A Parable of Two Brothers

There once was a man named Ash. 

Ash spent all his days running uphill.  He never understood why.  It just seemed like what he had to do. Every morning, he woke up and began a new arduous trek.
 
Whenever he stopped, he felt unexplained forces poking him from behind, forcing him to keep running. But the path never evened out. Some days were a steeper incline than others, but the path was always uphill.

Ash was sad.  He looked around and saw that other people he knew walked level ground, while life forced him constantly to run uphill, and always against the wind.  Meanwhile, others seemed to be running downhill, or even laying in the sun.

It didn't seem fair. Nothing came easy to Ash.

For whatever reason, life just came harder for Ash than for everyone else he knew. He seldom got excited about much of anything other than seeing his friends, but he wasn't equipped with the right wiring to make that many friends, or to organize get-togethers with them once he had.

The only time Ash could stop running was when he had covered enough distance to stop and write something, or to fall into a meeting with one of his friends.  Ash enjoyed those moments, but they didn't come often.  And even if they did, pretty soon, he'd get poked by those forces behind him and have to start running again.

The doctors had a complex term for why life felt like a constant uphill climb to Ash, but to him, it was just unfair.

His older brothers and sisters never have to run uphill, nor did his friends.  His siblings had been the most popular kids at their schools, while he had to spend his summers reading self-help books just to be vaguely normal.  He did well in school, but once he got into the workforce, the act of actually accomplishing anything always seemed a Herculian effort.

Like running up a hill. 

One day, when Ash was running up one of those hill, he was surprised to look over and see his brother Sal, who had seemingly never had an uphill climb for which he didn't volunteer, reluctantly pushing a boulder up a mountain. 

"That isn't fair," said Ash. "Why must you push a boulder up a mountain when so many people around us don't even have to walk uphill?"

"I don't know," Sal said. "But my master told me I must do it. And I will be stronger for the experience when I finish."

"But why have you been given this task?" asked Ash. "It seems so much harder than what others around us have to do.  And what good does strength do at all unless your master arbitrarily assigns you more boulders to push? Surely this master of yours is a tyrant to assign you such a job while others around us seem to have such an easier path."

"Quite the opposite," Sal said. "You see, I am strong.  Strong enough to push this boulder up this cliff. If you look around us, you will see that many of the people that you see would not have been able to push this rock at all. If my master were not good, he would have given this task to someone not strong enough to push this boulder."

"But what is the purpose of this? Why does your master want you to push this boulder up this hill at all? Why can't you just run unencumbered wherever you choose?"

"The boulder is a burden to me now," Sal said. "But once I reach the top of this hill, it no longer will be.  And others who see me push this rock successfully may be inspired to do the same."

"But why must anyone push rocks at all?  What's the purpose of it all?"

"Oh, I understand now what you mean. It is true that pushing a boulder seems hard and unnecessary now. But once I get to the top of this hill, the boulder won't seem such an impediment.  In fact, instead of being a burden, it will become a tool.  You see, once I reach the downslope of this hill, this boulder is powerful enough to break down walls that others have built to separate themselves. Because of this boulder, I will be able to break through the barriers and talk to people who otherwise wouldn't have listened to me.  My master will use this boulder to burst through walls that people have built around themselves. 

"This boulder is a burden now, but it will be a blessing once I reach the other side. This boulder is heavy, but the impact of this boulder on the other side of this mountain is directly proportional to the burden it feels like now."

 Ash finally understood.

Compared to pushing a boulder, running uphill didn't seem so bad. And even if he had to run uphill, perhaps the strength he gained in doing so would someday allow him to carry someone else when his life's trail had flattened out.

And then, suddenly, he noticed that the path before him didn't seem to lead uphill at all.

Thank You

Thank you.

I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room awaiting the results of my brother's surgery. As I sit here without the mental energy to think of much, the one thing that keeps running through my mind is how grateful I am for the support of so many of you. 

Thanks again to all of you who have said a prayer on behalf of my family, passed along an encouraging word, or otherwise made it known that my family and I aren't in this thing alone. 

For reasons I hope you understand, this will have to do for a blog post this week.  The blog will be back in full force next week, but until then, please continue to keep my family in your thoughts and prayers.

While I'm here:

this hardly seems significant at the moment, but enough of you shared my hatred of February in general and Valentine's Day in particular to push the blog to its highest readership ever last month.  The blog got 699 hits last month, falling just short of an even number, but blowing away the previous high of 551 hits.  Last February, the blog got 121, so we've come along way.

Thank you all for reading.  Each blog hits brings me one step closer to my dream of using this space to make a living.  In the meantime, keep my family and me in your prayers and I'll meet you back here next week.

This is a Post About Hope

2012 was off to a great start. 

Work had been busy, but everything else was falling my way.  My wife liked her new job and we both liked the extra money that came along with it. We’ve been having what seems like the mildest winter in the history of Nashville.  Our social life had recently begun to flourish, and it promised to get even more vibrant on the news that one of my best friends might move back to town.

Things were good.  But good times never last on this side of Paradise.

On Thursday, just as a medical scare on my wife’s side of the family subsided, we learned that my brother has cancer. 

It’s in his colon.  After the surgeon removes the mass on Monday, the doctors expect six months of chemotherapy to follow. With one test result, my brother, his wife and their three kids just got the biggest challenge of their lives thus far handed to them: they must defeat cancer.  

But this isn’t a blog post about cancer. 

I refuse to let cancer define this column, just as my brother refuses to let it define his life.  
  

This is a post about hope.

I used to joke that hoping is the first step toward disappointment.  That is technically true, but hope is also the fuel that powers our lives.  A person without hope doesn’t have much reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Hope doesn’t come naturally sometimes.  Life goes wrong for reasons no one can explain, and there’s no guarantee that things will ever flip right-side-up once they’ve been turned upside down.

My brother isn’t worried about that.  He says that his diagnosis is an opportunity.  He says that his life’s story is now a megaphone to the world to show that adversity can be overcome, and that he serves a God who holds closely those who seek His comfort.

He and my sister-in-law are convinced that he will beat this, and that this grueling process will bring hope and inspiration to someone facing their own struggles that they can also do all things through Christ who will give them strength if only they seek it.  

That kind of faith is inspiring, but hope doesn’t always come as easily for me.  After all, God promises to be with us through our pain, but there’s no guarantee that bad things will eventually turn out the way we’d like.  And if there really is a God with a purpose behind all of this, couldn’t that purpose have been equally served by afflicting the disease on me, my brother's childless sibling with the same genetic code?

I don’t have answers to that or the many other questions I keep asking in my head.  I don’t understand why disease exists in our world.  It seems like God could have just as easily created a world without it, and we still would have had no shortage of challenges to help us grow. 

I don’t know why we live in a world with so much suffering or why bad things happen to good people. 

But I do know that the world looks different to me now than it did this time a week ago.    

A week ago, when Green Day’s “I Walk Alone” came on my mp3 player while I was at the gym, my heart sang along enthusiastically, convinced my life represented an isolated battle against the population at large.  Today, I’m overwhelmed by the number of prayers at my side and the compassion of those around me, who have consistently delivered the exact message I needed to hear at the exact moment I needed it.   

The world looks different to me now than it did four years ago.

In 2008, I let political debates damage some of my closest relationships.  This election year, I’m not revealing to anyone who I’m voting for unless they specifically ask, and even then, I’m not going to try to convince them that I’m right. 

Last year, when a series of aggravating misfortunes hit at the same time, I felt God had abandoned me and would never return.  This week, even during the moments when some unexpected sudden thought reduced me to tears, I’ve sensed a peace that I haven’t known in quite some time.  

I don’t know the end result of my brother’s challenges, but I have hope because I see God working through them already.  I’ve learned that I don’t walk alone, that petty things don’t matter, that God seems closer when I call for His presence than when I ask for a favor, and I’ve been reminded that life really does work better when I don’t try to rely on my own strength to navigate it.  

If I’ve already been reminded of these things, I can only imagine what else is in store for the hundreds of others in my brother’s life.

It would be easy to say that cancer caused all this, but this isn’t a blog post about cancer.

This is a post about being thankful for the outpouring of support my friends have given me.

It’s a post about how I’ve realized in the past few days how much time I’ve wasted on stuff that doesn’t really matter, and how I’m going to live my life differently going forward.  

This is post about remembering all the other times I’ve felt God’s presence in my life through hard times that were ultimately endured. 

It’s a post about being thankful, in the midst of all the other garbage, for a reminder of all these lessons.

I am still devastated by the news.  Several times a day I have a passing moment where I wonder if maybe this is all just a bad dream from which I'll eventually awake.  Sappy songs on the radio bring me to tears at inopportune moments, and I constantly despise myself for not knowing the right things to say to make those around me feel better. 

But I take some solace in the fact that I can already see a change in my life through  what is maybe the worst news I’ve ever received. That makes me realize there’s a greater purpose at work here than what I can comprehend.  

And that fact gives me all the hope I need.

Ask Andrew: Where Did President's Day come from?

Andrew Smith writes a blog in this space. That hardly qualifies him to provide answers to life's most vexing questions, but he has a column to write for this week and doesn't have any other ideas.  So anyway, here goes another edition of Ask Andrew:

Q: How is it that everyone on earth claims to hate Katy Perry's music, but every idiotic new song she releases ends up #1 on the charts?
A: Humans hate Katy Perry, but ever since her aborted guest spot on the show, she's big in the Sesame Street community, particularly with Elmo.  And since he doesn't eat and lives in a drawer, Elmo has a whole lot of money to spend on CDs.  He is singlehandedly bankrolling her current success.

Q: If it is an insult to be called "uncouth," does that make being called "couth" a compliment?  Why does no one ever use that word?
A: People who are uncouth lives their lives feeling disgruntled, disgusted and overwhelmed.  Meanwhile, the "couth" among us are gruntled, gusted and whelmed.  You don't hear much about them because they all tend to hang out with each other and drink tea while talking about the weather.

Q: What does it mean to get on one's "last nerve," and why is that worse than getting on one's first nerve?
A: The moderately annoying people in your life only get on about half your nerves.  The really obnoxious people you know get on most of your nerves.  It takes someone who is truly a piece of work to get on every single nerve you have, even your very last one. I have a unique talent for  accumulating these people in my life, for some reason, however. 

Q: Who came up with President's Day, and why did we choose to place a holiday in the middle of February when it's too cold to leave the house, instead of, say, June or August, which scream for holiday time but have none?
A: President's Day started as an excuse not to leave the house when it had been cold for two straight months and Martin Luther King hadn't been born yet to provide us with an additional winter holiday.  Once he came around and provided us with an actual worthy cause to honor early in each calendar year, instead of switching President's Day to a better holiday falling at a more convenient time of the year, society mostly just forgot about it.  The five percent of us who got the day off nonetheless aren't complaining, however.

Q: Are child molesters and rapists somehow naturally predisposed to having mustaches and thick glasses, or does having those things turn otherwise normal people into criminals?
A: 'There are thousands of drivers of those unmarked, white, window-less minivans who are anxiously awaiting the answer to this question.  Their fates likely depend on it.
Q: So, what's the answer?
A: I don't know. I would invite you to grow a mustache and see what happens, but the only people who would accept that challenge are those who probably would have committed some sort of sexual felony anyway.

Q: Like millions of Americans, I get home from work, heat up my dinner and sit down to relax in front of the TV at about 6:00 every weeknight.  Why is that Judge Judy and Wheel of Fortune are the only things on at the time when most people want to watch something decent on TV?
A:  This is a good question, but the better questions are why Wheel of Fortune is still on TV in the first place, and how is it that neither Pat nor Vanna have aged in the last 25 years?  The only answer I can think of is that "Wheel" taped roughly one billion shows back when it was popular (1987), and the networks that bought the syndication rights are still burning through the stockpile of shows one day at a time.  The good news is that by 2046, we'll finally be done.

Q: Will Katy Perry still be popular then?
A: Sadly, Elmo is going anywhere...  

Why I Hate Valentine's Day

It's once again that time of year when we give inaccurate replicas of our internal bodily organs to our loved ones so they can open them up, pillage through them, and ultimately throw them away. 

I'm speaking, of course, about Valentine's Day, the historical origins (what other kind of origins are there, anyway?) of which go back to at least 1983, when the month of February decided it wanted to be remembered for something other than groundhogs and the occasional leap year.  Sadly, it picked Valentine's Day as its signature event.

I don't like Valentine's Day. 

I can already hear you gasping all the way across cyberspace, but hear me out. 

Valentine's Day is full of overcrowded restaurants charging twice as much as they normally do.  It's a day where our culture tells us that we are losers unless we are in a relationship. And for those in a relationship, it's a day filled with pressure to do something unique and special every year, when every other couple is trying to do the same thing, which kills both the uniqueness and the specialty of whatever plans you might make. 

It's assembly-line romance.  It's a day where you value your sweetie not for who they are, but because it's a day on the calendar when you're told to do so.

The ads on TV tell men that if they buy their significant others nice things, they can demand physical intimacy, and tell women that if they expect to receive something, they better give in return.  Every kiss begins with Kay, after all. 

I hate Valentine's Day for all these reasons.  Happily for me, my wife feels the same way about this Hallmark holiday, and maybe even more so.

But that's not quite the whole story.

In truth, I've hated Valentine's Day since the eighth grade.  Valentine's Day of my eighth grade year, to be exact.

That year, I bought a heart filled with chocolate for a girl on whom I had had a silent crush.  In retrospect, I wish I would have just bought one of those plastic hearts they sell at CVS instead of going the extra mile for authenticity. 

I had carried a silent crush on this girl for months, and had received occasional doses of friendliness from her that I mistook as something more.  She was a cheerleader, and I was a stereotypical 120-pound middle school dork with thick glasses, so I should have known better.  But to some extent, I think the fact that I was so unappealing made me a target for the popular girls to tease me occasionally with false flirtation. 

I fell for it hook, line and sinker. 

Still, I sensed something was a bit off with the vibe I was getting from her.  I figured that asking her out on Valentine's Day, and giving her something along with my invitation, would erase any residual doubt she might have. 

So at the end of homeroom that Valentine's Day morning, I gave her my chocolate-filled heart and asked if she wanted to go out sometime. 

She said no.

I wasn't prepared for that kind of heartbreak, but it wasn't the worst part of the day. Using a prop (the heart) for my little proposition meant that the entire school saw me carrying around a gift that was obviously meant for something else.  So, much to my horror (and I'm sure, the horror of my little Mean Girl as well), a crowd gathered to watch my humiliating rejection, and then my brutal demise became the storyline of the day across Nelson Adams Middle School.

On the bright side, she never again flirted with me just for sport.

I tried to forget about it as the day went on, but the seven people who didn't watch my rejection go down live kept asking what became of that heart I was carrying around earlier in the day.  (I found out later that Mean Girl gave it to her little sister.) 

To make matters worse, later in that day, in Mrs. Dennis' English class, the day's activities including diagramming sentences. I still specifically remember being told to go up the chalkboard in front of the class to diagram the following:

"Why did the heartless beauty scorn my offer of affection."

I'm not making this up.

This unfortunate assignment brought renewed and widespread snicking from the rest of my class, as Mrs. Dennis sat back in her chair, looking confused. 

I was so shaken by the whole thing that I told my mom I was sick the next day and stayed home.

Ten days later, at the mature age of 14 and still irrational from humiliation, I attempted to reclaim some semblance of coolness by taking my parents' car for a drive through the neighborhood with a friend of mine. 

He crashed it into a tree. 

I got a pretty good whipping that night, but at least it gave my schoolmates something else to talk about.

So after enduring the traumatic events of February 1992, I guess it's no wonder that I still hate Valentine's Day. 

As I look back, it's probably no wonder that when Mean Girl actually starting showing (legitimate) interest in me a few years later, I spent most of my last two years of high school trying to win her over once and for all, against the better judgment of myself and every other person whose advice I valued. 

Doing so would have, in some weird way, cancelled out of one of the worst memories of my life.  

It didn't quite work out, but I can laugh about it now. 

The lesson I learned from that cold February day was not that I should avoid taking risks for fear of humiliation.  It wasn't that I should stop opening my heart to people, because they might have ulterior motives and hurt me in the end.

The lesson was that I should never buy someone something in the hopes that it will make them like me.

Most of the Valentine' Day messages we hear revolve around that false premise.  And that's exactly why I hate Valentine's Day.

Technical Difficulties

As you know, I usually post something by Tuesday night.  Tonight, exhausted from a hard day of work coming on the heels of two emotionally grueling weeks of work, I nevertheless spent two hours grinding through a column that had promise but wouldn't quite come togehter.

I didn't want to disappoint you.

Finally, after an agonizing struggle, the column finally came to life and I hit the "publish" button on a column with which I was absolutely thrilled.  But instead of posting, I got an error message and half my column, for reasons unknown, suddenly disappeared into cyberspace.

Sadly, no amount of cursing could bring it back.

I'm too tired and frustrated to re-create it right now. 

I'm out of town tomorrow, but, assuming blogger is over its infection, I'll try again on Thursday.

I'll see you then.   

3 Hours in Cell Block 303

Having just experienced it first hand and lived to tell the story, I can confidently say that there's nothing on earth quite like Cell Block 303. 

If one were to cross a costume party, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and one of those contests where guys compete to see who can deliver the best insult about the other guy's mother, you'd have something approaching the experience of watching a Nashville Predators hockey game in section 303 of the Bridgestone Arena.

It's an otherworldly scene. 

The fans who aren't wearing jerseys dress in costumes.  The guy sitting beside me for Saturday night's game against the St. Louis Blues wore a cape that he flailed around at each dramatic moment.

A group of guys at the top of the section took turns yelling insults directed at both the visiting Blues players and at the city with the arch in general.  Others blow train whistles designed to remind of a Predators player with the last name "Tootoo."

The fans not only cheer after every goal, they break into a predetermined full minute taunt of the other team's goalie after every score, delivered in perfect unison.  Cell Block 303 starts these cheers after every goal, and the rest of the stadium soon joins in. 

The amazing thing is that the fans have a specific insult for every situation.  There's a taunt if an opposing player falls on the ice.  There's a different taunt if an opposing player gets a penalty, followed by yet another taunt when the penalty box door shuts behind him.

Individual opposing players are told they suck after every pregame introduction, right before the first faceoff, and, lest they forget, they are reminded that they suck at various intervals throughout the game.

There are an equal number of synchronized cheers supporting the Predators, and for that matter, even for when the P.A. guy announces the remaining time.

On each occasion, voices ring out in perfect unison with no clear source of origin, as though everyone in the section received a secret text message reading: "Go." No one rehearses these cheers prior to the game, and there are no instructions handed out, but the fans in the Cell Block somehow just know all the words to say and when to say them.  
 
Its the only setting know to humanity (outside of pro wrestling) where professional sports follows a script.

Given the passion of the fans it contains, one might expect Cell Block 303 to contain the best seats in the house.  The opposite is actually true. 

Tucked away high in a remote corner of the arena, the section consists of the worst seats in the arena that money can buy.  Somewhere along the way, the blue collar fans who could afford nothing better than the cheapest seats in the stadium decided to enhance their experience by collectively going nuts, and Cell Block 303 was born.  In a Southern city that wasn't a natural hockey market, the inmates of Cell Block 303 set out to make their enthusiasm infectious, and have largely succeeded.

In fact, the inmates of 303 have created such an energetic atmosphere that many who experience it firsthand will never voluntarily sit anywhere else again. The seats may not be great, but the energy and sense of community of being an inmate in the cell block are unrivaled. 

Of course, the atmosphere isn't quite so pleasant if you're a fan of the opposing team who somehow ends up with tickets in the section. 

On Saturday, a group of Blues fans, having no idea what they had gotten themselves into, strutted to their seats loudly talking trash and proclaiming their superiority to all who would listen.

Within five minutes they were beaten into verbal submission by retorts from various inmates who had clearly spent all day thinking of ways to defame all thing St. Louis, including its fans.  As this unfortunate foursome realized they were in waaayyyy over their heads they suddenly became quiet.

Ten minutes later, one of them turned around and, with voice cracking, sheepishly whispered to my wife and I: 

"This is insane.  I've never seen anything like this.  Are we even going to be safe sitting here?"

I assured them they would--that the Cell Block was like this for every game, but that it's all in good fun.  The passion is intense here, but it's not the kind of place where people actually resort to violence. 

Still, at that point, my wife, herself decked out in Predators gear, jumped in: "We used to live in St. Louis," she said, "so I'm actually a Blues fan too."

"But there is no way I'm letting anyone know that while I'm sitting here."