On the First Wednesday

The squirrels are running with impunity in my yard.

This is the first Wednesday night I've had to face since my beloved lab, Coach, died last week. To put it in perspective, this is the first Wednesday night I've ever spent in this house without him, and I've lived here over a decade. I hate it. My wife and girls are doing their Wednesday night thing - the weekly gathering for elementary kids at our church. I'm doing mine - cleaning up the kitchen, taking care of the dishes, keeping the house somewhat organized. But I'm doing it alone tonight. For the first time. There was no one to look askance at my choice of 90's rap for dish-doing motivation. There will be no one attempting to steal a chin scratch or bait me into a wrestling match while doing planks in my upcoming workout. When I swept the kitchen floor, I found the unthinkable: dropped cereal from the breakfast table. Much is amiss in the Dykstra household now that one of our members is gone. And I've decided to face it. Tonight. Right now. It must be done. And it must be done here.

I've got to get this down right, because it's my one chance to do it. If I wait it will be gone, all the half-sentences and broken thoughts and stray emotions that only become tangible through writing. Already I feel the reality of it slipping away, behind a mask of smiles, losing it's grasp on the fingertips of my consciousness as I feed distractions and distortions to my burdened soul. Am I capable of pausing, of staring it straight in the face, of naming it and claiming it as my own? Even now I am scared, knowing that at the keys and the screen of my laptop is a mirror, and it's one that won't let me change the channel or turn up the noise. Breathless, fearful, I type on. Not one to advertise weakness or pain, I know this writing session won't be much fun.

Typically, I write to figure out the world, to make sense of it, to bring clarity to the news and notes, the literature and liaisons of my daily life. I write to discover. I write to understand. That's why I began this blog; sharing is secondary in the quest. If you find understanding alongside me in my journey, so be it. Good for both of us. But I am here selfishly.

I write to understand, but there is nothing to understand here. There is no knowledge to be gained, no mysteries to sort out and pry through with a scalpel or a shovel, one clause or catalog at a time. It's really quite simple; we want to make death and loss complicated, but it rarely is. No, what I need isn't understanding. What I need is to merely feel better. And I've written enough words to know that writing can't do that for me.

Or at least I don't think it can. I've never really tried it. I had another option. Now I don't. The one thing I could count on to make me feel better, every part of every day, in every room of my house, regardless of how bad the hurt, is now gone. Even now, as I type that sentence and feel my heart drop and let out a heaving sigh across my dining room and into the Wednesday evening darkness, I know he would have heard that, felt that, recognized that, and arisen unsolicited from his half nap to run his nose below my fingers.

The missing energy of a bounding hundred pounds of lab reminding you to smile is a clanging, discordant silence.

One line from a book I read this summer and saved to write about until I had something to say came from Karen Swallow Prior's Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me. In this memoir connecting her life with classic literary texts, Swallow writes about about one particularly troubling experience from her teenage years, saying, "I"m sure plenty had gone through a great deal more, but I hadn't." I have wanted to apologize all week for being this scarred by the memory of a dog. Millions of people have lost dogs before. This is not special. It is not significant. And he's just a dog, after all. While I've been mired in grief, people around the world lost their homes, families, and lives in a punishing hurricane and crippling earthquake. Cancer still lords its sovereignty over helpless victims. I can't even claim this was the worst thing to happen in my own extended family this week.

But Swallow is right. Others may have experienced a similar loss, but I haven't. Not this dog. The tragedies surrounding all of us, while offering perspective, have no power to make me less sad. I've decided, then, to not apologize, and to not hide. I have been hurt over this, and I still hurt, and I say that out loud and without remorse.

For this loss was the loss of my companion in everything good. There is nowhere to go to escape that reality. So much of our family's routine, the best parts of what we do, seem a little less crowded right now. And I don't like the extra room. Every book read in our recliner, he was there. Whether it was the gentle and mindless back and forth of my fingers on his head, interrupted only by a sip of coffee or a page turn when he found me there alone, or the strategically placed full-body collapse he used to receive the methodical strokes from my foot when I had children in my lap, he made his presence known. Every weekday evening or Sunday afternoon walk, full of laughter and conversations between members of our family, was strategically planned to maximize his room to run and opportunities to splash. Every guest greeted, every strange dog warned, every dropped chip devoured in our yard and dining room. First in the morning, last in the evening to smile and greet and remind: I am here, I am happy, and you matter to me.

I find myself talking to him, of course. Or wanting to talk to him. To tell him what? I don't know. Whatever I told him on all those still moonlit winter walks we shared to keep me sane during the basketball season. Whatever I'm feeling, unfiltered, unabashed, no matter how ridiculous, goofy, or confused. Whatever I said to him in the times of wordless grief over the past ten years, whatever he knowingly heard that made him slow down and calmly and patiently rest his nose unobtrusively on my knee, his weight softly leaning against me, offering comfort.

It will be okay. Some time. But not now. Not this night. Tonight I mourn, receiving no trite answers, receiving no furry comfort. And so it must be.

But in the mourning I recognize that if he was a part of every good thing for this family, in this home, in this town, then I have much to be thankful for. Because I am reminded of him, by his absence in the good that we have, about eleven billion times a day.

Farewell, old friend.

Preparing for the Season

After a one season hiatus, I return to coaching basketball in three short weeks. While I wasn't sure I'd ever be back, and I appreciated many aspects of a toned-down winter schedule, I know that for me there is no way to do this job half speed. If I'm in, I'm in all the way, heart and mind, emotions and time, committed to the process. In short, I am signing on and accepting responsibility for another busy season in life.

Some people are able to live a somewhat consistent, predictable, stable way of life. I am not. I have seasons, and I love seasons. I can go hard teaching for nine months, with all the work and energy that entails, knowing I have a three month season of relative relaxation. And just as summer turns to fall, and the earlier sunsets indicate a renewed sense of commitment; so also when the snow flies, I feel a call to add a few more hours, a few more smiles, and a few more stressors to each work day, on top of the English teaching reading and paper load. 'Tis the season, after all.

It is easy to get stressed in the busy seasons. So much has to go right to fit everything in. Every unplanned obstacle becomes an emergency. Rather than a nuisance, illnesses become crippling. Just as any problem in heavy traffic turns into a traffic jam, every inconvenience in a busy season ratchets up the rage and affects every other activity on my personal road.

This busy, though, I am choosing. As I indicated above, I am responsible for it. I am claiming it and the way it affects every priority in my life.

A common piece of advice, and a wise one I'm sure, is to not let your busyness affect your priorities. For me, that advice essentially means don't be too tired to be Dad. Don't be too invested that you neglect to invest in your wife. Don't be too busy to pray. And that's all good advice.

But this season I think I'm going another way. I'm flipping the advice. Rather than not let my busyness affect my priorities, I want to make sure my priorities affect my busyness.

Instead of worrying about my basketball schedule getting in the way, I will be more conscious of carrying my core priorities around with me. I will remember that I am a father who treasures his daughters, and that will fuel a respect for the time of my players and their families. My intense love for my wife, and my desire to make her proud of the work I do, will walk alongside me and remind me that every decision, every word, every effort I make matters to far more people than me. Instead of worrying about basketball decreasing my worship to the God I trust and humbly rely on, I will make what I do in my busy hours a worthy offering of praise.

At an English teaching conference I went to recently, one speaker sought to clarify the definition of non-fiction, with I think is sorely needed. For too long, students have been told that fiction is fake and non-fiction is real. It can be trusted. Not so, said the speaker. What we need to communicate to readers of all ages is that the definition of non-fiction is a text that "enters your world and purports to tell us something about it." Rather than being less work, non-fiction is more. It requires a response. With non-fiction, the reader has a responsibility to understand the text, its inherent biases and preconceived positions, and see if it fits into or is strong enough to change his or her worldview.

The sacred texts of our lives, whether they be actual texts (like my precious Bible) or the volumes containing the priorities that stand as the pillars marking all we hold dear, must be read with as much attention, with as much of a demand for a response. But rather than seeing if we have room for what our sacred texts purport to tell us about our world, we must check our world and all the activities therein, and see if our actions fit those sacred texts.

Busy can be an obstacle, or it can be an opportunity to extend all that we love and believe in to further corners of the world. But only for a season. My priorities in this busy season, and I hope in many busy seasons to come, will not be something I save energy for. I will not carve out time to remember them. They will not get my leftovers. Rather, in the heat of the schedule, in all the deeds I enjoy and in the ones that are mere necessities, I will carry them with me everywhere I go.

The Nineteenth Time

It is not courageous to have convictions.

Convictions are easy. Convictions are quick. Convictions speak of who we are at our best, or who we see our best can be, or who the world sees when the lights are on and we are most aware and most vocal.

I believe in writing. I believe in the power of prayer. I believe in all-the-time honesty, all-the-time integrity, and all-the-time service. I believe books change lives, and I believe the television wastes them. I believe in the Bible as my personal foundation, as the foundation of my family, and as the ultimate and true source of wisdom and feasting for my soul. But none of this makes me courageous.

I came to these convictions in many ways. Some I experienced. Some I was taught. Some I am reminded of regularly by excited, excitable, like-minded people who make it easy to stay convinced. All of them I can state, rather easily, in casual coffee conversation or in deep debate.

But it requires nothing of me to have convictions. Yet it has become trendy to place on a pedestal those who verbalize their convictions, as if that were the hardest part. We place a premium on what people say, or post, or tweet, showering them with praise and likes for their courage of conviction if the words they are using mirror the thoughts of our own hearts. But to have convictions, to speak or type or share them, costs little.

Courage, rather, is standing for your convictions and priorities when its hard. Courage is re-upping and relearning a truth worthy of devotion after violating it, again, more passionately and more firmly each time. Courage is acting on the light when you're in the dark.

And you don't display courage because you already have it. I don't believe anyone is innately courageous. Rather, the courageous create courage. They begin, petrified or exhausted or beaten, and they make a small decision on behalf of their convictions anyway because they're tired of being less than who they want to be, tired of disappointing themselves. Then they feed that little shoot of courage, growing it, stretching it, because it might not need to be stronger the second and third time around, but certainly it will be tested the nineteenth and twentieth when it's no longer exciting and no longer popular and there's no one left to impress.

To remain full of courage, the courageous focus on their convictions. They stare at the truth. They repeat the truth. They find people in their lives who will speak the truth to them as well. Someone far stronger, far more experienced, who has lived the truth. Someone younger, energetic, who isn't too tired or cynical to believe it. Someone with great fervor; someone with great calm.

Feelings and excitement will fade. The conference or pep rally will end. Sunday morning's sermon will turn into Monday morning's challenges. You will say good night after the first date, or after the first anniversary. The angelic and pure newborn will become a loquacious, confrontational 3-year old. You will say amen, leaving the eternal to face the immediate. The crowd, the like-minded, will go home. But the truth you found in those feelings won't be any less true.

Can you keep it? Can you act on it? Through sickness and health? Through fatigue and loneliness? Through boredom? Through busyness? Will you still act on the convictions you speak?

That, I find, is courage. Those are the brave. And I want to be one of them.