MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. – Theophrastus

There’s something to ponder.

Gets me thinking about how I have spent my free time the past few days. Not that I had any free time. Is there really any such thing as free time? You’ve heard the phrase “time well spent?”

I had lunch with my friend Richard the Sage today. Over a very tasty cup of soup I confessed I was having trouble budgeting my time, getting things done. It seems sometimes that the harder I concentrate on my vision, the more I lose my sight. I asked if he might help me come up with a plan. Richard the Sage said, no he would not. He feels, the way I am wired, that “plan” is a word loaded with potential pitfalls and suggested I use the word “path” instead. And, yes, he would be happy to help me with the path.

The path. I do like that better.

So we talked vision and possibility alongside burden and practicality and I agreed to spend some time getting all my thoughts down on paper, which I will give to him so he can ponder it all and help me put together a pla… I mean help me see a path. He said a lot of other things but I was concentrating on the soup and have forgotten most of it.

Next time we’ll just meet over coffee.

Years can pass by without you realizing what is happening and you wake up one day and you are in your 40s and your son is away at college and it hits you… This won’t last forever. St. Augustine once said “God has promised forgiveness to your repentance; but he has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.”

I remember talking with another friend of mine, Rick the Thoughtful, about the idea that God always rejoices when we dare to dream. I had heard someone say that “we are actually much like God when we dream. The Lord exults in newness, delights in stretching the old. He wrote the book on making the impossible possible.” I asked Rick the Thoughtful if this was a theologically sound statement and he felt that, indeed, it is.

I like that.

Try this sometime. Sit down with pad and pencil and start writing down all the things you feel you need to do, love to do, want to do; all the things you feel pressured to manage, all the things you feel are heavy on your heart. Write down dreams you have. Picture your life ten years down the road. What do you want it to look like? Are you on “a path” toward realizing that picture. Jot it all down, even fleeting thoughts that move you; the shoulds and the woulds and the coulds and even the if onlys. Don’t hurry. Getting all this down may take some time but find the time to do it.

Then give it all to Richard the Sage, buy him a bowl of soup and see what he has to say.

NOTEBOOKS AND CRIMINALS AND SHADOWS AND LIGHT

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in. - Arlo Guthrie

I was supposed to be on a flight to Tucson today but things unexpectedly changed at the last minute so I will be home this weekend. That is okay with me as I have about a hundred things to do here. Picking my way through a pile of papers after the radio show this morning I found a wad of notes stuck into a journal I carried around with me while traveling Afghanistan. I had filled the pages with my scribbled observations and so had moved on to another notebook, the contents of which I later ripped out on the flight from Vienna to Frankfurt and stuck into the first journal thinking it was best to keep it organized all in one place so that I wouldn’t have to look through different books when I was writing about it all later. Sometime in the exercise of unpacking my bags the whole mess found its way to the middle of the pile of papers I stumbled upon in my office today, three and a-half weeks after the paper shuffle on the Lufthansa flight. So much for organization.

I remember last year, after my wife and I returned from a trip to Maastricht and some other places, one of the bags was somehow set aside and it was a month before I found it under the bed in our guest room, still fully packed.

That was the trip during which all our camera gear was stolen. My wife and I had walked to a little café adjacent to our hotel in Amsterdam for breakfast and I left her there, with an espresso and the camera bag, while I ran back to the hotel to ask the concierge for a walking map of the city center. I wasn’t gone five minutes. In that time a couple of thieves, working together like they do in those old American Express commercials, distracted her long enough to grab the bag and disappear. When I returned she was standing in the middle of the café, shouting. The waitresses were looking at her as if she had lost her mind and for just the slightest moment I wondered myself until I realized what she was shouting.

He took the bag! He took the cameras!

Then she ran outside the café and I, slowly realizing what was happening, chased out after her. Then we stopped. We stood there, together on the broad expanse that on the one side opened to the street and rail lines separating us from the train station where we had arrived the night before, and on the other, the dense collection of structures that front the circular city center and canals. We were strangers in this place.

The thieves were long gone, swallowed up by the narrow streets emptying out onto the boulevard where we stood feeling sick and violated and bewildered and alone.

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Last Friday afternoon I was traveling to a retreat in the Rocky Mountains near Kremmling, winding my way along a road snaking it’s way up a sun-soaked valley. I was driving mostly north-northwest, alongside a river, taking off and putting back on my sunglasses as the sun danced just above the tree line on top of a high ridge. Finally, as the afternoon gave way to evening, I rounded a bend edging my way closer to the mountain as the road sunk into heavy shadow. It seemed suddenly dark and I thought to myself that it was unlikely the valley would open up again to the late evening light so I put the sunglasses away in the glove compartment.

Life can feel that way. We go through times where it seems very dark indeed and sometimes in the midst of that darkness we can’t imagine it ever being light again. We think, better get used to this.

A few minutes later the valley opened up, the river and the road curved left around a corner and a flood of sunlight filled the horizon. The brilliance of it was nearly blinding. Follow me, it beckoned. Steer toward the light.

DIGGING MYSELF OUT OF THE HOLE I DUG MYSELF INTO

Never say something behind someone’s back. That’s good advice for all of us. But it is particularly good advice if you make a living hosting a radio show. Take it from me.

Here’s the thing. When you host a radio show, you really have no say over who listens. Who hears what is completely out of your control.

It is not unlike a blog on the internet. You never know who might read it. Remember when I wrote about my son and the shotgun ownership question? I found out he does read my blog.

Not that I’m complaining.

But I need to use this space to clear up a little misconception about my feelings about my nephew, Luke, moving in. I told a little story on the air, which a certain someone heard. That someone told another someone, who told another someone, and on and on until my sister heard the story.

(Click here to listen to the radio discussion that may have given the wrong impression, then come back here for my feeble attempt at clarification)

The fact of the matter is, I am very glad he is living with us. Several months ago I told my wife that if Luke moves to town, we should offer to have him stay at our place until he gets situated. No, really. I did. I was the first to bring up the possibility way back when. Our son is off at college, we’re empty-nesters. We’ve got room. Only thing is…I forgot about it. Then I left the country for a couple weeks for the mission trip to Afghanistan and Albania. It was while I was away that Luke decided to move to town and into our house at the invitation of his aunt, my wife.

I was tired when I returned. I’m still tired. So I should be forgiven for being surprised.

Since the discussion on the radio show, Luke has been a blessing from God. He is painting the trim on the south side of our home, and redoing the deck. You can’t buy help like that. Well, you could, but why would you when you can get your 22-year-old nephew to do the work for free?

He’s a wonderful young man.

Plus, he reads this blog.

RELIVING HORROR AND THINKING ABOUT BEAUTY

Last night as I sat down to spend some time preparing for this morning’s radio show I found myself torn. I was listening to some of the audio I had in the archives from this day 5 years ago and felt a flood of emotion.

(Click here and you'll see what I mean.)

Reliving it again I thought, I don’t I want to do this. It is not a place I want to go.

Then again, it is not wise to take the show in a direction that is out-of-sync with the hearts and minds of listeners. Bobby & Mrs. Grant and I had a few discussions on how to approach the show and came to a consensus that it would be wise to strike a balance between “remembering” and moving forward.

In this space today I find myself thinking about the grace of God. The singer-songwriter Sara Groves says God’s grace is an invitation to be beautiful. She says the Lord has invited us, as mere human beings, to add to the beauty of his plan and creation. She says, if I may quote her here, “the Kingdom of God transcends politics and policy, nationality, gender and race. It transcends the way we do church, and makes us a real live body of believers. It gives us the ability to be very different and still bear with one another. It gives us the power to extend the same kind of grace that has been extended to us, and to love each other with a love that never fails. The very real kingdom of God calls out of us, it’s inhabitants, beautiful art, creative lives, and redemptive work.”

I love that. In a world that feels, at times, very dark indeed, God invites us to “add to the beauty…” Bring light into the lives of others.

Another favorite artist of mine, Phil Keaggy, says he believes the art of being has to do with the art of giving, the art of loving. After all, he points out, “scripture tells us that ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive,’ and that the only thing that really matters is ‘faith working through love.’" To believe we are important for who we are is to believe we have the potential to love and give.

That is something worth reflecting on throughout a day filled with reflection.

EMAIL, GOAT MEAT, & FIREARMS

I am finally caught up on the email. While I was traveling it backed up like my digestive system at the all-you-can-eat goat meat buffet at the Best Western Kabul. Alright, so there was no goat meat buffet in Kabul. No Best Western, either. But there was a buffet, actually, at the Serena Hotel, though I don’t think the meat was from a goat. I don’t know what sort of meat it was. But I ate it because everyone warned me not to eat the vegetable-looking stuff or the bowl of cold soup because of the water and I had to eat something so the meat-like substance won by default.

But I digress. I was thinking about all the email I had to sort through when I got home. Took me more than a week to clean out the inbox. The very occasional computer access I had overseas did not give me enough time to even think about going through the mail and I didn’t want to leave any of it unanswered if I could help it. I got some really encouraging notes from people I now feel connected to, even though we’ve never actually met.

Speaking of email… Take a second and go to your email inbox and see how many you have in there. I’ll wait here.

Well?

I was just using my wife’s computer a little while ago and in her inbox in Outlook there are 343 messages. 343. I can’t stop thinking about it. We have completely different approaches to dealing with email. For me, email in the inbox represents work to be done. As long as the mail is in there, I feel I’m not done working. I know I can rest only once the inbox is empty. A bunch of email in the inbox is as annoying to me as someone parked in my driveway honking their horn to get my attention. My wife, on the other hand, seems unaffected by this sort of thing. She treats the inbox like other people treat the junk drawer in the desk. Every so often she rummages through there to see what she can find, and occasionally she actually starts to clean it out, moving half a-dozen out of there every few days. At the same time, 30 or 40 more arrive. She’s got a few thousand in the deleted folder. Doesn’t bother her at all. I’m never going to use her computer again.

My son, Brandon, emailed me the other day asking if I would ship a shotgun to him because he has a friend at his college whose family owns some land nearby where they all want to go and shoot trap. He wrote, “Dad, could you ship my shotgun to me?” It was only after I replied yes and logged off that I remembered the shotgun is not his shotgun. It is my shotgun. I never use it, but it is my shotgun. It’s some kind of fancy Italian model. He has some other kind of gun that has gone untouched in the storage room for the past 6 years. Its not the sort of gun one uses to shoot trap. Neither of us are hunters so I’m not even sure why we have the guns. I’ve been trying to figure out how to write him back or call him and tell him the shotgun is not his, and now that he’s reminded me that we have one in the storage room I’m thinking of selling it and using the money for something we actually need. I feel guilty because he obviously thinks it is his and I didn’t correct him on that point when I had the chance.

Had my wife received that email, it might have gotten lost among the hundreds of other emails in her inbox and that would have been the end of it. But there it is, in my inbox, honking its obnoxious little horn.

I wonder if Brandon reads dad’s blog?

TERRORISTS AND BUTT DOUBLES

I’ve been working in the broadcast business for 25 years now so I pay attention to the news. Let me tell you this… What qualifies as news around here is a world apart from the news in Afghanistan. During my time there it was clear that the pressing issues of the day were generally life and death matters. Consequently, the news is serious. Always. In an earlier blog I wrote about the headlines from the only English-language newspaper I saw while I was there. On the front page alone there were three or four stories about terrorism: suicide bombings, increasing rebel attacks, etc. Other stories involved the opium crop funding insurgents, land mine dangers, bin Laden. Heavy stuff.

It’s not that we don’t have problems around here. Certainly we do. But we clearly have the luxury of not focusing on them all the time.

The top stories here in the U-S today included: Katie Couric taking over as the anchor of CBS News, Rosie on The View, photos published of Tom and Katie’s baby (finally!), and actor Luke Wilson hiring a butt double for a nude scene in a movie. He said choosing a stunt butt was very difficult. Whoa. Stop the presses.

Hey…inquiring minds want to know these things! And we are blessed enough to be able to indulge in trivial distraction.

Speaking of trivial distraction…

According to a new book by a Sudanese woman who says she was Osama bin Laden’s slave ten years ago, the terrorist is obsessed with Whitney Houston. He claimed her music was evil, but hopes someday to come to America and secretly meet with her. He says she has a nice smile. (If its in the tabloids it must be true.)

And here I thought it was a slow news day in America.

TOO MUCH TO DO AND A NAKED GUY IN A COFFEE SHOP

There is a lot of work to do yet before I’ll be caught up. I still have a notebook full of notes from the trip that I have yet to decipher and expand upon. Not to mention lots of things on the home front to-do list.

Isn’t it amazing how the pace of life can be so unrelenting. After checking out of the normal day to day routine to go overseas for nearly two weeks, the demands of the day wasted no time swelling up like a wave and crashing down on top of me. What happened to the task list while I was gone? It got along without having me to bully for 12 days. It seems it could get along without me now that I’m back. But no.

The radio show is always full of its demands but I don’t have any real complaints there. It is what I do and so the preparation must be done. And I have to be honest in admitting that most of the rest of the things I have to do are things I signed on for so who can I blame for that?

And what am I doing now? I’m sitting in a coffee shop about twenty minutes drive from my house pecking away at the Mac as my espresso gets cold.

So I admit it. I’m slacking off. It doesn’t help get the work done but I excuse it by telling myself I am still working off the jet lag. I can work longer tomorrow. I have about 20 phone calls to make but those can wait as well. I’m not “networking” this afternoon I’m “notworking.” I’m letting opportunity open its own darn door. I’m de-nosing the grindstone for a few hours.

After the show today I was writing stories for tomorrow when I came across the story of a guy in Bend, Oregon, who is in trouble for what he did at a coffee shop. Twice. He forgot his pants. Walked into the place naked from the waist down. He said he just wanted to see what it felt like. Imagine looking up from your mocha frappuccino to see some guy standing in line with his private parts exposed.

Also saw, on the Associated Press newswire, a story of some thieves who broke into a bank in Malaysia early the other morning, wrapped some ropes around an ATM, tied the other ends to a car, and pulled the machine right out of the wall. Problem was, the machine they ripped out of the wall was not an ATM. Kinda looked like one, but it was actually simply the box where people deposit checks. The police got there about the time the men opened the box and found only checks. No cash.

And, finally, there is this… Police in Italy came to Mario Rivera’s house to question him about a drug ring they thought he might be connected with. Officers looking around Mario’s place quickly found cocaine hidden in a shampoo bottle. The reason they found it quickly? Mario is bald.

Sometimes the show writes itself.

THE BODY CLOCK ADJUSTMENT CHALLENGE

I can’t believe I didn’t get anything written here the past few days. I’m certainly not earning my pay. Oh, that’s right, I don’t get paid for this.

It would seem the exhausting nature of the travel to Afghanistan/Albania and the 10 hour jet lag was more than I had anticipated. Needed to sleep. At night if possible. Monday, the first day back, was spent in a zombie-like stupor, not really asleep but far from awake. My wife and I had several long conversations that I don’t remember. I stared a lot at nothing in particular and dozed off without much warning several times. I was then wide awake all night. I managed to do the radio show Tuesday morning but am pretty sure we won’t be winning any awards for that broadcast. On the other hand, it is possible I’m a better broadcaster when only half conscious. (If you happened to hear that show, don’t feel the need to email any critiques.)

Wednesday was not a lot better but I finally managed to sleep during the night rather than on and off all day and am now, Saturday morning, feeling like my body clock is close to correct. Or would be if I were on a ship about a-thousand miles off the eastern seaboard.



But that is a lot closer to home than Afghanistan, or Vienna, for that matter (captured in the above photograph as our flight from Albania was approaching to land). I must say it seemed somehow unfair to me that, after the time in Afghanistan, I would only be in Vienna long enough to tour the airport.

And I complain!

While in Albania, I visited a school for Roma (Gypsy) children run by an American missionary.



She is there with the Christian organization Youth With a Mission, YWAM. The school gives the 160 kids the blessing of an education, the love of the teachers, and food to eat. Then many of the children go home to conditions you wouldn’t believe; families of six living in one small room in rat-infested slums. No running water. No electricity.

The stop at the school was part of a full day of visiting missionaries who, in their hearts to follow Jesus, had made Albania (the poorest country in Europe) their home. I met some of the most amazing, beautiful people you could ever encounter.


Even as I visited the various mission teams, I confess I was thinking about how tired I was from the past eleven days. I was thinking about home. Sleep. Clean clothes. It’s not that I wasn’t deeply impacted by what I was experiencing. As I have said before, I believe when you get a glimpse into the heart of God, you see something often missed by much of this world.


Yet still, I was thinking of myself.

**

Here’s something interesting. The experts (whoever they are) say, when it comes to adjusting to jet lag, it takes a full day for every hour of time difference. If that is true I won’t be truly back on track until the middle of next week.