Struggling Well With Life

Still in Jersey.  Hot. Humid.  On one hand, it is so great to visit where you grew up, to drive past homes you lived in, to see where your high school used to be (they tore it down), and it is always great to be near the ocean.  Summertime at the Jersey shore is a hoot!  Also, it is a gift to be with family, to be in my dad’s world a bit.  If I were catholic, I would be petioning him for sainthood.  On the other hand, there is this weird out of body thing that happens for me when I return home.  I catch myself slipping back into that “Jersey talk”, and have to remind myself that I really have graduated from the junior high and am a full grown man with a life and family of my own.  In some odd time warp deal, I find myself going back thirty years and pushing my brother’s buttons like I did way back when.  I should have brought Terri and the girls on this trip - they let me get away with nothing!  Families bring out the best and the worst in you.  Going home is fun, and fattening.  Always good to be with family - drama and all, but I am glad for the distance of thirty years, and the work God has done. 

I am on sabbatical.  Two months out of the loop at church, and it feels really strange.  For a guy who likes to be in the thrust of it all, at first I felt a bit sidelined, taken out of the game.  Now, I am deeply grateful to a church who values longevity, and who encourages their staff to serve from wells that are full, and not running on empty.  Unlike brother James, I am not sitting in a castle in Scotland writing my next book.  That does not spell refreshment for me.  I have determined to move more deeply into the relationships, more intentionally into the world’s, of those in my inner circle, namely God, Terri, Em and Meg, and my dad/brothers.  To do so has put me on the road.  Heading to the homeland today - New Jersey.  By tomorrow I will have had a real sub, not a NC imitation, but an honest to goodness “White House Sub” from Atlantic City.  And then on to sweet Jesey corn and tomatoes.  When I turn around and drive back, the car will smell like a bakery with dozens of bagels ready to freeze and carry me through a few months.  Looking forward to being with family, hanging out with my dad.

So very grateful for a father, a dad, who at 84 is still a man to be admired, and a model of manhood that still humbles his five boys.  One of the greatest romances I have witnessed was between he and my mom.  He loved her well.  And in her last few years, my dad who had been “taken care of” his entire married life, learned to cook, clean, write checks, and care for a woman who physically could no longer do that for herself.  Stroke riden and in a wheel chair, he lit up when his bride entered a room.  The old man is still teaching me what it looks like to be a man, to love well, and to enjoy everyday.  84 years old, and still parenting sons, still dad.

I love the Scriptures.  Written so long ago, but speaking cleary, and supernaturally to our current plight.  Writing to believers in the book of Jude the author longs for this reality to be known by his readers, that “mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance”.  In abundance, more than we need, overflowing.  O how I long for this outpouring of the Holy Spirit in my life, to drink of the gospel so deeply that the truth of it would well up in me and bust a gasket causing mercy, peace, and love to flood this tired old heart of mine.