and half a dozen doctors and nurses. They were working diligently to ensure that dad would survive the med-flight so that he could have the life-saving surgery an hour later. I’ve been in similar rooms with other people and their family more times than I can remember, so I’ve learned to maintain my composure and think clearly in these moments. I always considered it an occupational necessity to remain calm so I could minister to the people in the midst of their crisis, but on this day it was my family in crisis. As they prepared to wheel dad out of the room and to the helicopter pad, I remember looking at him and thinking, “This could be the last time I ever see my father.” Sitting here now I realize it sounds morbid to write this, but if you put yourself in that room it is a perfectly reasonable thing to think. On a day where we feared, if not expected, death would come to our family, we were graciously given the gift of life. Now, two months later, a mere thirty feet from the helicopter pad that played a part in saving my father’s life, we were standing outside the window, already in love with the new life we had been expecting, that we feared was going to be stripped from us. Sitting here tonight, I am grateful in both cases our fears were alleviated and our joy was made fully. 

The night before my granddaughter was born I spent a good bit of time in the chapel, praying a mixture of Scriptures from Isaiah, John, and Psalms. 

“Do I bring to the moment of birth and not give delivery?” says the Lord. “Do I close up the womb when I bring to delivery?” says your God…Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. 

“You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. In that day you will no longer ask me anything. Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.”

“Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”

If this picture says anything it says the border between life and death is narrow and near, and we all walk it like a tightrope. 

Fortunate Fall

   In July 2022, U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas was chairing a conference in Bilbao, Spain. The car he was in was traveling down a dark stretch of highway and crashed due to a wild boar that had wandered into the road. The Congressman was taken to a hospital where it was discovered that he had cancer. Fortunately for Representative Castro it was a very treatable form of cancer, but even more fortunate for him was the car wreck that led to its discovery. As strange as it may sound, his misfortune was actually quite fortunate.

  For several years my wife and I have loved listening to the music of Audrey Assad. In fact, it is rare for our Sunday morning not to begin with her song “I Shall Not Want”. It’s become a sort of Sunday morning prayer in our home. Admittedly, that is my favorite of her songs, but recently another one has been demanding space in my heart and attention in my thoughts. The song is “Fortunate Fall” and the lyrics are simply four lines repeated four times.

Oh happy fault, oh happy fault

That gained for us, so great a Redeemer

Fortunate fall, fortunate fall

That gained for us, so great a Redeemer

  Something doesn’t have to be lengthy to be profound — something I would do well to learn — and this brief stanza gripped my thoughts and has refused to let go. We often speak of Genesis 3 and refer to it as the fall of man or the original sin. Most are familiar with this story. God said do not eat of the tree, Adam and Eve ate of the tree, the door of disregarding God’s will and wisdom was opened and very soon all manner of evil came in. The consequences of our ancient ancestor Adam’s actions are still plaguing us today….shame, fear, pain, division, death. Just as the Judeans loved to taunt their northern neighbors, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Perhaps we wonder, can anything good come out of the fall of man? I have come to understand, yes, yes it can. 

  Whenever something piques my interest, I have a tendency to delve into it obsessively and try to learn everything I can about it while the zeal of curiosity fuels me. What I uncovered after I discovered this song was that it was actually quite ancient, like 1,700 years old ancient. These lyrics first appear in the 4th century Catholic Paschal Vigil Mass Exsultet: O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem, "O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer." Talk about a deep cut cover song, well done Ms. Assad.

  The technical term is “Felix Culpa”, Latin for happy/lucky/blessed or as Audrey Assad put it, fortunate fall. It is one of the many paradoxes in the Bible — the first shall be last, the least will be the greatest, those who lose their life will save it, etc. Felix Culpa is about the fortunate consequences of an unfortunate event. It is a reminder that there is nothing broken which cannot be redeemed by God. Augustine of Hippo remains one of the most brilliant minds in Christian theology and in the fourth century he wrote, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”

  Please don’t mistake God’s will for God’s working. God never intends or desires for anyone to do that which is contrary to Him, and yet, part of what makes God, well, God, is His ability and willingness to take our mess and create a masterpiece. Have you ever watched one of those cooking shows where chefs are given very few, and often random, ingredients, only to witness them create amazing dishes? That’s God. Yes, our ancestor Adam and his near descendants made a mess of God’s good creation, and that is when God stepped in and began creating a masterpiece. It is because of this fall that we were able to witness the full depth, the magnitude and the majesty of God’s love through the life and death of Jesus.

 Padre Pio, an Italian Capuchin friar who died in 1968, once said, “Blessed is the crisis that made you grow, the fall that made you gaze up to Heaven, the problem that made you look up to God.” This is precisely why the gospel is good news. God turns our mess into a masterpiece in Him. Have you ever messed up? Did you make an even bigger mess when you tried to clean it up on your own? I’ve been there. But I’ve also, as the old gospel song says, brought Christ my broken life, so stained by sin, and He created a new and made whole again, my empty wasted years He did restore. Fortunate fall that gained for us so great a Redeemer.

A reading from Romans 7-8

Well then, am I suggesting that the law of God is sinful? Of course not! In fact, it was the law that showed me my sin. I would never have known that coveting is wrong if the law had not said, “You must not covet.” But sin used this command to arouse all kinds of covetous desires within me! If there were no law, sin would not have that power. At one time I lived without understanding the law. But when I learned the command not to covet, for instance, the power of sin came to life, and I died. So I discovered that the law’s commands, which were supposed to bring life, brought spiritual death instead. Sin took advantage of those commands and deceived me; it used the commands to kill me. But still, the law itself is holy, and its commands are holy and right and good.

But how can that be? Did the law, which is good, cause my death? Of course not! Sin used what was good to bring about my condemnation to death. So we can see how terrible sin really is. It uses God’s good commands for its own evil purposes.

So the trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me, for I am all too human, a slave to sin. I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.

And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.

I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God’s law with all my heart. But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin.

So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus…What shall we say about such wonderful things as these? If God is for us, who can ever be against us? Since he did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else? Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? No one—for God himself has given us right standing with himself. Who then will condemn us? No one—for Christ Jesus died for us and was raised to life for us, and he is sitting in the place of honor at God’s right hand, pleading for us.

Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? (As the Scriptures say, “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.” No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDLKuJgRqPM

Waiting for the Magnolia to Bloom

 In terms of popularity, Christmas is clearly the king of the holidays. The top of the food chain. The big enchilada. Insert your favorite superlative here. It’s hard to compete with special songs, lights, decorations, trees in your house, and presents. Everyone loves to be given a gift. Not everyone loves to wait until December 25th to receive a gift.  I would ask for a show of hands for those those who can’t wait until Christmas morning and always get your presents early — or even worse, unwrap them and rewrap them — but there’s no need, we already know who you are. Truth is, none of us really LIKE to wait. We may HAVE to wait or be WILLING to wait, but I dare say none of us like to wait. We may not like to wait but we NEED to learn to wait, precisely because sometimes we have to wait.

Ours is an age of instant gratification, and while that can be really wonderful in some cases — like finding a bathroom when you really need one or a parking spot when you’re in a hurry — it also comes at a cost. If we can be honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the anticipation is what makes the realization so great. Sometimes the anticipation is better. Look at it this way, if you are really wanting to eat some dish or dessert that someone only makes once a year, say at Christmas, once you eat it, it’s over. That joy may last a few minutes while you are eating it and then the plate is empty and give it a few more hours and your belly will be empty again too. Now think about the days, weeks, perhaps months you spent looking forward to, getting excited about when you finally get to sit down to that delicious whatever it is. The actual enjoying of it is quite fleeting, but the buildup, the anticipation, which is its own kind of joy if you learn to love it, can last a long, long time. When we can get whatever we want, whenever we want, for as long as we want, we lose the blessing of anticipation.

Fortunately for us, there is a holiday, or better yet, a holiday season that is designed to teach us to learn to appreciate waiting, or at least learn how to wait, even if we don’t enjoy it. I’ve written before about Advent, very recently in fact, but I love it so much that I just can’t get enough of it this time of year. Probably because you have to wait for it for eleven months. 

For those who celebrate Advent, the season is all about identifying with our ancestors who waited for millennia, often times in darkness, sadness, suffering, fear, and loss, for God to come a bring help, hope, happiness, deliverance. For thousands of years their cry was “How long?” Their waiting wasn’t about anticipation but endurance. They waited and waited and cried and prayed and through it all continued to trust God. To say the payoff was worth the wait is an understatement. All they wanted was relief from their sufferings, but what they got was Jesus. When the waiting was over they were left with so much more than they ever imagined. Early on, very few people realized what had come with the arrival of this little baby — His parents, a couple of cousins, a few shepherds and magi — but just wait until He grows up. Everyone will know.

This story and this season has really taken up a lot of space in my mind lately. We too are waiting with an anticipation that cannot be contained. We too are asking, “How long, O Lord?” In Tennessee, Magnolia’s bloom in the Spring, but since they are an evergreen, they are popular centerpieces for holiday tables. The centerpiece of our season is waiting fo our little Magnolia Mae to bloom. We thought she would be here by now, maybe even home enjoying the bedroom that mom and dad, grandparents, friends, aunts, uncles and cousins have spent months preparing just for her. Her mama spent the last three days in the hospital letting the doctors and nurses put her through quite a bit of discomfort and outright pain, in an effort to induce the arrival of this little girl, to no avail. All the family gathered at the hospital waiting to erupt with celebration, somberly dispersed and went back to our normal routines. Everyone is disappointed and a little sad, so we go back to waiting and anticipating, and that’s ok. When the fulness of time was come God sent forth His Son, and when His time has come He will send us our little Magnolia Mae. Until then, we will shed a few tears, wait and pray and continue to trust God.

Right now Maggie is somewhat suspended between two worlds. She is very much real and alive, but she’s not yet here with us face to face, so a part of her remains in the presence of her Creator too. Perhaps He is already using her to bless us and teach us, even before she is fully with us. Maybe this is her way of reminding us that so many of the things we focus on, while blessings, aren’t ultimately that important. A baby can lay in a manger just fine, the important thing is we make room in our hearts and lives to love this new little life that God is giving us. Driving home from the hospital last night I couldn’t help but be reminded, before you get to Christmas you have to get through Advent. You have to learn to wait, anticipate, and through it all, trust God to give good gifts when the time is right.

Later in his life, I bet the Innkeeper wished he'd made more room than he thought he had for Jesus. Me too, and little Magnolia’s delayed arrival is a good reminder that there is no better way to spend the time while we are waiting than to create more room in my heart for HIm. Out of the mouths of babes…

For Everything There Is A Season...A Time For Everything Under The Sun

     E=MC2 is arguably the most well known equation of all time. People who don’t even know what an equation actually is, know this equation. I am one of those people by the way. When people hear the name Albert Einstein they think of two things: 1) his rather memorable hairstyle and 2) his even more memorable equation, E=MC2. Over the years I’ve come to know that this equation (which represents that energy is equal to matter multiplied by the speed of light squared) is part of his theory of relativity. To make a long story short, Einstein discovered that time is not constant. In the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein determined that time is relative—in other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. With all due respect to Einstein and his incredible contributions to the realm of science, disciples of Jesus have long known this fact in the realm of faith.

    Asking the question, “What time is is?” seems simple enough, until you consider the fact that not all groups of people observe time the same way. Civilians might say “The meeting will begin at 6pm”, someone in the military might refer to this same meeting as occurring at 1800 hours. The civilian keeps time based on a twelve hour cycle, whereas the military utilizes a twenty-four hour clock. If you’ve ever visited a Chinese restaurant then you have likely noticed that the calendar they observe is different from the one observed in the West. To borrow from Einstein’s theory, time is relative to the different cultures and people groups observing it.

    There is an ancient tradition where followers of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob marked time according to their relationship with God. In Exodus 12, while still in Egypt, God prepared the Israelites to begin marking time differently. The event now known as the Passover, the seminal event in Hebrew history, would transform the way in which they observed time. The month in which the Passover occurred would now be the first month of the year. In time, the entire Jewish calendar would revolved around three principal feasts: Passover, Pentecost and Sukkot (feast of booths). 

    In much the same way, ancient Christians, beginning as early as the third century, began to keep sacred time by commemorating God’s redemptive acts and continual blessings through Jesus. This time revolves around two divine movements of God: the incarnation and the resurrection. In time, this restructuring of time in view of Jesus, came to be known as the Liturgical or Christian Calendar. Much like the secular calendar in the West, which has four seasons (Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall), the Christian calendar has its own seasons: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week/Passover, Easter, and Pentecost. These seasons are less about identifying precise dates for certain events in the life of Jesus, and more about taking time to reflect upon, celebrate and in our own ways, imitate the life and works of Jesus.

    I didn’t grow up in a religious tradition that observed, or even recognized, the Christian calendar, but it was something I adopted on my own several years ago and my faith has been blessed immeasurably by it. To borrow from Lauren Winner in the Foreword of Living the Christian Year by Bobby Gross, “First, I want the Christian story to shape everything I do, even how I reckon time. I want it to be truer and more essential to me than school's calendar, or Hallmark's calendar, or the calendar set by the IRS. I want the rhythms of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost to be more basic to my life than the days on which my quarterly estimated taxes are due.” Living the Christian calendar forces us to live inside the story of Jesus. My friend Wes McAdams is want to say, “The first step of discipleship in the modern era: Learn to see yourself as a supporting character in a story about Jesus, rather than the main character in a story about you.”

    Most all of our lives have a rhythm they follow, usually based around certain seasons we tend to orbit. If you are a hunter, deer season is likely the seminal event of your year. For sports fans it might be opening day of baseball season or the first game that kicks off football season. For school teachers it is the school year and for CPA’s it’s tax season, and for the farmer it is planting and harvest seasons. Nothing is wrong with observing or enjoying these seasons, but none of them are worthy of serving as the focal point of our lives. It is in God that we live and move and have our very being (Acts 17:28). And that is precisely why I began altering the way I observe time to revolve around Him.

    Not all traditions and believers follow identical patterns, but generally speaking there are three cycles to the year: the cycle of light (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany), the cycle of life (Lent, Holy Week/Passover and Easter) and the cycle of love (Pentecost or Ordinary time). The cycle of light is all about the True Light of the world (John 1) coming into the world of darkness and overcoming it. The cycle of life is about how God saves us from death through the life of Jesus. The cycle of love is focused on us living the love of Jesus in our everyday lives by loving God and our neighbors as ourselves. 

    My personal favorite time of the year is upon us and is the inspiration for me writing this. Advent has become the most beautiful, challenging, inspiring and powerful season of the year for me personally. It is the beginning of the Christian year and was the beginning of my journey into the Liturgical year. The word “advent” means coming or arrival, and refers to the time leading up to the incarnation, the coming of God in the flesh as the baby Jesus. 

    This season begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and reaches its climax with Christmas Day. For a great many people, Christmas is the highpoint of the year, and precisely for that reason, the Christmas season begins so early it practically starts on Halloween night. But Advent is about waiting, something our modern age struggles with mightily. The aim of Advent is to slow down, learn to be still and to be quiet in the presence of God as we wait for Him to act. Advent is not Christmas. Advent is stepping into the story of our spiritual ancestors who lived and suffered in a cold and barbaric world but never lost hope that God would come and make all things new. Advent is trusting through the darkness, looking to the East and the rising of the star that signified the long night had ended and light was dawning.

    Advent is also a season of repentance, it forces us to look upon and sit in the darkness that exists in the world, in our lives and in our own hearts. We listen to the voices of the poets and prophets from long ago as they cry out to God “How long, O Lord?” How long? A very long time. Hundreds of years, thousands of years, but then, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.” (Isaiah 9:2). After so long, after so much anticipation, the darkness was overcome by the light of life. “Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12). And yet, we know that darkness still exists. The arrival of Jesus changed the world for the better, forever, it saved the world, but there is still darkness to be conquered. Advent is about living in that tension between the light that has come, the darkness that still plagues, and the light that is to come. It embodies both singing and weeping and the causes we have for both, often simultaneously.  

    My love of Advent was expanded a couple of years ago when our family was anticipating the arrival of our own little boy, my first grandchild. Nearly three thousand years ago Isaiah wrote, “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Scriptures you’ve read and contemplated your entire life can suddenly be seen afresh, like the dazzle in a diamond when struck by a new light. Or perhaps it is like a treasure that has always been present, unearthed by erosion and suddenly visible. This isn’t the first time this scripture has been seen in a different light. When the prophet Isaiah recorded these words they carried significance for the royal court and the current state of affairs, and yet, it would be another seven hundred years before the full gravity of his words would be felt. A child would be born, a son, and everything would change. The whole world would be different, everything redefined and reshaped.

    One cold and dark night, two years ago, I contemplated the words of Isaiah and the story of Jesus and I wrote these words to my (then) unborn grandson:

I’ve never met you, I don’t know what you look like or even what you will like, but I am already                        fully and completely in love with you. My heart is swollen and strained at all times, trying in vain to contain the emotions your existence has produced in me. Just a phrase, a sound, a song or a sight and tears overflow my eyes like so much water breaching a feeble dam. Though I am electrified with excitement and anticipation, a part of me envisions our meeting with dread because I know I will not be able to maintain any modicum of dignity, in fact I fear I may not even be able to stand. Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.

Reflecting on him, my grandson, forced me to look up to Him, my Father and echo these words:

I’ve never met you, I don’t know what you look like or even what you will be like, but I am already         fully and completely in love with you. My heart is swollen and strained at all times, trying in vain to contain the emotions your existence has produced in me. just a phrase, a sound, a song or a sight and tears overflow my eyes like so much water breaching a feeble dam. Though I am electrified with excitement and anticipation, a part of me envisions our meeting with dread because I know I will not be able to maintain any modicum of dignity, in fact I fear I may even be able to stand. Is this why you give us children? Is this why you created the reproductive cycle the way you did? Is it to teach us, to prepare us, to reach us? Is it meant to teach us that it’s possible to love that which we cannot see? If a love of this magnitude is merely a foretaste, a speck compared to the love we will know in you, how will I be able to endure it? The love that I have known nearly pulls me apart at the seams, stretching and straining the very fibers of my being in its more powerful moments. How can it be? Am I wrong, will it not fill me, but rather absorb me? Will I, will we, be part of what fills it? 

    Two years later, we sit on the precipice of another Advent season and await the birth of another child. Any day now I will get to meet my first granddaughter and once again the words filling my mind are those of Isaiah. Unto us ANOTHER child is born and all of those same powerful emotions are running rampant in my heart. The only difference this time is I now know what to expect, so I anticipate and I wait in hope. In much the same way, I already know what it means for Christ to come into my life and the difference it made, but I also wait in anticipation of His coming to make all things new, when there will be no night.

Heart Like A Wardrobe

  There are certain rites of passage that await most children in their exploration of the world around them. Some good, some bad, all valuable. These inaugurations don’t look the same for all children, in every culture or generation, but they serve the same purpose….discovery. To a child, this enormous and complex world can at once be terrifying, confusing, and boring. These rites of passage create a framework equipping a child to understand their world, or at least to experiment as they try to make sense of the absurdity of life.

For many adolescents, this comes in the form of discovering great literature for the first time. More recent generations crossed this threshold via J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The exotic creatures, magical powers, elaborate locations, and bizarre vocabulary captivate a child’s often evasive attention, while the characters and storylines educate them in the way life often operates. These fantasy realms can be hilarious and horrifying simultaneously, much like the real world, but also safe because the book can be closed whenever the emotions become overwhelming.

I came along long before Harry Potter, so my on-ramp to worlds unknown was Star Wars, which arrested my attention when I was only five years old. Much to my chagrin, early 80’s technology didn’t allow me to access this world anytime I wanted. There was no streaming service housing the entire catalog of my favorite films, but I soon discovered an even greater technology existed, my imagination.

The portal to access my imagination was literature. I had always read books, or been read books by my family, but these new worlds only really became accessible when I started reading for myself. One of the greatest joys in reading is in discovering a book for yourself, which eventually feels like the books are choosing you as if guided by some unseen hand who knows what you need before you even begin to seek it. In this way, many a child has found himself drawn into the land of Narnia.

C.S. Lewis, author of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia series, was one of those rare few who possessed the intellectual flexibility to be able to challenge the most brilliant minds, educate the curious minds, and enchant the minds of children . Most of us made our first journey to Narnia in the same fashion as Lucy Pevensie from the first book in the series…through the wardrobe. In his initial invitation into Narnia, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lewis employs the wardrobe as a portal into this magical world of discovery and enlightenment. From the outside, the wardrobe was merely a piece of furniture large enough to house the apparel of one or two persons, but once inside it opened up to a practically endless world. 

Lewis is hardly the only, or even the first author to use this gateway to a greater universe device. It’s actually so common to fiction writing that it’s practically a standard literary device for fantasy writers (see Carrol’s looking glass and rabbit hole…Dr. Who and the TARDIS…Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Station in Harry Potter). Outside of literature, this concept even has a place in scientific discussions. Physicists will explain that, like the wardrobe to Narnia, mathematically it’s possible for something to be exponentially larger on the inside than it appears on the outside. They speak of a traversable wormhole as essentially a connection between two regions of space (a portal or bridge between different universes). On one side you might have something that appears small, like a door or room, but once inside it opens up to an entirely new universe, another dimension right on top of our own, but only accessible and visible via these portals. Whether or not this is theoretically possible through the known physics governing our universe, I can’t say, but I don’t need science to prove what my heart has experienced.

Like most everyone I presume, my childhood understanding of love was confined to people like family (parents, grandparents, etc), friends, and, in my case, Princess Leia. In time, romantic love would enter the equation, and though it has the potential to grow into something profoundly beautiful, initially it tends to be stunted by selfishness and personal gratification. Nothing could have prepared me for the exponentially magnified love I experienced when I became a father. It was a bit different with my second son because I now knew where to look because I had been there before. With my first son, the time before he was born was just abstract. I knew my wife was pregnant, that he existed, but it was mostly just blips on a screen or blurry images they told me was my son. Watching her stomach grow I knew there was life inside her, but it wasn’t until I saw him for the first time that I felt the irresistible pull toward a beautiful new world. That little squirming, crying baby was the wardrobe, the portal through which I would enter a land far greater than Narnia. As the nurses tended to him, cleaning and checking him, I ached to hold him, to comfort him, and soothe his cries. It was as if I’d crossed the event horizon of a black hole made of pure love and I immediately knew there was no escape. I was drawn in and I reached to take hold of my son, but instead something took hold of me. Through this tiny little creature love from a realm beyond reached out and seized me, and once it had me I surrendered to it, letting it take me wherever it wanted me to be. It didn’t take me far, I never left the room, I didn’t even move, except to sway, after regaining the strength from my buckling knees, and yet I was taken somewhere I’d never before seen. Love pulled me into my own heart and it was as if an entire room in my heart had been opened, the door to which I’d never even noticed though it had been there the whole time. What I had perceived as a modest sized heart, with barely enough room to love a handful of choice people, was suddenly so much more than I’d ever known. It was all encompassing, boundless and powerful beyond anything I’d ever experienced and it was all right there all along. How could something so gigantic and profound be held within a fist sized heart, much less how could it have gone unnoticed for 19 years? 

That was the day I first glimpsed the kingdom of heaven. I’d always believed there was such a place, somewhere far off, somewhere out there, but that was no longer true. Truly, the kingdom of heaven is within you, there is nowhere to go, it is with you always. Follow me for a moment into the mystical and transcendent.

If God is above all and through all  and in all as Paul says (Ephesians 4:6), then all that exists, exists within God. An unborn child is created within its mother, exists within its mother, and yet is separate from its mother, though connected by a cord. This much greater life source provides life to her child via a cord, a conduit, a portal. We exist within God. We are not God, we are separate from Him and yet we remain connected to Him. It is in Him we live and move and have our very being, as Paul says again (Acts 17:25,28). Perhaps Paul knew this because he personally got a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven through the appearance of Jesus on the road to Damascus. God is infinite and God is love and that means love is infinite, and John says God lives in us and it is through love that we know this (1 John 4:11-13). How can an infinite God, within whom our seemingly infinite universe exists, possibly dwell in me? He placed within us a portal, a small opening, a wardrobe if you will, that traverses space and time and gives us access to boundless love. The love I touched when I first held my son, opened the door of my heart to this realm where love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and never fails. It transported me into the kingdom of heaven and once that door was opened the kingdom of heaven began to seep through and spill  over into my world, blurring the lines between where the realm ruled by love begins and my world ends. What came washing in with this flood of love was a newfound capacity to love neighbors, strangers, even enemies. Suddenly there was room to love to depths and heights and breadths not previously perceived or even thought possible, and it was always there. 

“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in…To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne…After this I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven! At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne.” (Revelation 3:20-4:2).

It's Been A Lovely Cruise: My Tribute to Jimmy Buffett

 I was in Tupelo, Mississippi on the day that Jimmy Buffett died. If Elvis was the king of rock and roll, then Jimmy Buffett was certainly the court jester, making music equally as memorable, though often tongue in cheek and never taking the whole rock star thing too seriously. 

When I first heard the news of his passing, two songs popped into my mind: Lovely Cruise and Incommunicado.  Lovely Cruise was playing when I tuned in to the memorial tribute to Jimmy on his Radio Margaritaville satellite radio channel. It’s a great metaphor for life in general, and his specifically, with lyrics like,

Drink it up

This ones for you

It's been a lovely cruise

I'm sorry it's ended

It's sad but it's true

Honey it's been a lovely cruise

These moments we’re left with

May you always remember

These moments are shared by few

There's wind in our hair

And there's water in our shoes

Honey, it's been a lovely cruise

Incommunicado isn’t quite as obvious, but it speaks to my heart this morning. The verse that is echoing through my mind like a CD on repeat is, 

Now on the day that John Wayne died

I found myself on the continental divide

Tell me where do I go from here?

Think I'll ride into Leadville and have a few beers

Think of "Red River", "Liberty Valence" can't believe

the old man's gone

But now he's incommunicado

Leaving such a hole in a world that believed

That a life with such bravado

Was taking the right way home

The word ‘incommunicado’ means, “not able, wanting or allowed to communicate.” (Jimmy Buffett always taught me more vocabulary than my high school English classes). It’s a bit of an oxymoron that I’m writing so many words about a word that refers to the inability to communicate, but that was Jimmy Buffett in a nutshell. To quote his own words from Distantly In Love, “I can’t help but be, ruled by inconsistency.” He was at his best when working with contradictions, irony, or a play on words and turn of phrase. I am painfully aware that I am not talented enough of a writer to communicate what I’m really feeling in this moment, so I too am incommunicado and am relying on his lyrics to help get me across the finish line. 

He wrote this song, I believe, because he could remember where he was and what he did on the day that his childhood hero died. He probably didn’t know and likely never met John Wayne, just like I never met Jimmy Buffett (though I did send him an invitation to both my high school graduation and wedding, but I digress), but when a childhood hero dies, it feels big, there is a gravity to it that pulls at you in unexpected ways. It feels like the death of your youth and the final step in a right of passage wherein your childhood is officially gone. For Jimmy, that was the day that John Wayne died and his memory was flooded with images from his favorite movies starring the Duke. Jimmy Buffett was my John Wayne.

I was introduced to Jimmy Buffett by my college age cousin Denise when I was 14 years old. Denise was to me what Uncle Billy was to Jimmy Buffett in his semi autobiographical song Pascagoula Run….an on ramp to fun that was otherwise beyond reach. She played me the Volcano cassette while riding in her car and I was hooked from the first song, which ironically, was Fins. Right there in the front seat of her car she taught me how to make a shark fin with my hands over my head and then lean left when Jimmy sang, “fins to the left” and then to the right when he followed with “fins to the right.” Somehow this music seemed like the silly kids songs you grow up with, but these were for grown ups. All I wanted to do was grow up and be an adult, so I didn’t yet know that grown ups just want an excuse to be able to act like a silly kid from time to time. Denise gave me a copy of the album and it became my obsession. Within a matter of days I had played the entire thing so many times I had every word to every song memorized. It was the first time I can remember something truly speaking to my heart and connecting with things within me that I didn’t even know were there. It was as if the tide had come in and washed away the shoreline, exposing long buried treasure for me to discover. His songs made me laugh, made me cry, made me think, made me blush, but mostly made me long for a life beyond Pulaski, Tennessee. I literally spent my study hall in the Giles County High School library looking up pictures and facts about the places he mentioned in his songs: Montserrat, Antigua, Trinidad. Once I located them and learned all there was to know, I fantasized about the day I would sail into their harbors. Within a year I had convinced my parents to hire my aunt, who painted sets for plays, to paint my room to look like the tropical shoreline that graced the cover of his first novel, Where Is Joe Merchant?

Denise took me to my first Buffett show the next summer. Jimmy Buffett’s Outpost Tour came rolling into the Starwood Amphitheater in Nashville, August 1991. This was my first concert and it was practically a portal to another world. People from eight to eighty were dressed like they were kicked back on the beach on a tropical vacation, but we were in fact in a gravel parking lot in Tennessee. Somehow they transformed a parking lot into a Caribbean shoreline. Jimmy described this scene best in the song Here We Are, as a “family reunion costume bbq. All the black sheep, family outcasts, and a freak or two.” I would not go another year without seeing him in concert for nearly a decade, catching shows in Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago and New Orleans.

  When we got home that night I stayed up all night and read Tales From Margaritaville cover to cover. The deal was sealed that night. I still have that copy of that book sitting on the bookshelf in my office. For an only child living in a tiny town like Pulaski, Tennessee it was an access to the world and the source of all my hopes and dreams for my life. I’ve been writing what I feel since I was in fourth grade, but after reading Tales From Margaritaville I wanted to be a writer, and I gave it a decent shot, at least the best I could at that age. When I was seventeen I started writing a book that I titled Seashores or Summer School. The plot was pretty simple and a little too on the nose, a teenage boy from a small Tennessee town loads up his typewriter and dog in his jeep and heads off for the coast via Memphis and New Orleans, but it gave me a vehicle for sifting through my complex teenage emotions. I wrote around fifty pages, never finished it, but in a bizarre bit of serendipitous kismet, my life began to take shape somewhat like my not so short story. A few years later I would live in Memphis and over the next twenty years I’ve spent more time in New Orleans than any town I wasn’t living in. I spent time in the Caribbean and although I never lived on the coast, I did live in Florida and spent a lot of time on all of its coasts and several in Central America too. I met a girl who was a lot like the girl I was writing about in my story; one that scared me to death but I couldn’t get enough of either. I got a dog, not a Siberian Husky like my title character, but a loyal companion nonetheless, although I never did get that Jeep. Que sera sera.

For better or worse, I took his advice and tried “living my life like a song.” I “followed on the song lines that only dreamers see….not known for predictability”, often completely uprooting my life and career, setting sail on a moments notice, following the horizon for new adventures. Eventually I did find myself sleeping in a hammock in a grass hut on a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea. My first mission trip found me in the San Blas Islands with the Kuna Indians and I’ve never felt more like Jimmy Buffett in my life. I think that was when I realized it was time to stop trying to be him and be what he was calling all of us to be….ourselves. When I went to work with Latin American Missions and boarded my first plane to spend the summer in Central America I put on my headphones and played Far Side of the World to commemorate finally leaving Pulaski and venturing out to see the world. I didn’t see nearly all of it, but I’ve seen a lot more than most kids who grew up in Pulaski. Oddly enough, that little farm on Chicken Creek has become my Margaritaville and I’m ready to go home. I guess in some strange way, the timing of his passing is poetic to me. My story isn’t over yet, though the first and second acts have certainly come to a close. This morning, sitting on the front porch of my new, old home, back where all of this began, things have come full circle. Maybe time really is a flat circle, where what we have done we will do again and again. Regardless, I reject the nihilism of Nietzsche and prefer the philosophy of Jimmy Buffett, so I’ll close with a line from his song Love in the Library, “Write your own ending and hope it comes true.”

My bedroom mural

Note the Parrothead tie (that I still have)

Greatest Hits

 Unless you are one of the rare, lucky few born into a family with incredible taste in music, most of us get introduced to music via the radio. Whatever is popular is playing and that becomes our baseline for “good” music. When you are a child you don’t have much of a choice so you become a fan of New Kids On The Block, NSYNC, One Direction, BTS, depending on your generation, or whatever handpicked and carefully crafted boy band or girl group that the music machine pumps over the airwaves incessantly. Somewhere around the beginning of your teenage years a lot of us begin to branch out and carve our own path musically. We get introduced to “cool” music via a cool older cousin or young uncle that creates a new trajectory for our listening life. When you are willing to let your guard down and admit that your parents were once young too, and likely as cool as you think you are, you can open yourself up to the things they listened to during their formative years and find that some of it is actually pretty good. Few realize it in the moment, but what is actually occurring is a foundation is being laid for a yellow brick road whereon you truly learn to appreciate music of all genres, across all eras, and at the end of this journey are endless pots of gold, even if they aren’t gold records. Most of the best music never wins awards, has an accompanying music video or even gets played on the radio. True music lovers usually reach a point where they have grown tired of being told by the industry what they are supposed to like and what is “good” music, so they forge their own way through the maze of music to discover their own hidden treasure. 

For me, this journey began when I would hear the bands I’d grown to love on my own, discussing their favorite bands and influences. It could be Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain wearing a t-shirt for the band The Vaselines or covering Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on MTV Unplugged or hearing Eddie Vedder talk about Mother Love Bone and performing “Rockin In The Free World” with Neil Young at the VMA’s, but those moments opened up new doors for musical exploration. This is the place where you typically begin your own auditory archaeology by digging further and further back into the past, listening to the artists who influenced your favorite musicians and the artists who influenced them and on and on as far back as you want to dig.

I experienced a moment like this much later in life while listening to artists like Jason Isbell and Todd Snider talk about their love for John Prine. I’m both saddened and ashamed to admit that I’d not listened to a John Prine song until I was nearly forty years old. If you like a singer songwriter style artist today, there is a near certainty that they are a John Prine fan. Sadly, I never got to see him live, he was one of the early Covid deaths, but before he left this world he left behind a treasure in his final album The Tree of Forgiveness. Tree of Forgiveness is an album I can listen to front to back without skipping a single track. This record is the kind of music that can only be made at the end of your life, when you’ve been through countless experiences of love and loss, joy and sadness, ecstasy and agony, satisfaction and suffering and now are left with this priceless gift of perspective. It’s almost an insult to just call it music when in reality its poetry set to music. There isn’t a single song on the album that is my “favorite” John Prine song (how would you even pick one favorite from his magnificent, decades spanning catalog?) but it is my favorite of his albums and it contains my favorite line from a John Prine song. The song is called “When I Get To Heaven” and it just may capture the theology of redemption and reconciliation better than all of the volumes of books I’ve read over three decades of religious study, and he does it in just three minutes and forty-three seconds. The first line begins, 

“When I get to heaven I'm gonna shake God's hand. 

Thank Him for more blessings than one man can stand.”

 By the second verse he is declaring 

“Then as God is my witness I'm getting back into show business I'm gonna open up a nightclub called ‘The Tree of Forgiveness’ 

And forgive everybody ever done me any harm.” 

But it’s this line from the last verse that always get stuck in my throat. 

“And them I'm gonna go find my mom and dad And good old brother Doug

Well I bet him and cousin Jackie are still cuttin' up a rug

I wanna see all my mama's sisters

'Cause that's where all the love starts

I miss 'em all like crazy

Bless their little hearts.”

Yesterday I stood in the kitchen at my mama’s house, while the living room was filled with her surviving brothers and sisters, some of their spouses, my wife, children and grandchildren and a cousin while my dad lead a prayer before we ate lunch together. I genuinely can’t remember when I was last in the same room with this many of my mama’s family. For the first twenty years of my life gatherings like this were a near weekly, and on a smaller scale practically daily, occurrence, but with me moving nine hours away for a decade all of that changed. I don’t regret for a moment that decade, but even blessings can sometimes come at a cost. I needed to learn the lessons that I learned in far away places. That time changed me for the better, but there was rarely a day when I didn’t desperately miss moments like this, and I had to miss far too many of them. Funerals, weddings, birthdays, reunions, holidays, just weren’t possible logistically. Standing there listening to daddy expressing gratitude for our family, the words from this John Prine song filled my mind, gratitude filled my heart and tears filled my eyes.

“I wanna see all my mama’s sisters ‘cause that’s where all the love starts. I miss ‘em all like crazy, bless their little hearts.”

I was one of the rare, lucky few born into a family filled with incredible, larger than life characters. The most fascinating, brave, loyal, good, hilarious, interesting and amazing people I’ve ever known are not famous, but they are family. Their circle of influence likely only spans a few hundred people at best. None of them have statues depicting their likeness, buildings adorned with their names, holidays in their honor or movies telling their stories, and yet, these are the people I treasure. Their influence and imprint upon my life, my identity, my personality, my sense of humor, my interests and my nature is indelible. I’ve done my best to memorialize and give them the honor they are due through the stories I write and the stories I tell because they are as interesting as any character in a book or movie or song. Sitting around a deck on a beautiful, though very windy, April day, listening to them take their turns telling stories I’ve heard so many times they’ve grown into memories, I couldn’t help but think there wan’t a better way to have grown up than surrounded by these people. In many ways, my childhood family gatherings were like the ones depicted in movies, where a house is filled to the brim with people, food covers every inch of table and countertop space, and roars of laughter nearly burst your eardrums, and yet, it was somehow peaceful.

Sitting here today, I realized this wasn’t one of those memories, this was the making of a memory, but it was more than that. Today was an exposure to the influences that made my mother who in turn made me. In the eyes of my aunt I see my long departed Big Mama, who we honored by serving her sweet tea and chocolate oatmeal cookies. In the laughter of another aunt I heard my own mama and I saw her face in her brother’s when he cracked one of his endless one liner responses that always brings about belly laughs. To my right was one of those cool older cousins who introduced me to so many things that made my childhood memorable and just across from my cousin sat my own mother, who was the cool aunt to her. I was getting to watch her in her element, surrounded by the older brothers and sisters who were her influences, when I realized that the best parts of me were first the best parts of her, but they were actually bits and pieces of the dozen or so men and women who were her favorite people as she was growing up. Together they become a sum of all their parts and operate as a single unit. One on one they will entertain you, but together they will enchant you. 

At one point, when I was supposed to be taking a group picture of them, I switched my phone to video mode and recorded them cutting up while trying to take a good picture. I realized I didn’t just want to look at a photo of this day, I wanted to have even just a minute of it recorded for posterity. I wanted my grandchildren to at least be able to sample a moment of what it’s like when the band gets back together. Whether it’s recipes passed down generation to generation, shared stories told from multiple perspectives, or the sound of them laughing until they blend into an indistinguishable cacophony of joy, each of them is an individual and yet none of them stand alone in my heart. They are best enjoyed as a box set, and yesterday they played their greatest hits.

Then Sings My Soul

 For as long as I can remember I’ve preferred vinyl records to all other means of listening to music. Perhaps it’s because my earliest introduction to music was my parents playing records when I was a very small boy. When I was eight years old I got a stereo for Christmas with a turntable and my first record….Electric Breakdance. I still have that record, along with hundreds of others that literally span a hundred years. The oldest records in my collection date to the 1920’s and I also have records that were released brand new this year. It was Pegasus Records in Florence, Alabama during my freshman year of college that ignited my passion for vinyl hunting. What I loved the most as a broke eighteen year old was the fact that two or three dollar last could acquire you a handful of music that would last for hours. In reality, those two or three dollars could last you a lifetime if you were willing to box up those records and haul them with you around the country as you moved from place to place…which I gladly have for thirty years. There are cheaper and more convenient means of listening to music, but I’ve reached a stage in life where low price and convenience don’t always equal value. Most of the world seems like an endless droll of background noise these days, like so much muzak played over loud speakers in department stores. Vinyl records require your full attention. They have to be handled with care, started with gentleness and attended to regularly if you want to enjoy them. You can’t put on a record, walk away and have music blaring for hours on end, periodically you have to flip the record and start the other side or replace the record when you are ready for something new. There is no shuffle on a record player. Whereas streaming services offer unlimited options, curated by algorithms that will fill your ears endlessly while you do any number of other things, from cleaning house to driving, playing records is an event unto itself. Records have to be attended to, so you tend to choose one carefully and then sit and listen while it plays. I have found that records force me to be in the moment and therefore in the music much more than any other format. This alone can transform the evening from just background music to soul singing. 

I woke up thinking about you this morning thinking about records in part because I woke up thinking about you. That may not make a lot of sense to you, or anyone else for that matter, so let me explain what makes my brain go around. Most folks just assume time is like a straight line, linear, always moving forward with the impossibility of moving backwards, and maybe that’s so, I’m no scientist so what do I know. But sometimes time feels more like a record that keeps spinning around and around, with well worn grooves that capture people, places and events that happened at a particular time and place, and just like you can lift the arm of the record player and drop the stylus on a particular groove to relive that melodious moment, so to it is with life. We know that this world, heck this entire solar system, is spinning around and around in a giant cosmic circle, so is it really that much of a stretch to think that time itself might just be a circle going round and round too?

This morning, the cosmic dj dropped the needle on what has already become one of my all time favorite heart songs, the day you were born. When this day came around I was in Nashville again, just like I was one year ago. You were so excited to be here that you showed up six weeks early and apart from being worried about your health and safety, I was thrilled to get to meet you sooner. Just before 1:30 am your nana exploded into the quiet, dark, secluded waiting room where Honey and I were camped out trying to get comfortable and take a nap, and she shouted “He’s here!” Just minutes later I got my first glimpse of you via a picture your daddy sent to me. After all the months waiting  and watching you grow inside your mama, I finally got to see you and the best way I know to describe it is with a line from a hymn, “then sings my soul.” The hardest part of that night, and the next few days, wasn’t the hospital chairs we tried to sleep in, but not being able to see you and hold you. Perhaps that’s why in the year since that night I’ve spent countless hours just looking at you, holding you, talking to you, reading to you, singing to you. Like a night spent listening to a beloved vinyl record I love to just stop everything and sit with you and do nothing else, then sings my soul. 

Happy Birthday Rougarou