Five years ago I wrote a letter to my dad who’d recently passed about the current state of this country he’d departed. I warned that a second civil war was brewing again about slavery but this time not due to the color of one’s skin but over beliefs and virtues dear to the human heart some now consider slavery to a nonexistent God whose tenets interfere with agendas and narratives that twist His words and deny the evidence of His very existence. With both camps feeling increasingly oppressed and furious at the mounting divide over which each claims truth on their side, the impasse is ramping up to war with only one to prevail at the death of the other. When my departed father read my letter, he assured me this has been the condition of man’s heart for all time and to not be afraid for the future. For to win is Christ, to die is great gain, and to endure this war reveals both whose you are and what is to follow.Let us hope history will continue to show that people are moved more by temperate letters and words than any act of war.
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a little advice
Give honest advice when it’s solicited. The asking of it places you among their most trusted friends, consideration of it among their most influential, and the taking of it among their most sincere. Honesty is friendship’s truest indicator.
that’s my story and i’m stickin to it.
[If there’s one thing addicts do well, it’s telling stories. But after 9 years clean, they’re usually not lies anymore.]
Someone asked me recently how I did it. How I got off drugs, meth of all things. Undoubtedly tonight at my meeting I’ll be asked once again as is the tradition for anyone getting another annual chip. My ninth.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the question. Less to the mechanics of my leap into sobriety, but more about which of my words might just trigger another addict in attendance to turn on that light upstairs, illuminating them to the possibility that they, too, despite their past, deserve a future.
You see, it’s not so much the quitting of drugs that’s important. Equally necessary is the installation of hope and belief that you are worth far more in this world than the lonely company of any drug or its cohorts. It’s about having been utterly blinded by the stupor of a drug and its false promise of contentment that blocks out hope or vision there’s really anything more to life. To that end, we are all addicts. We all have something we’ve allowed to remain which blocks our hope and blurs our vision. Something to which we remain bound.
“Clean and sober.” It’s almost cliché these days.
The distinction between the two, however, is perhaps the most important thing I learned in my years of recovery so far. I got clean once, but I get more sober with each passing day.
The truly recovered are not recovered at all. They are recovering. And the truly recovering can instinctively tell the difference. A recovering person hasn’t simply stopped using, they have started living. It’s evident that a clarity of mind, purpose and a place for God was birthed at some moment, and rarely is that moment a single epiphany, but the commencement of lifelong epiphanies which, strung together, create the continuity of recovering.
It’s the high I get from my ongoing little epiphanies of life these days. They continue to escort me down a much more beautiful path. And when you find yourself in a much prettier place, hope is much easier to find. In fact, it seems to find you.
And isn’t that really the definition of God?
So for the addicts in all of us, I say to you, we are here in this world for one reason only: Be that hope for someone today. Be clean. Be sober. And most of all, live like you deserve to.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
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awake in their dreams.
We never really stop worrying about our kids even when they’re adults.
It’s a lot like wearing a heart monitor that goes off at all times of the day and night alerting you to pray for at least one of them at that moment.
I just woke from a nightmare about my kids and my fatherly superstition alerted me to take pause. Of course, I can’t risk a 1am text or a call but I can always risk a prayer. They’re entirely unaware I spend these times tuning frequencies to their private channels to spy if they might be hurt, happy, worried, in harm’s way or just in secret need of something no one else may understand, save the one who’s known them since before they were born.
I’ll have no need to teach them this parental peculiarity. They’ll learn to trust this phenomenon all by themselves when we are long gone and our own grandkids are away at school, asleep down the hall, or on a midnight road of crazy drivers protected only by the angels we’ve dispatched to their mercy on our knees from our midnight bedsides.
Kids may be all grown up but they’ll never outgrow our duties and responsibilities to psychically worry and silently intervene as I am, and perhaps you are, right now at this very moment.
dinner conversation
Our dinner conversation about happiness took an unexpected turn into serendipity.
After sharing what makes each of us happiest, I had an epiphany. All our happiest scenarios were circumstantial, based on fortunate events and experiences that either happened around us, to us, or were otherwise created by us to experience and briefly enjoy.
It occurred to me “that’s a lot of work for a moment of fleeting bliss which is ultimately dependent on the next one.”
Being continuously happy requires effort and exposure to things outside ourselves while being content is a still, taskless state of peace within our circumstances whatever they are. Happiness is the ! at the end while contentment is the sentence before it we need not work to write, because we just let it fall into place.
It was at that moment we all discovered that serendipity is both insightful, wondrous, beautiful, and exactly what our dinner conversation that evening had happily become.
a summer rain
Tiny
droplets
falling,
landing,
faster now,
they race
for standing,
driving down
in revving sheets
a bouncing frenzy
each drop competes
but
I
lost
count
and a new river won.
I sat to watch
the cool summer rain
applaud the earth and
to it waved the checkered flag.
surprise!
I don’t want to know it when I die. I just want to come home from a long day at work, open the door, drop my briefcase for the last time and suddenly everyone I ever loved jumps out from behind the sofa and yells “Surprise!” and all my old dogs run up and lick me like it’s been ME who’s been gone so long.
death
Of all human experiences, only one remains almost entirely unknown.
Despite hypotheses and relentless attempts at its description from every conceivable perspective, unhinged fantasy, limitless speculation and sordid detail, unchallenged since the beginning of time, we still know nothing more beyond its cause except for the promise that we never will for as long as we live.
And then it will either be the nothing or the everything we ever dreamed of.
fell from heaven
They don’t know when to stop.
They offer without an ask, buy before a need, don’t give or take no for an answer and expect nothing in return. They don’t regard the world as their oyster, but rather their responsibility. Their gifts give beyond holidays and our lives are their only prize as their every new morning is a personal canvas for the fine art of being human. They create masterpieces for needy people they’ve never even met and surprise unsuspecting strangers from the benevolence of their bottomless hearts. They neither demand nor expect the same for themselves, but survive on intuition, conscience, faith and opportunity. Their deeds are oft mistaken for angels and tiny pieces of heaven fell to earth, which of course, they are. They know no different and don’t know when to stop because indeed, this is what they were wonderfully made to do.
And someday. when you meet one, they will either change your life forever or inspire you to follow. #taganangel
a close call with a defibrillator
Out of ICU after a near miss with a defibrillator yesterday. Not the original reason for admission but perhaps a red herring. Triglycerides down to 400 vs 2000+. Going for a stress test this morning. Maybe home. Good spirits and new awakenings abound from the past 6 days here, the greatest of which was waking up to another day, another sunrise, another chance to dance. #thanksforthelove
Well, your love and prayers brought me home from the hospital last night after an ordeal that logically should not have.
So many first hand nursing accounts of young dead COVID patients in the ICU hall next door was sobering to say the very least. I was in bad shape but my mountains were rolling hills in comparison to the desperation only 300 feet away I could occasionally hear when those sealed double doors opened. Some called it ‘the tomb’ while others called codes on the dead and dying.
There are indeed heroes inside those walls whose dedication to serve others seemingly outpaces their own need to survive.
Until there is a better solution, wear a mask. Keep your distance. Keep hope alive.