Category: Faith and Family

Lessons from Forbidden Island

‘But Among you it will be different’ – Jesus, in Mark 10:42

Game night.  My family gathered around the table.  On the menu is Forbidden Island, a cooperative adventure game in which players work together to find four magical treasures before the island on which they lie sinks into the sea.  Each player picks a character with special powers to help in the quest.  It’s a great game and my family always has a wonderful time with it.  If you’ve never played, you should check it out.  It’s a terrific way to teach your family the value of working together. 

Trouble is, this time, the kids got into an argument right at the outset.  My ten-year-old son Caleb had his heart set on us searching for treasure as four particular characters, believing his combination would make the game more challenging.  My thirteen-year-old daughter, Kaeleigh, however, did not like that Caleb was choosing everyone’s character for them.  She wanted to pick her own.

Enter chaos. 

‘I want to play with these four characters!’

‘You’re being a dictator!  We should each get to pick our own roles!’

‘Mom and Dad don’t care which ones they play with, why should you?!’

‘Because I do!’

‘Okay, which one do you want to be?’

Oddly, Kaeleigh chose the very character Caleb had picked out for her. 

‘What!’ Caleb screamed.  ‘Why are we arguing!  If that’s who you wanted, what’s the big deal!  Why on earth didn’t you just accept who I picked out for you!’ 

‘Because you don’t get to choose for someone else!  Everyone should be able to pick for themselves!  Everyone should have equal rights!  Blame Dad, he’s the one who taught me about fairness and equality!’ (I was proud to hear her say that!).

And that’s when Caleb, desperate to win the argument, said some ridiculous, yet unfortunately descriptive things about the world.

‘Fairness! Equality!  What on earth are you talking about?  There’s no such thing as fairness or equality!  Think about it!  Sexism!  Racism!  Why do you think there are poor people?  Nothing’s fair in this world!  How can you talk to us about equality?!’

And there it was – a teachable moment.  Cooperative play wasn’t the only lesson my family would get that night from Forbidden Island.  I could sense my son’s pain as he spoke the words about the world he knows and has every reason to be concerned about.  I knew that deep down he didn’t believe we should mirror that world but was only trying to win the argument.  But still, there were some things that needed to be said. 

‘Caleb,’ I said, ‘you are right.  Equality isn’t easily found in the world.  It breaks my heart, as I know it does yours, but yes, there is sexism.  There is racism.  People do not share the way they should.  The world is blatantly unfair.’

‘Exactly!’

‘But both of you, listen: in this house, we practice equality.  In this house, we stand against racism and sexism.  In this house, we share.  And not just in our house.  In our church too.  Why?  Because we follow Jesus.  Jesus practices equality and wants us to do so as well.  We do if for Him, we do it for ourselves, and we do it so that the world around us, as unequal and unfair as it is, gets to see a better way.  As followers of Jesus, it is our responsibility to live this way, no matter how people around us are living.  We must live differently.’ 

Caleb didn’t like losing the argument, but he had to admit I was right.  ‘Okay.  I can’t argue with that.  From now on I’ll let everyone pick their own characters.’ 

And so the game began (sadly, the island sank on us before we retrieved all four treasures, but hey, there’s always next time). 

The next day I thought more deeply about my words.  I believe they pretty much sum up what it means to live as a citizen of Jesus’ Kingdom.  We live in a fallen world, where oh so much is wrong.  Much of which we can do little about, just as in the days of the early Church, there was little Christians then could do create immediate change in their world.  There’s was a world of inequality and unfairness.  A world of oppression and persecution.  A world of hatred and violence.  Not all that different from our own.  So what did the Christians do? 

They lived differently. 

In a world where equality was a joke, they insisted that in Christ, there were no distinctions, neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.  All were one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

In a world of violence, they refused to wage war, employing instead weapons not of this world – such as prayer and enemy love – to overcome the forces arrayed against them (2 Corinthians 10:3-4). 

In a world where the ‘have’s’ accumulated while the ‘have not’s’ wanted, they shared their resources to the extent there was not a needy person among them, choosing to consider their possessions the common property of all (Acts 4:32-37). 

In a world of hopelessness, they hoped (Romans 8:25).

In a world where the powerful lorded authority over their subjects, they followed the path of servant love (Mark 10:42-45).

In a world that was sinking, they worked together to stay afloat (Ephesians 4:16).

In a world that took up the sword, they took up the Cross (Mark 8:34). 

In short, in a world where the shadows not only existed but deepened, they insisted on being the light. 

This is still our call today.  No matter how unequal, unfair, unjust, or unpeaceable the world around us may be, we who follow Christ must live differently. We must live as citizens of the Kingdom and show the world the way things will one day be. 

Most especially when the island seems to be sinking.

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent

A Father’s Love

There are a few stories I could tell today, but this one rises to the forefront of my mind. 

I was in sixth grade, and my basketball team was returning from a father and son outing to see the Nets play the Knicks at the Meadowlands.  I can’t remember who won, but I certainly remember what happened on the way home.  We were cruising back down the Garden State Parkway in a greyhound bus when the driver asked all the rowdy kids to quiet down and remain in their seats.  It wasn’t a simple matter of his being distracted. There was a serious problem. 

The bus’s accelerator was stuck, and the driver couldn’t slow it down.  (No, Keanu Reeves does not enter this story).   

As first, the kids (including myself) thought this was awesome, especially as we zoomed through our first toll booth.  Our dads took it a bit more seriously, and as the adventure continued, their concerned looks convinced us that this was no laughing matter.  I soon realized that unless something happened to slow the bus down, we would eventually run out of highway, and that would not be a good thing. 

Our escapade continued for over an hour, complete with police cars racing ahead to clear the way.  As I sat in my seat, I kept looking at my father, who was sitting next to me.  While he seemed a bit concerned, he kept telling me not to worry, that things would be alright, smiling confidently as he spoke, which went a long way toward putting my mind at ease.  Thankfully, after a while, the bus driver managed to regain control of the bus, and we arrived safely at our destination.  When we did, the whole thing didn’t seem so bad – more like a grand adventure, one that I and the other kids were sure to brag about the next day at school. 

But the most important part of this so-called adventure was what I overheard later that night.  My Dad was talking to my Mom about what happened.  As I said, on the bus, my Dad kept projecting an attitude of calm confidence.  But when he talked to my Mom, all of that shattered.  He had been really shaken up by the whole thing.  He really thought that we were going to crash.  And as I continued to listen (I was a bad little eavesdropper, I suppose), I heard my Dad say something I will never forget.  He said, with his heart rising in his throat, that he had been ready to put me on the floor and wrap himself around me to protect me from being hurt in the crash.  The words sank into my mind with lightning speed –my Dad was saying that if the bus had crashed, he would have been willing to put himself in a position to absorb the full impact of the disaster, giving up his own life in the process, in order to save mine. 

Looking back, I can say this was one of the most impactful moments of my life.  I already knew my Dad loved me.  But to hear him say he was willing to give his life for me – that told me how much he loved me.  And when you know that you are loved to that extent, well, that really changes the way you feel about yourself.  That changes the way you feel about – everything.  Life is never the same again once you know that someone sees you as worth dying for.  It lets you know you are more than a little special in their eyes. 

It was years before I communicated to my Father what that meant to me.  But eventually I did.  In the past few days, I had the opportunity to remind him.  I credit my Dad, in this and other instances I could write about, for teaching me what the love of a father looks like.  And I credit my Dad, in this and other instances I could write about, for teaching me what the love of God looks like.  It looks like Calvary.  It looks like a love willing to wrap itself around the beloved and absorb the full impact of a disaster, giving up its own life in the process in order to save the beloved. 

Yeah, my Dad taught me that.  In the love he showed to me, I saw the love of God. 

Yesterday morning, I lost my Dad to Covid-19.  We had suspected he had it for a week, and when the test came back positive, we knew there was a good chance that this would be it.  As we talked again and again, my Dad remained my Dad.  He never once seemed concerned about himself.  His only concern was that the rest of his family was safe and well.  And if he could have, he would have gladly wrapped himself around each of us, and absorbed the full impact of the disaster, to save even just one of us. 

That was my Dad.  And now, he is face to face with the One who wrapped his arms around him. 

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent

Uncle Ned

‘Last night I had the strangest dream’ – Matthew Wilder

I had a vivid dream the other night. I was at some sort of family gathering. Maybe it was Thanksgiving, maybe something else, but whatever it was, it was a major league affair. We’re talking Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday party. Everyone was there – parents, grandparents, children, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, and spouses. The weird thing was that there were more people there than are actually in my family. It was as if an extra 500 people had been grafted into the family tree for the occasion. This made things super cool, I thought, since my family was now a representation of humanity. There were people of every race, nationality, and ethnicity. It was a foretaste of what heaven on earth will one day look like. I didn’t know everyone from real life, but in my dream, they were all part of my family.

Including Uncle Ned.

I don’t actually have an Uncle Ned. But I’ve heard people on the news talk about him from time to time. Uncle Ned is a name I’ve heard bandied about on TV in reference to that guy who seems to be in everyone’s family tree and who causes trouble at family gatherings. The guy who can’t keep his mouth shut and winds up offending everyone present.

Yes, it was that Uncle Ned. And he proceeded to do just what all proverbial Uncle Neds do.

He started off by talking about ‘colored people.’ He launched into an incoherent rant about NFL protests that before long morphed into a nostalgic longing for the ‘good old days’ when people knew their place. Looking around the room at African American family members, he suggested that none of them had been born in America, that their birth certificates proved it, and that if they had trouble with what he was saying, they really should just get over it. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘Slavery ended hundreds of years ago. What do you have to be so upset about?’

He moved on to immigrants and refugees. He said that ‘bad hombres’ and terrorists were ‘invading’ the country and that we had to do something to get them all out of America. They were taking all our jobs. They were spreading disease. And why the hell couldn’t they learn English? Uncle Ned found it particularly horrific that voicemail systems kept asking him to ‘press one’ for a Spanish menu. It was a sure sign the world was going to hell in a hand basket. He advocated for a wall to keep people from coming in, and immigration policies that favored nations populated by white, English-speaking people. ‘Why,’ asked Uncle Ned, ‘do we have to keep taking in all these people from s—thole countries? They don’t belong here. Put ‘em in cages!’

By this time, many of the attendees were deeply offended and hurt. But Uncle Ned was just getting started. He began riffing on the mentally and physically handicapped, speaking in a slurred voice and gesticulating with his hands as if he suffered from some type of palsy. Everyone sat in shocked silence as Uncle Ned laughed his way through his routine.

Next came the women. Boy did he have a lot to say about them. I won’t even repeat it. As he made his way around the room, he groped several of the ladies present. He said that he would probably date them if they weren’t his relatives. Their horrified looks and tears meant nothing to him. When some protested, he made demeaning comments about their appearances.

This prompted a response. Uncle Bob, who had served in the military, including time as a prisoner of war, told Uncle Ned he needed to settle down. Ned just laughed in his face. ‘Who the heck are you to talk to me? You think you’re a hero? I prefer heroes who don’t get captured.’

Uncle Ned didn’t stop there. He attacked a nephew who worked for a newspaper, calling him an enemy of the state. He told an LGBT family member he was a disgrace to his family. He called a politically liberal cousin a communist. He said that anyone in the room who disagreed with him was unpatriotic. He proceeded to announce to several present, who apparently worked for Uncle Ned in his business, that they were fired because they hadn’t stood up for him as they should have. He ran about the room like a school yard bully, disparaging everyone.

In my dream I was doing a slow burn all the while. I kept wanting to speak up but for some reason could not (you know, like in those dreams when you are trying to run away from something and can’t move). But finally, I found my voice. I told Uncle Ned to shut up. I told him we had no room in our family for racism, xenophobia, and the rest. I told him that if he couldn’t behave himself and treat people respectfully, he needed to leave immediately.

And that’s when everyone cheered. My entire family, both those who are members of it in real life and those who were just part of it for the dream, chimed in and told Uncle Ned they felt the same way. And when Uncle Ned responded by stating that the Constitution gave him the right to do and say whatever he wanted without fear of repercussion, we somehow collectively grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him out the back door.

I woke with a start. It had only been a dream. But the thought that came to mind was this: of course my family had stood up to Uncle Ned. I mean, seriously, who on earth would ever condone such behavior? What decent person would ever, under any circumstances, defend Uncle Ned? How insane would anyone have to be to support the likes of him?

It was then that I remembered: 46% of America elected him President.

And are poised to do it again.

I tried to go back to the solace of sleep but could not.

Some nightmares are all too real.

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent

Photo courtesy of Dyaa Eldin on Unsplash

Apple Pie Hill

‘Direct your children on the right path, and when they are older, they will not leave it’ – Proverbs 22:6 (NLT)

This past Sunday our church’s Band of Brothers (an intergenerational group for guys) took a hike along the Batona trail in the South Jersey Pine Barrens. Our destination was a fire tower (pictured above) atop ‘Apple Pie Hill.’ In our company of men were several adults and boys at various stages along the masculine journey, among them my eight year old son Caleb.

Caleb is an adventurer if there ever was one. He is pure energy, always ready to take on the world. A force to be reckoned with. A few months back he attended a week long parkour camp during the hottest week of summer. His class met in an old a warehouse with no air-conditioning, a real oven. Each night, after a grueling eight hour day, he bounced in the front door and shouted, ‘Dad, let’s go play soccer!’ That’s Caleb. I go to the gym mainly for two purposes: (1) so I can eat more ice cream; and (2) so I can keep up with my son.

We had a great time on the hike, talking and sharing as guys do, and eventually arrived at our destination: Apple Pie Hill. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the tower. It was much taller than I thought it would be, and the stairwells were open – no caging or fencing. True confession time: I’m more than a little afraid of heights. I didn’t used to be. When I was a kid one of my favorite games was ‘what’s the tallest thing I can jump off of without getting seriously hurt’ (answer – it’s a house, and trust me, you’re better off not finding that our for yourself). But as I’ve aged I’ve developed a sense of vertigo. Like Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock film, I freeze when it comes to heights. But there she was, Apple Pie Hill, complete with the tower that everyone, including Caleb, wanted to climb. I would just have to man up and give it a try.

We could only go up in groups of four, and Caleb and I were in the first group. Two stairwells up my concerns began to mount. The openings on the sides of the stairwells were even bigger up close, certainly big enough for an eight year old to fall through if he became careless. In spite of my own fears, my concern, at least at the conscious level, was all for Caleb, and an event in the not too distant past wasn’t helping matters. A few months earlier, Band of Brothers had gone canoeing in these same pine barrens. The river was a fast, and at one point our canoe flipped. I popped up out of the water nicely, but Caleb popped up under the canoe. He was safe, but for two seconds, I could not find him. It is amazing what goes through a parent’s mind in such a scenario. Those were without a doubt the scariest two seconds of my life. And now here I was, climbing a tower overlooking those same barrens, filled with Jimmy Stewart-esque visions of my son falling through one of those openings. There was no doubt in my mind: this was too risky. I told Caleb as much, and as soon as I did, his bravery vanished. It’s frightening for a boy to see his Dad frightened. He agreed that we should go back down. We did. We had only made it up three of the eight or so staircases that led to the top of the tower on Apple Pie Hill.

Let me ask you: what do you imagine when you hear the word, ‘deflated?’ A balloon that’s lost its air? A blown out tire? For the rest of my life, whenever I hear ‘deflated,’ I will picture my eight year old son sitting on the ground at the base of the tower on Apple Pie Hill. He watched as other groups of four made their way up the tower and felt like a failure. I tried to explain things to him. I said this was like those signs at the amusement park that say you have to be ‘this tall’ to go on the ride. We were just being responsible. That sort of thing. I foolishly thought he would understand. He did not. As I watched Caleb sit in his frustration and failure, he almost appeared to shrink in size.

I struggled for a few minutes. What should I do? Was it too risky to climb that tower with Caleb? Was the fear I felt for him just a projection of my own? I almost convinced myself that the risk of falling was too great. But then it hit me: there are some things more dangerous than the risk of falling. There is the risk of a boy learning that he doesn’t measure up. John Eldredge says that the primary question every young man asks, and needs his father or a father figure to answer, is ‘do I have what it takes?’ There are crucial moments when a young man needs to hear his Dad affirm that he does. If this happens, he will grow to be a man. If it doesn’t, he may very well limp through life as something less.

Caleb was asking himself that question. More to the point, he was asking me. And suddenly I knew that I was failing him. I knew, as well as I’d ever known anything, that there was only one thing for me to do. I had to man up, for real this time, and lead Caleb up that tower.

So up we went. I won’t say I wasn’t a little scared. I was. But I knew what was at stake. And you know what? No one died. We, along with two other young boys asking similar questions of themselves, made it to the top. The views were spectacular, all the more so for what we had overcome to enjoy them. The ranger at the top showed us amazing pictures taken at night that made it seem that from that tower you could reach out and touch the Harvest Moon and stars. The look on Caleb’s face was priceless (the other boys too). When we made it back down there were high fives all around. No conqueror of Mount Everest has ever been more proud. Caleb looked at me and said, ‘Dad, this is the best day ever!’ and I could see in his eyes that he knew the answer to his question.

Fathers have a sacred trust. In his beautiful novel, Chasing Fireflies, Charles Martin writes about the importance of fathers in the lives of their sons: ‘I know this about boys: we are all born with a dad-sized hole in the center of our chest. Our dads either fill it with themselves, or as we grow into men and start to feel the emptiness, we medicate it with other stuff.’ Which is why we must keep the trust that has been given us. Our boys lives depend on it. This will require that we man up. That we overcome our fears. That we deal with the wounds we ourselves have experienced. We need to do this so that, when the important moments come (and they come every day) we will be able to fill the hearts of our boys, and show them that they have what it takes.

I shudder to think what might have happened to Caleb’s heart had I failed to see what was happening within it at the base of that tower. I hope that in the future, I will more quickly realize what is at stake. I pray that every time my son’s heart is on the line, I will have the courage to do what is necessary. And I pray that every man out there who is reading this, and every woman too for that matter, will do the same, for both our sons, and the sons around us.

Because every boy needs someone to show them they have what it takes. Every father needs to show every son the way to the top of Apple Pie Hill.

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent