Tree of Life?

so, as it turns out, those parts of my marriage and of my parenting which are in the most need of repair are exactly the parts where becoming a better version of me will have the strongest impact. oh, cruel irony! but, take it from me; pointing your finger at someone else and demanding that they change to make you happier (however subtle you may think you are) is most definitely not going to work.

with that I mind I read something from brennan manning’s book, abba’s child this morning that I think pointed me in the right direction… he talked about a tree. I don’t have the text in front of me, so let me paraphrase-

a tree gives shade to everyone. the nature of the person who goes to the tree and sits in its shade does not in any way impact the quality or quantity of shade the tree will provide for them. this applies for children, pets, or even if the person relaxing in the tree’s shade intends to cut it down when he gets up.

the tree’s shadiness is a result of it’s relationship with the sun, not it’s relationship with the shade recipient. if it has had long exposure to plenty of sun, it can and likely has grown tall and wide, capable of throwing far more shade than a tree which has spent less time in the sunlight.

what a great analogy for how we ought to offer grace. our ability to be charitable or kind or generous does not and ought not come from those we are being charitable to; rather, it is a characteristic in us that is forged over a lifetime of interacting with god. it becomes part of us and remains constant, regardless of how another ats toward us. on those occasions when i do find myself offering love based upon my relationship with that person, i now recognize smallness and weakness in me, and find that i am ashamed i have allowed my spark of godliness to diminish in that way.

my problem is that I am always so pre-occupied with some preceived injustice I am sufferring, that it totally blocks my view of my wife or son’s suffering. what crap! that’s so not how god ever intended a relationship to be (and that totally goes for more casual relationships such as coworkers, too). in manning's analogy, if god is rthe sun, and I am the tree, why does the level of grace I extend to those around me seem to be in direct proportion to my perception of them?

step one in my quest to be a better husband & daddy: be smarter than a tree. it’s going to be tough to learn this one, folks…

"for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of god" -ephesians 2.8

growing pains

woah, dude. long time no see. guess i've been away from the blog for a while- sorry about that.

these last six months or so have been really crazy, and i've had to sort of re-evaluate priorities. it took lots of emotional beatings but i am finally beginning to piece together some meaningful change. bun certainly not before tormenting my poor wife to within an inch of her sanity by not doing my part.

that's a little cryptic i know, and intentionally so. c'mon, i can't tell you gossips all my secrets! but here's what i am going to tell you: the function of this blog is going to shift a little.

don't worry! tank is still a rockin' good time, and i wouldn't want to live without him. but as i'm learning about parenthood, i'm also learning about marriage. what it is- and what it isn't. put them together, and you might say i'm learning to be a good parent by being a godly husband. only i haven't been a godly husband. what i've been, is a turd. as i understand it, turds make, er- crappy husbands (har! sorry...).

so while i thought i was doing all the right things, i wasn't. i thought it was all about my husbandry, but it turns out it's not... it's more to do with my ability to relate to god, and how that ability, and the limitations of it impact my godliness.

so i think going forward, we're going to take on a slightly more serious slant, and i'll be continuing to reflect on bennett, but now also on what it means to raise a little dude up. i'm thinking about how i can teach him who jesus is, and how to fall in love with him, even while the culture around us teaches us that's weird and irrelevant. and, of nearly equal importance, how he can do these things without having to be wierd!

let's see where it goes. knowing me, it will probably come full circle back to dirty jokes and uncomfortable inuendo. but let's try for something a wee more useful, yes?

PS- i would totally love it if it became kind of a conversation, so feel free to chime in with thoughts or comments. i promise, no poo-pooing.

repeat the sounding joy...

christmas time is here. and so is music, lots of music. not just any music, either. tank has his favorites, and like any toddler worth his salt, he insists on his favoites being played over and over (and over and over). this is a nice intro as to why change is good. trust me.

fortunately for us, his favorites are not what you'd think. he loves rock & roll. and like his daddy, he goes through phases of who he's into at a given moment. celbrated artists of yester-week include; stevie ray vaughn, james brown, jack johnson and cookie monster.

the new favorite is a band called coldplay. he even prefers certain songs: viva la vida, lost!, and yellow. he wakes up wanting to hear it, and cries when we make him turn it off for bed. he just has a natural love for music...
here's hoping for a zillion dollar record deal someday. but if not, i'll happily take a well rounded interest in music that helps him be a better version of bennett than he would otherwise be.

point is, tank is growing and learning at a breakneck pace, and he amazes me every day. what's even more amazing is how his growth inspires my own constant learning & changing. for a guy who comes form a backwater town where change is evil i have, through bennett, been learning, changing, growing, and adapting to keep up with him. that's right, i'm saying it. i impress me. ha!

ok, well maybe we should just go with 'i surprise me'. either way, the fact of the matter is that i have noticed it about myself, and i like it. i really aspire to maintain it. experience tells me that is porbably much easier said than done.

i have met folks at retirement age who have clearly not done this- have not continued to grow, to be open to new things, to learn. their lives appear to me to be centered on the absolute demand for things around them to be a certain way, and whenever it is not, look out. they are angry, they feel betrayed or ripped off. in short, not much fun to be around, and they make those around them suffer, too. they will stop at nothing in their obsessive efforts to get things back to "normal." all the while, lives of their loved ones move on, relationships suffer, and pain & discontent grow.

on the other hand, i have met people who at retirement age still go to school. they love poetry, or music, or art, even if they once did not. when a loved one suddenly changes the rules of the relationship, they can adapt. they may not like it, but they are emotionally equipped for dealing with the change, and so the change itself does not destroy the relationship.

i am talking about this because god has recently taught me that we were created for relationships. thinking about that, i figure it this way: god exists in relationship (three persons in one, & all that confusing crap), and it's part of his nature to inter-relate with.. i dunno, himself? since we are "made in his image," i figure maybe our nature reflects that relational component. and i believe it too, because when you look at people, when you really pay attention to who we are as a people, we are clearly designed for relationship. movies like i am legend with will smith, or castaway with tom hanks demonstrate how the soul longs for contact with others.

so (to bring this seeming pointless rant to a well rounded conclusion...) i have become convinced that continuing to grow, to learn, to adapt to changes is essential to my own happiness, essential to my efforts maintain healthy relationships with friends, with family, with god. and that is just one more of the lessons bennett teaches me all the time.

bennett, i hope someday when you're older and you read this the thing you take away is that i am aware every day of the gift that you are. of the amazing ways you make me a better version of me, of how you improve every aspect of my life, especially my trust in the almighty. love you, little dude!

...and above all, MUSIC!

thankfully, as i have aged, my musical tastes have changed. i can hardly imagine what it would be like if they did not... we'd likely play megadeath during meals with dinner guests, and OU812 would be my album of choice for bennett to listen to.

actually, i'm not sure that last bit isn't a good idea... but i digress.

regardless of the genre, bennett loves music. he dances & smiles as soon as he hears it. now, i know- that's not exactly uncommon among toddlers. for those of you who might feel inclined to remind me of that i would say this: shutup and stop bursting my bubble.

ha... but in addition to dancing, he is actually quite teh emphatic drummer. he has a couple of toy drums around the house which he bangs on with a glee i've not known since i found out you can order twinkies by the case. and he does a relatively good job keeping the beat too. not that my opinion on the matter would mean much. i can barely breathe & walk at the same time.

and, as if this were not evidence enough of his clear musical genius, he also plays guitar and violin. i'll gerant you they're toy guitars & violins, but he still plays them. sort of. well, ok- he actually plays both as if they were guitars, and leaves the bow aside altogether (except to flog his parents with when they're not paying attention). in my opinion, that's just the manly way to play the violin, i can't see why anyone would expect him to do otherwise.

so, anytime we play music in teh house, or play a video for him with music in it, he grabs an instrument and takes to playing it with a focus & attention span i'd not expect from a toddler.

even more interesting is his musical taste. while i have not yet converted him to be the U2 junkie jen & i are, he does have excellent taste in music. so far, i have found his favorites to be james brown, jack johnson, and stevie ray vaughn. oh, and elmo.

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what?

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stop looking at me like that. he's a damned musical genuis, and that's it! ha! and pretty impressive it is too because he certainly didn't inherit the gift from me, since i can't carry a tune in a bag. it's just another amazing way that god has used limited resources to lavish us with undeserved gifts. awesome.

a crappy day...

friday, february 10th was a crappy day. jen had gone to bed the night before feeling miserable, with some sort of weird cramp in her abdomen, and she was up half the night with it.

friday morning it was about as bad, and jen decided to take a sick day to relax until the cramp went away. but, alas, jen, who is a relentless researcher, got on the internet and quickly began to worry that she may have appendecitus. she called her cousin-slash-ER doc krista, who confirmed that her symptoms matched.

so, after getting a call at about 9am from jen asking me to take her to the hospital, i of course immediately panicked, ran screaming from my job and broke more laws than billy the kid on my way home to get her.

jen of course was from the beginning the very opposite of this. she's awesome in emergencies. while i run around like an idiot, she is always the voice of reason. perhaps too much so.
if her left arm were missing, she'd probably calmly look around for it, pick it up, & put it in a leftover bag from old navy or someplace (which she would of course have- you never know when those handy shopping bags with the handles will be useful!) and then drive herself to the hospital one armed and annoyed mostly at the disturbance in her schedule. she makes me look like such a sissy... pisses me right off.

anyway, the good folk at the hospital confirmed that her appendix did have to come out. they agreed to remove said unnecessary digit right after she sat around for like 12 hours in the ER, in pain, in the hall (no rooms were available) and after she agreed to drink like 26 gallons of cherry flavored snot.

she did finally go in for surgery at about 10pm, and all went smashingly from then on. she stayed overnight and left the following morning. and, despite the long miserable wait in the ER, the staff we encountered at the hospital were awesome. clearly overworked, but otherwise very patient & attentive.

the surgery was done laproscopically, which makes the recovery amazing. within a week jen was feeling 100% back to her pre-appentectomy state. sans anout 6-12 ounces, i guess.

i think the amazing ease of the surgery was due to the competence of the staff & surgeon. i think our ability to handle that long crappy day in the hospital (i didn't get home in bed that night until 2am) & to manage bennett were due entirely to about 35 people who were all praying for us all day. god was there in a big way calming my nerves & easing jen's pain & anxiety.
all said & done, jen said the worst part was that in order to to the minimally invasive laproscopic surgery, they have to pump a little gas into you so they can see what they're doing- and the gas proves to be very uncomfortable for a few days.

not so bad in the scheme of things i guess. i'm just glad my people are ok.

george washington carver can kiss my ass

that's right, you heard me. no, this is not some kind of racist rant... i'm pissed at carver for coming up with so many uses for the damnable legumes for one simple reason: they turn my kid into the nutty professor. (yes, pun intended. suckas!)

yep. as it turns out the poor little guy is allergic to nuts. and egg whites. but at leas tthe eggs showed up on his two allergy panels. the nut's didn't! what kind of crap is that?!? NUTS of all things? don't people with nut allergies die & stuff? jeez... you'd think they'd have caught that one.

it's scary stuff, too. of course, it's easy enough to not feed the tyke a nut or whatever, but then there's all this accidental exposure you gotta worry about. like what if hes at school and another kid shares an unsupervised contraband sandwich? worse, there's all kinds of cross contamination- like if the chocolate ice cream at the local scoop shop has traces of pistachio in it from when the kid behind the counter filled that order 15 minutes earlier for a chocolate-pistacchio-peanut swirl death cone. who thinks of that stuff ahead of time?

i'm tellin' you right now, if i'd had a peanut allergy as a kid, i'd never have made it to see my twenties.

so now we gotta carry this epi-pen thingy with us everywhere we go. you know, so that if bennett sits on a park bench where yesterday another kid sat who accidentally dropped his PB&J, and then tank subsequently swells up like schwarzenegger at a body building competition, i will have the option of pulling out this giant needle and stabbing my son with it. (how's that for a run-on sentence and a miserable thing to have to do?)

but, all things considered bennett is a very healthy lad so i'm counting my blessings. and while god has taught me much about humility, selflessness, and stewardship through bennett it is clear ther is much more to be learned. the awareness we'll need to have about poor tank's diet is to me a transparent attemt by god to teach me how to focus on others- a skill i am embarrassed to say i have in very meager quantities.

so, while you will likely find me continuing to bemoan tank's sever loss (i cannot fathom not getting to enjoy peanut sauce in my pad-thai), i am also learning to be grateful to god for what is clearly going to be a 30 year tutoring session. the revelation of it has made me long to experience god all the more.

slapsticky fingers

ole' tank is really growing up fast. it's already been over a year, and it feels like only a few months since we brought him home from the hospital (ahhh, yes. that was the first and last time i ever obeyed every single traffic law).

so much about bennett's development has been really fun to watch, but he's beginning now to assert his individuality, and realizing that he is his own person. my favorite way to watch this happen is to see what makes him laugh. the sound of it alone is worth the effort. i recently noticed an entire contest on youtube to find the baby with the best laugh. i'm sure bennett could win.

so far the things that make him laugh the hardest are, 1) biting his tummy. 2) anticipation games... he loves the build of tension just beofre you pop out & yell "boo!" or tickle him or something. or best of all, 3) slapstick humor. bennett seems to love to watch people get hurt. last summer he giggled for an hour while a 6 year old bonked himself on the head with a water bottle over & over. then last night seth, tank's cousin, had him in stitches for the longest time by pretending to fall off the couch over and over again. with each thud! bennett would let out another belly laugh.

another thing i love about bennett's laughter is that when he does it, particularly when you jump out and "get" him, he grabs his belly with both hands as he guffaws. it's so totally authentic and without pretense. ...freakin awesome.

i am now looking forward with great anticipation to sharing with him the joy of the slapstick greats... such as the three stooges, which we all know is every american man's rite of humor passage to maturity. i can't wait to enjoy a lazy saturday morning on the couch with tank, watching old reruns of the stooges and chomping on some sugary snack that mom will yell at us for if she catches us.

maybe we could build a furniture fort from some blankets and hide in there with a laptop to watch & munch & giggle where sly ole' mom would never suspect to look...

HometownTank (EuroTank Pt XI)

Monday, 11.12.2007
Denville, NJ USA

monday was our travel day to come home to the states. we were actually a little worried about bennett for this flight. it's longer than the trip our by an hour (due to headwinds) and the flight to europe had been a redeye- when he would normally sleep. this time it was going to be an all-day affair.

but tank is a serious soldier- he was absolutely amazing. better behaved than the two or three other babies his age on the flight, and even played with some of them for a bit. it was a long day for all of us. we were up at 6:00am danish time, and went to bed at 9:00 in NJ (that's 3:00am danish time. we were pooped.

but jen's family was great, they picked us up at the airport & took us home, then came over later for danish pastry, & belgian choco;ate to help keep us up. (staying up as late as possible aids in the jet lag recovery). overall, it was probably the best & most interesting trip of my life. i learned a lot, and thoroughly enjoyed engaging other cultures. i even picked up a little of the danish language (no small task).

we can't thank the danes enough for their incredible hospitality. they never forgot a single thing, and made our trip to denmark amazingly easy fun and comfortable. to inger, gert, ricci, annette, catherine, sonja, stephan, villads, and even little phillip- thank yo uso much! we love you guys, and can't wait to see you again... thanks for doing so much, and we're orry if we made you hate cake!

we're glad to be home and settle into our routine. and we missed our friends and family here while we were away, even if it was only ten days. keep your eyes on the kids table for photos of the trip and more.

EuroTank Pt. X

Sunday, 11.11.2007
Copenhagen, Denmark

sunday we got up and had another great breakfast with inger & anette, then headed to church with annette. i was pretty excited to see it, and i wasn't disappointed.

apparently, denmark is a christian state, and they have a state church with is supported by the government. annette however goes to a free church. a great little group who have converted a big house to a worship center. very small and intimate, which i love in a church.

all the members seemed warm and genuinely close, and the pastor delivered a brilliant sermon on margin, of all things (in danish- we had an interpreter). this appears to be a recurring theme in my recent life, and i'm beginning to understand that god is not fooling around with this. i guess i'd better figure out how to reduce my pace.

the really tough thing for us was to leave bennett outside. in denmark, children nap outside. all year, in all temperatures. no kidding. they just bundle 'em up & leave 'em out there. in fact, unitl recently, it was typical for a parent to leave a stroller with an infant in it on the street while in a store, if the carriage didn't get in easily. they just leave 'em out there. so when we got to the church, that's what we were instrucked to do with our sleeping boy. it was hard, but we did it (though we insisted on sitting by the widow so we could see him).

afterwards, we took a brief driving tour of some other things in copenhagen, and stopped at a great pastry shop for our last bit of danish tasty-goodness. then we headed to sonja & stefan's place for the last (danish) supper.

the dinner was great, and i think villads and bennett finally became friendly (though villads seemed happy to help bennett get his shoes on to go...) that night it snowed- our first snow of the season, and it was in denmark! a very nice conclusion to the trip. the following morning we were going to have to pack up and head home, so we made an early night of it and got to bed.