Why Don't We Confront?

Why don't we confront when errant ways we see?
Reasons rampant litter the path.
Who knows the motives, walked the path of erring friend?
It may not be error after all, sight being what it is.

But there's little knowing without asking.

No one wants the pained response, the indignation, the affront.
We grieve for others but leave be because it is hard to confront.

But at what cost?

We have all erred painfully in life. Why did no one speak up?
For me I know now I was headstrong, self-willed, 

preoccupied with my own way. 

No one wanted to tell me how wrong I was.

Do I have the love, especially with the young, to pray and wait
and then when it is right, sit down and listen? And then, maybe,

after listening long:

“Can you hear an alternate opinion?
I am concerned where this may lead.
I made a similar step when I was young:
here is what happened."

There is no substitute most of the time for relationship.
Most cannot hear well if they do no know you on some level.
But all are begging for clear direction. And caring.

Clear and caring is what they will thank you for.

And would-be confronters will mostly remain silent unless
they think it will be worth it.

It is the story of life. We don't listen, and those who could help,
won't. Why should they? 

Love is the only reason; love willing to bear the pain of rejection.




Help me, Lord.

Confessions

“Snide remarks do not become thee” --
('whispered' in my ear);
I know ‘the wound is more than kiss'
But this I could not bear.

“It feels so good to let it out,
to show how right I am!”
“And full of self,” came the reply,
“Your rightness is a sham.”

“When putting down the other one
to make the point you make;
You undercut pretended gain
and all for ego's sake.”

“What can I do?” I asked askance,
my lingua franca lost;
“Maybe silence – there's a start,
attending to the log

“within your eye that's overlooked,
so easily ignored;
The easy snark and cutting down
grows out of grievance stored.

“The 'healing' you so crassly give
With 'truth' 'neath ugly shroud,
Will ne'er be real until you know
your own heart is afoul,

“and let the Wounded Healer in
to heal your broken soul;
He needs no snide, but walks beside,
and makes the wounded whole.”

On Heritage, the Goodness of God, and Planting Seeds

The value of some encounters cannot be measured and we are blessed when we dare to believe the goodness of God is with us. I always remember this glad truth when I consider my beloved Kansas heritage and the little town of Miltonvale that looms large.

Last year I wrote about my Dad's coming to school at Miltonvale Wesleyan College and Academy, a spiritual anchor for several generations in my family, starting with my Great-great Grandfather Markey in 1908. It would be impossible to count the number of my relatives whose life was shaped by that place that many called “a prairie fortress for righteousness.”

On the Huff side my Dad's elder brother, Wayne, came to the Academy in 1957. As Uncle Wayne explained to me, Larry (my Dad) had stayed home in Emily, Minnesota to help his parents as there were four younger children still at home. My Dad, 3rd of 8, would have turned 18 that November and he was out of school so he could work full time with my Grandpa in the family business.

After Wayne finished the school year he came back to Minnesota and he and my Dad worked in Minneapolis for the summer in road construction as Minnesota was beginning the new Interstate highway system. I can feel the thrill of it in my bones: the time together, the long hard days, fending for themselves with camp stove or getting a burger at the diner, perhaps driving north to Emily late on Saturday and back again before Monday morning. Good days, sore muscles, long conversation, love — with the blessing of God near and promising.

Highway workers near Minneapolis, 1958.

Each August Wesleyan Methodist folks from Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota attended a camp in Charles City, Iowa. Uncle Wayne and my Dad decided to go down for weekend services. They drove the 180 miles or so and found lodging and meals and friendly people who loved God and loved them.

Representing MWC at this camp was one of the college teachers, Rev. Warren Freeborn. Wayne was happy to see him and more happy to introduce him to his brother Larry. Rev. Freeborn encouraged him to finish his schooling and this encounter changed the direction of my Dad's life, and mine in turn. In tears for all it meant, Dad decided to leave home and finish his High School at Miltonvale.

Rev. Warren S. Freeborn (1902-1978)

There were difficulties. My Dad worried about his folks getting along without him at home. The school had no lodging space ready for them and besides, the two young men had work obligations to fulfill, not least so they could pay their school bill. They explained this to the school and were allowed to come two weeks late. When they arrived they stayed for a few weeks with Aunt Eunice, my Grandpa Stacy's sister, while workmen refurbished an old basement room to serve as their dorm room.

That year was a good one, I am sure of it. As Uncle Wayne tells it, “We worked together, studied together, double dated together, and helped each other through!” They graduated that spring and were married two years later to gals they both met in that happy place – my Aunt Alice and my Mom, Glendah. In later years I often walked those grounds, ran up and down the old Abbott Hall where their dorm room had been, played ball in the old gym, even went to the old college snack shop.

But most of all I remember the spiritual impact of the place and the camp meeting on those same grounds that hosted a gathering each summer. It was life-changing because it brought one into touch with God. Eventually the choice my Dad made brought fruit in my own life, and I found myself letting go and finding God was able for me as well. I had my own set of hurdles, and my version of Miltonvale was 1500 miles away. But I have never been sorry, and will never stop being thankful for my precious Dad and Mom and the heritage of faith and goodness they passed to me by way of that humble place on the Kansas prairie.

Addendum:
There is a subtext to this, an important note I failed to emphasize. The influence of my Uncle Wayne was indispensable in this process. As an elder brother his word carried weight with my Dad and his encouragement helped make it all happen. It is an old truth of course -- we all stand on the shoulders of others. Everyone plays into our lives for good or ill, and in this way Uncle Wayne -- whose life has counted for good with countless people across the years -- planted seeds in my Dad that will grow forever in my life and with all whom I am able to love and serve. It is the truth of the old saying which I first heard, not incidentally, on that very Miltonvale Campground from a preacher in 1979:

"Anyone can count the number of seeds in an apple; only God can count the number of apples in a seed.”

Thank you, Uncle Wayne, for your life of faithful planting.

Uncle Wayne (far right) with me and my brothers at an event honoring my
late father in 2018. Always with us whenever he can, encouraging us upward.

The Mystery of Reciprocity

Reality should give us pause and make us hold our tongue,
For words are deadly boomerang and 'karma's' never done.
'The way you judge,' the Master said, 'the same will come in kind
into your teeth' and be assured the taste will not be fine.

So when the weapon's ready to release from angry heart;
Or when you see another one who fails to do his part;
Remember that the way we see has resonance within,
And hold your peace (lest you project) and then you truly win.

Of Laws and Life and Getting Along

“No one is above the law.”

We hear it often and we believe it. And yet we know, like all things in this world, it is an ideal with myriad mixed application and painful failings all about. It came to mind as my wife and I visited with a friend.

This new friend was a somewhat refugee, settled legally in an American state, staying in the home of friends. She has been there for two years. Her friend's HOA has strict rules about house guests. Two months maximum, no exceptions, no loopholes. The HOA president is popular, not least for her consistent application of the rules.

“No one is above the law.” There have been no exceptions, until now. The HOA president, if she even knows, doesn't care. And if anyone else cares, they don't say.

This means several things: personal freedom in one's housing decisions really matters, the spirit of the law matters more than the letter, and some things transcend the law, like mercy. I think our friend should be able to stay there as long as it is workable for all.

This is instructive, though HOA rules are tangential to our judicial system. Numberless factors always come to play in the courts, not all of them sinister. The worst violations are money and political power – unless of course it serves my ends – then I don't protest as much. As the ancient expression has it, “It all depends on whose ox is getting gored.”

I grieve over the litigious nature of our culture. Frivolous lawsuits, the mere threat of lawsuit, and “lawfare” plague our judicial system in ways that hinder it from ensuring justice for all. And yet there are factors at play we often overlook. Local matters, for example, are often decided with local concerns in mind, the strict idea of “no one is above the law” set aside. I saw this once in a rural community where a murderer received the leanest possible treatment due to the mitigating circumstances obvious to all who were there.

And yet one man's happy justice is another's broken scale, as we are seeing in spades today. The new President is doing things that, charitably considered, are merely reflections – perhaps correctives – of President Biden's misdeeds. One person's tit-for-tat is another's “at long last justice is done.” And we learn about it by means of variously construed media outlets which we trust or not, based on our own assumptions going in.

I think of two helpful reminders in this quagmire. One is to know various extra-legal factors affect the process of justice. How often have mere good looks swayed the opinion of all involved? Or what has a bad day for judge or attorney brought to bear? How often does sheer cleverness win the day when everyone looking on knows justice failed? Circumstances, particular venue, luck of the draw, some obscure point overlooked by court or prosecutor– they all come into play and we know pure justice was beyond reach once again.

The other thought comes to mind from the New Testament where Jesus speaks to how we handle ourselves in court. There is mystery to it, but Dallas Willard puts it helpfully. He says Jesus was after something like this: When you come to court be at peace with whatever the outcome will be and, moreso, be at peace with your opponent. Even be ready to greet him as you enter with a handshake and a greeting: “Well, I hope this works out for the best for all of us!”

Such an outlook might be ludicrous to an attorney but as Willard also says, we should take Jesus seriously enough to imagine he knew what he was talking about. Perhaps he was helping us know God is the final judge, life is short, it is likely we will not get total justice here, and we just as well be at peace with that. And maybe we love the other person – even our enemies – more than our own way.

I don't think this means for a minute that any person is above the law or that we must accept injustice as a matter of course. But it does mean, seems to me, that we remember we ourselves – the one looking back at us in the glass – are faulty. We judge poorly, and try as we might, we will get it wrong. We hope mercy will triumph over justice on our behalf. And in turn we learn to back off our insistence on what has become a legalism in new quarters: maligning and despising those who depart from whatever orthodoxy breathes the zeitgeist.

True enough, no one is above the law, except when they are. It is for us to do what we know is right, love our neighbor, even tell the HOA president to take a hike if we feel we must. And if she hauls us to court for it, well, maybe she is right. Let's try to work it out in the fear of God and pray the good prevails.

In time all will be made right, and I don't want to surrender to hate or fear along the way.

What is a Thing, Really?

Nominalism is a funny word. Though its use is vanishingly small, the idea is ever with us. Nominalism comes from the Greek word nomos meaning “name.” It says, “Call me my name; never mind what I really am.”

This first came to mind when I read ads for lumber in the paper as a boy. “Nominal measurement 2 inches by 4 inches” the small print said. What? Yes, a 2 x 4 is simply called a 2 x 4. In reality it is a 1 1/2” by 3 1/2” board. It is a nominal 2 x 4 – “in name only.”

No one really cares about this, of course. No one says the lumber man is lying. The expression has worked itself into the vernacular by very natural means. Lumber is milled as a 2x4, dried and then milled again so the final size is an actual 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches.

But the issue is ever with us. What is the difference between what I call a thing and what the thing actually is – its ontology, or being? Is it what I say it is, or does it have substance in and of itself?

This problem sometimes unsettled me as a boy. I would hear a word – almost any word: maybe the word “school.” Having heard it a zillion times, the sounds of it and its common use would suddenly seem divorced from anything real. It felt like a nightmare: the world had no real meaning. It was all fake, reduced to sounds coming from my mouth.

I was grappling – unknowing – with this basic idea that a thing is what it is, no matter what you call it. Words are necessary so we can talk about reality, but they have no substance in themselves beyond the actual meaning agreed upon. If the expression “school” always means a place where students and teachers gather and etc., well and good. The word has meaning, borrowed from that to which it refers and given credibility through common agreement. In academic jargon, referent and sign are agreed.

Enter Elon Musk and anyone else who falls into the unlucky category of making a particular sign with their arm. “He made a Nazi salute” we are told, and large swaths of the electorate are dumbfounded or reduced to peels of laughter. “He did what​?!” I am in this category. It never entered my mind that he was making such a salute.

But if I step outside of my own mind I see there is a large swath of the electorate who think the occasion of Musk's expression was not unlike a rally where folks are eager for things the Nazi's were fond of: group-think, un-bridled dominance, blind allegiance to their leader, restoring the Fatherland to greatness. In such a rally someone – an abject fool, in my view – might be inclined to make a Nazi salute and mean it as such.

I remain dumbfounded by the idea Musk was doing this.

One could argue, of course, that the salute is primal; that a society who never heard of nor witnessed the Nazi salute might use it in a given context to mean what salutes mean: respect, allegiance, obedience, even adoration. And this brings further the question of what a salute really is supposed to mean. When the common private salutes an officer, when a letter begins with a salutation, when a military escort salutes a government leader -- what is the meaning?

Elon was saluting the crowd. He was saying "thank you, I honor you, I appreciate you, I respect you." He needed something to add to his words, so he used a hand expression from heart-to-crowd that meant exactly that to him and, he assumed, to onlookers. The fact it looked like a Nazi salute to some can hardly be helped, and should not matter anyway.

The minimum of charity insists we try to discern what a person had in mind. Was Elon imbibing the spirit of a Nazi rally?

This brings us back to nominalism. Is a salute “Nazi” because it entails the lifting of the arm and shaping of the hand in a particular way and at a given angle? Or is it “Nazi” if it shares in various external similarities with a Nazi rally? Strict nominalism says all that we need is the gesture: if it fits the name, that's what it is. The corrective notion – ontology – goes to the actual rally and claims there were various components that made it “Nazi-like,” lending credibility to the idea Musk intended the Nazi salute.

Is this possible? I suppose, but I simply don't believe it. I think the man has enough sense to avoid an actual Nazi salute, and accusations otherwise seem, at minimum, quite uncharitable. I have tried to understand where others are coming from and have no doubt let my own bias color the effort. I began by wondering if Musk's accusers were mere nominalists but I have concluded they believe the rally was indeed Nazi-like. This is distressing.

We have reached a place in our national discourse where major press organs think a hand-gesture is Nazi because they believe the Nazi 'spirit' was at the very inauguration rally. And they mean it. Meanwhile, an enormous portion of the electorate deeply identifies with that rally. And they mean it. When you say Elon gave a Nazi salute you say that those people – representative of that electorate – were Nazi's.

Such a situation is untenable and portends the end of charity in public discourse. And while such a conclusion is deeply painful, I am a slave to hope, to the idea our nation can still be good and strong; that, in the end, it is our homes and communities that determine that, not Washington or press organs.

To paraphrase an ancient oracle, “A nation can only be great when it learns to be good.” Which is to say there is no true greatness without goodness. Otherwise it is just a name, or a salute: a word with no substance. I want the real thing.

A good start would be daring to believe that those who won the election are not Nazi's.

"If the Shoe Fits, Wear It!"

"If the shoe fits, wear it!" or so the saying goes. How often we read or hear a comment and know the person had us in mind. And yet how often, red-faced, have we confronted, only to learn they had no idea we were even "in the room," much less did they have us in mind.

I've been on both sides of this as perhaps we all have. Being accused of accusing or feeling the sting of affront when none was intended -- both are painful.

We usually know our flaws. The more serious the more sensitive. Pity the soul who unwittingly uncovers them. I pray for the grace to hear the affront and own it, intended or not. If the shoe fits, it makes no sense to pretend otherwise or take offense.

It's "Getting Along 101," but alas these jars of clay are fragile.

"For grace, O Lord, I pray. When the shoe fits, let me walk barefoot, learning -- listening -- rather than lashing out. Maybe, in time, I will learn the peace only you can give, the peace that refuses to be angry at accusations, true or otherwise."

When He was reviled, He did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously (I Peter 2:23)