My Budding Tattoo Artist

My youngest daughter is frequently described by her adult admirers as a “spitfire”. Without investigating the etymological roots of that appellation, I’m happy to conclude that the word means my daughter is part “spit” and part “fire”. She spits on what she scorns and she burns red-hot with an intensity of spirit and spunk. Last night, five-year-old Elizabeth graduated from daycare. The program highlighted the professional ambitions of these young dreamers in a section entitled, “When I grow up , I would like to be:” Many of the children had noble callings listed like “doctor”, “astronaut”, “teacher” and “selling Mary Kay”. And then there was mine. Next to Elizabeth Jane Tamerius were the words “Tattoo person”. Where in the world did that come from?

Of Stronger Stuff Than I

One is occasionally asked the question, “Whom would you like to have as your guest at dinner?” Most answers are variations on a theme: either a celebrity or an absent loved one. I have nineteen people in mind that I’d select as my honored guests. These nineteen people (half coming from the same family!) are citizens of the great state of Missouri and they have purchased the privilege of putting their bare hands under a rock or in a crevice in an effort to pull out a catfish. The sport is called noodling. Previously criminalized as a misdemeanor offense, noodling is now sanctioned by the state government. For a small fee, noodlers can go to one of three river sites and during a six-week season then can catch up to five fish per day. With their hands blindly submerged in the muddy water, these brave souls never know what kind of creature they will encounter, whether a large channel cat, a beaver, a muskrat, a turtle or a snake.

Success, as you might expect, is quite painful. As the president of Noodlers Anonymous puts it, “If you don’t come up bloody, you ain’t hand-fishing.”

The Ennobling Power of Friendship

One of the most beautiful depictions of friendship from any work of antiquity is found in the biblical account of David and Jonathan. In 1 Samuel 18 it is written: “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. 2 And Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father's house. 3 Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. 4 And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.”

The narrative itself spells out the character of this covenantal friendship. Jonathan saw something in David that was not easy to see. He didn’t see David through the mad jealousy of his father, Saul. He didn’t see David as a rival to his own future. Rather, He saw David in his God-anointed identity and his God-appointed destiny. It is clear that the loyalty Jonathan pledged to David flowed out of a prior loyalty to God. Jonathan was pursuing God’s best as David’s best.

There are some relationships we have which make us less true to God, less true to others and less true to our true self. There are others relationships we enjoy which expand us and deepen us because the relationship is centered in a loyalty to God first – to His vision for the good, the true and the beautiful.

C.S. Lewis captured the ennobling power of genuine friendship in his imaginative work The Great Divorce. In that book, Lewis describes a bus ride from the dark, desolate city of hell to the outskirts of heaven and the people you meet along the way. In one scene, the pilgrim and narrator (Lewis) and his guide (George MacDonald) are witnessing the royal procession of a great woman who is surrounded by boys and girls on both sides of the forest avenue. That is where we pick up this conversation:

“Is it?.....is it? I whispered to my guide.
“Not at all,” said he. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”
“She seems to be….well, a person of particular importance?”
“Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”
“And who are these gigantic people….look! They’re like emeralds….who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?”
“Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”
“And who are all these young men and women on each side?”
“They are her sons and daughters.”
“She must have had a very large family, Sir.”
“Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.”
“Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?”
“No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer to their own wives” (107-108).

That Blessed Cussedness

A pastor friend of mine offers this defense of the occasional cussword:

“Last week a concerned mother phoned me and told me her adolescent son was having trouble. Seems the young lad had accidentally dropped his school papers on the floor and then proceeded to drop a verbal bomb. ‘Damn it.’ he said. She rebuked him for his youthful indiscretion, telling him his language was inappropriate and she didn’t want to hear him use that word again. A few days later, the young boy wanted to play on the computer before going to bed. The mother told him no and the upset boy muttered ‘shit’ under his breath. Technically, it wasn’t the same word he had used the first time. But the mother heard the mutter and she didn’t like this one either. So she called me, a pastor. And she asked me if I would talk to her son about the proper use of language.

The language was not nearly as upsetting to me as it was to her. Context, of course, is everything. What concerned me more than this boy’s language was his life. I was aware of what he was going through at home. He was waking up to a war not of his own making. I couldn’t fault him for a few slips of the tongue when his own desire to live was slipping away. And if these words were slips, they were likely Freudian slips which signified the subterranean rumble in the earth of his heart. It is especially at such times that we must ignore the pieties of polite society and listen to the language arising from the belly of the soul.

Consider this insight from Garret Keizer’s excellent book The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin.

“A former student of mine tells me that one of her professors remarked how anger is so often accompanied by a spontaneous invocation of God, as in “God damn it.” On one level this may be nothing more than the spiritual equivalent of breaking one’s dishes or tearing up the flowerbeds. Frustrated by one thing, I defy the consolation of other things. I smash, I shatter, I blaspheme. But even that destructive impulse strikes me as having a vaguely religious meaning: Take back your world, O God, if this is how it works!

But with those angry words we move to another level of religious meaning. The angry person who invokes the name of God is acknowledging that the source of his frustration runs contrary to an expectation of divine benevolence. In other words, the world ought to work better. There ought to be figs on this tree. There ought to be some force, some angel, that prevents hammers from accidentally crushing thumbs. The theology may be crude, but it is theology nonetheless. At the very least, it insists that the source of our frustration is within the control of a greater power – and a good one. Like the child who cries, “You don’t love me!” trusting that his parents do indeed love him and thus will be hurt by the remark, the person who cries out, “God damn it” is in some way acknowledging that God has already blessed “it”, by making it and by sustaining its cussed existence. If an atheist falls in a forest, do his curses make a sound? They do, but they make no sense.”

The Land of Opportunity

Here's a humorous article about an intramural basketball player who declared himself elgible for the NBA draft. It ranks up there with the college student from Oxford who impersonated a visiting scholar in China.

The Nightmare of Sin

Opossums, like persons, often seek their survival in a way that assures their very destruction. Hungry for immediate satisfaction, they look for the easiest way to get their next meal. The good news is that such food is easy to come by as opossums spend their nights foraging in the middle of the highway for rotting roadkill. The bad news is that the feast doesn’t last too long before opossums suffer the same fate as did their entree.

The Bone-Crushing God

C.S. Lewis wrote a profound lament upon the occasion of his wife’s death. In A Grief Observed, posthumously published after his own death, Lewis calls God the “great iconoclast” who is constantly shattering our ideas of how He should behave and be. He suggests that this shattering is one of the distinguishing mark of his presence and cites as support for his argument, the incarnation. “The incarnation leaves all previous notions of ‘messiah’ in ruins.”

Brilliant is it not? We recognize Jesus as the icon of God, the image of the invisible God, the exact representation of His nature. And yet, even as icon, Jesus is God’s iconoclasm.

Something like this occurs in the Book of Psalms. King David expresses his comfort in God’s ability to heal the soul and restore the weak. We rest well with such assurances. But he also acknowledges as another act of God, the work of breaking our bones. We don’t hear about this one as much. We tend to gloss over this part of God’s resume. And yet David includes this in his prayer: “let the bones which you have broken, rejoice” (Psalm 51:8). The great Physician, believing as he does in our wellness, frequently must break our bones. All of those things which give us stability - familiar structures, established routines, ordered movements and contrived securities - are threatened with his shattering Presence. And yet, in time, our prayer is answered. Our bones do their part again. They march in the parade rejoicing in the strength of the Lord.

The Five-Inch Tall Snake Jockey

In growing up, at every stage of the growing, we see some things we'd like to change about our lives. There are some things we can change like our hair color, body composition, where we live and where we work. Some things we can't change. They are the cards we play in the hand we've been dealt.

Here's an essay my child wrote for a class assignment:

"If I could change on thing it would be my height. I would be five inches tall. I would want to be five inches tall because I would be able to fit under the bed and sleep. I would be able to eat one cherry and already be full. I would be able to ride on a snake or a cat. I’d also be great at hide and seek."

The Enchanted World

Faith has an imaginative quality to it, a capacity for seeing that which is unseen (Hebrews 11:1). As such, faith does not limit itself to only visible phenomena, present circumstance, the conventional and typical or what can reasonably be explained. Rather, the mind saturated in the storyline of God’s great acts considers that resurrection life does break forth from the spiced-tomb of expectations. Light shines in the darkness. Cities rise out of the rubble. Old men dream dreams. This hopeful posture doesn’t pull us out of the world of the ordinary. Rather it gives a charge to all such things ordinary and profane. C.S. Lewis was on to this when he wrote that one “does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

Renouncing William the Second

In 1847, Hendrikus Tamerus (spelled without the 'i' back then) came to America as a young man with a group of Dutch Reformed Christians. Traveling on four ships, this group of 800 immigrants arrived in the port of Baltimore and made their way to St. Louis and wintered there. Soon after, they purchased large tracts of land in the central plains and settled the town of Pella, Iowa. Here is a court record describing their citizenship ceremony.

"Be it remembered that on the thirteenth day of March AD One thousand eight-hundred and forty eight, before one Lysander Babbit, clerk of the District Court of Marion County State of Iowa personally came……….H. Tamerus……and upon their solemn oath did depose and say that they are free white persons natives of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, that they arrived at the port of Baltimore in the United States of America on or before the twelth day of June A.D. one thousand eight-hundred and forty-seven, that they are now residing in Marion County, Iowa, and that it is bona fide their intention to become citizens of the United States, And to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign primer, potentate, State or Sovereignty, whatever and particularly to 'William the Second', King of the Netherlands of whom they are now subjects."

Lysander Babbit, Clerk

You Might Be a Redneck

Inspired by recent events:

If you are graduating from college and the president of the university has issued a request that the audience refrain from clapping, whistling, using cowbells or blowhorns until after all the graduates walk through and are seated and if, when you are walking across the stage, one of your relatives screams at the top of his lungs, "get-r-done", well, you might be a redneck.

America's Great Storyteller

In recent weeks I have visited Mark Twain's mansion in Hartford, CN and his boyhood home in Hannibal, MO. In the entrance to the newly renovated museum in Hannibal, a sign says, "Like all of us, Mark Twain told stories of his childhood to understand who he had become as an adult."

Here's a gem from the quotable Twain: "Get the facts first; than you can distort them as you please."

How God Tells the Story

"The Old Testament gives clues into the kind of history that God is writing. Exodus identifies by name the two Hebrew midwives who helped save Moses' life, but it does not bother to record the name of the Pharaoh ruling Egypt."

Philip Yancey, The Bible Jesus Read