Final Reflections on a Week in South Dakota

After much delay, here are some final thoughts on our trip to South Dakota:

One of the benefits of life in a campground is the general removal of all the distractions that don’t matter. News for instance. I don’t want to say that the news and the general events of the country and world don’t matter, but it felt so good to not hear the sky was falling for a good long week. And my not hearing about it didn’t accelerate or delay the rate at which it is falling in the least bit.

Television too. There was none. And it was marvelous. I went to bed at the same time as my wife every night, tired or not, because that’s what there was to do. I didn’t stay up too late because I was too tired to get off the couch and turn off the television and go to bed. I didn’t wind down with mindlessness. We played hard all day, made supper at night, washed some dishes, and went to bed. And then when I’d wake up before the others, I’d simply lie next to my wife in a smaller bed, holding her, appreciating the day before and the day to come and the long minutes of half wakefulness that we could share without a job to do or news to watch.

What is becoming clearer and clearer to me is that in all our busyness, some of the greatest demands on our times are the luxuries we’ve invented and convinced ourselves improve our lives. It seems the real luxury is the absence of stuff, the absence of distractions, and the forced proximity that allows you to feed each other’s souls rather than check the calendar for the next event to run to.

Also, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to be in awe every day. On most days, in multiple ways. The beauty of a wild mustang rambunctiously challenging his peers. The unspeakable ruggedness of the Badlands. The enormity and precision of the American vision cast into granite by ideals, a visionary, and a host of blue collar men feeding their families. A herd of buffalo, and the singular beauty of each one inside of the herd. A sky so big that. . . Words fail. Pictures fail. And to stand in front of something and know that, know that you can’t even talk about what you’re seeing, knowing that you’ll regret turning your eyes away as soon as you do, feeling powerless to take it all in – to do that over and over across a week is to be reminded that the news matters little, the television not at all, and the swelling of gratitude for all of it that accompanies is to feel good and right and true.

It does not take vacation or the natural beauty of National Parks to feel this. For the month and half since we’ve returned, I have a heightened receptiveness to the awe sparked by home. This morning for instance: a silent sixty degrees at sunrise, with the smell of August corn and a light fog settling over the waterways, pedaling over the blacktops of rural Iowa, I soaked in all manner of gratitude at the beauty here. Or the sheer pleasure of breakfast on the patio. Or the way the hymn the noon church bells here in town play stays with me all day, reassuring and uplifting. Or seeing my wife’s eyes light up, any time, and the swelling ache of gratitude that washes over me, knowing she is mine to treasure. Or every second reading aloud with my girls.

I am keenly aware of these blessings, and I am more prepared to see the awe in the every day after being confronted with it every day in South Dakota. There are few feelings I would trade for the wonder of being in awe. It is a better way to live.

Reflections on a Week in South Dakota, Part 2: National Character

With the visiting of Mount Rushmore and several state and national parks, I felt a heightened sense of responsibility to talk about our national character with our girls. About what the American spirit is. Or was. I’m not sure where they get that now – certainly not from the news. From education? I don’t know. I just want them to feel grateful and understand the perspective and perseverance that was required from generations to provide them what they have today. I want them to feel the grandness of this idea and the protections put in place against the folly of fallen humanity and its lust for power. Mostly, I want it to be true.

I want an American spirit that believes primarily in sacrifice and the common good. Is it in us? I am jealous of other generations, jealous of their sparseness. Jealous of their struggles and dangers. Is that a crazy thing to say? We have not been asked to conserve for the war effort. We have not been asked to serve. I’m not sure anyone even tries to use the phrase, “Your patriotic duty,” anymore, even in the most idyllic of settings. What are we made of, now? How would we respond to crisis, aside from attempts to alternately deify political leaders and then damn them when we don’t get what we want? What do we want, now? What is worthy of our efforts?

We have no West to conquer and explore. Our biggest aims are to find shinier and and quicker and more self-serving tools of distraction, or at least to make enough money to buy them when someone creates them and tells us our personal value depends on our ownership of it. We are sanitized from the wars we fight as a nation, and rather than responsibility to our soldiers we speak of war fatigue and our disinterest in the world’s affairs. We know more about Netflix and Youtube than the plight of humanity, and we’d prefer to keep it that way.

I lean to John Steinbeck on this one. If anyone has captured this transition better than him, I have not read them yet. Steinbeck understood the lostness that would occur when the big challenges went away. He saw and wrote repeatedly about how what would harm us the most is what we sought with greatest vigor in the mid-Twentieth Century: comfort, security, and luxury. And here we are, overfed, overspent, and in overdrive, chasing nothing and worn out from doing it, managing to lift our heads and scream only when our personal comforts are not immediately met.

My wife said during our trip that a visit to Mount Rushmore is one of the closest things we have to a national pilgrimage. It felt like one. And I felt a stirring of hope that pieces of the American spirit that I tried failingly to speak to my children about were still left in us when we sat together in an amphitheater after sundown with 2,000 other people and paid tribute in unison to those who had served in our military while a beam of light amplified four iconic presidents. We were unified in our respect for sacrifice, service, and a proud history. I did not want to leave.

Of course, pieces of that hope died while watching a percentage of the audience rush out before the military recognition in an attempt to avoid the discomforts of traffic. . .

It is hard for me to know whether the national spirit is merely our history, or if it is reality shielded by weak leadership and the noise of consumerism. I know that whether it is myth or mystery, I am complicit. But gazing on the Presidents, and visiting state and national parks that have been protected and valued for the common good of all people in all generations to appreciate, even for a mere couple of days, is enough to spur the desire to personally claim it as our legacy and to want to participate so that it does not die.

Reflections from a Week in South Dakota

Our family took a week-long trip to South Dakota in July, and I tried to jot down a few thoughts about it when I got back. I've cobbled it together into what I hope are three coherent posts. The first, below, is some thoughts about fatherhood and my two daughters after a week straight of car time, a shared one-room cabin at a KOA campground, fatigue, picnics, and some of the best scenery on earth:

I don’t want to forget a few things about my girls on this trip, because I know how fast they change and grow, and there are pieces that I don’t want to drift into the shapelessness of vague half memories. 

For instance, how they made friends with every dog owner and dog they saw at our campground, primarily because they missed their own dog. Our cabin was about 100 feet from the little dog park at the campground; and we knew that if we weren’t sure where our girls were, we could look out and see them leaning against the fence, chatting up a dog owner about their trip, or stopped between our cabin and the bathrooms, leaning down to pet a dog that they would almost assuredly describe in terms of how similar or dissimilar it was to a chocolate lab.

Or their independence. Confident, sauntering independence, the kind that makes clear, “This is my campground. I belong here. I need no help,” as they marched off to the pool or the bathroom or the pavilion.

And the vacation journals, of course. The chatty, persuasive prose from the oldest; the descriptive, joy-filled highlights from the youngest filling pages regarding our excursions. Just when I thought I had seen Mount Rushmore from every angle, I was reminded that I hadn't seen it from the angle and expectations of youth. I was enlightened by many sentences from the pens of my daughters.

I hope to forget some of their more memorable violent mood swings, but maybe even those I hope to keep. For few things are more comical to Emily and I than seeing that our youngest is the very definition of the Snickers commercials – the ones where a raging, caustic complainer disappears at the first bite of a Snickers and the eater returns to their true nature. Give our kid some caloric encouragement and watch the rollercoaster speed immediately back to home base.

It was a relief to talk to a friend who had also been to South Dakota at the same time we were, who also had a child who loved to read in the car, a child he had to remind to look up every once in a while and take in what God gave you. I was not alone. Look up!!! You’re going to miss it!!! I wanted to scream this so many times, settling for a toned-down version of it instead, trying to win with the logic that books are about life and this is life, there out the window, life worth writing about yourself some day if you could ever capture it with words.

There’s a desperation in fatherhood to not raise entitled children. I’ve heard the word “privileged” used instead, but I abandon that one because it is privilege that I can’t avoid. My kids are privileged – there is no escaping it. They have been born to parents who love each other, who love God, who have read to them since they exited the womb, who love to travel, and who have the means to do. They have privileges that others do not, and I would not willingly take those from them. What I want to avoid is that privilege leading to entitlement. My girls will grow up taking at least one trip a year, if not two. We’ve been to Austin, Texas four out of the last five years. In the summers they’ve been on extended trips to Duluth, Colorado, and now South Dakota. We routinely go to Minneapolis and Kansas City. We have favorite destinations in our home state of Iowa. These are good places, most of them full of good people who we know and love.

But the danger for me is making travel a ho-hum affair, something to be taken for granted, just another day on the calendar for our kids. I find myself explaining to them often that I took one trip as a kid. One. And it was with four people crammed into the cab of a pickup designed for two. And we loved it. It was special, and I know I have not forgotten most of that experience. Will my kids remember South Dakota? Will they take in its harsh terrain and inexplicable natural wonder with desperation, starving for the visual feast before them? Or will they hear me telling them to look out the window as one loud (but ignorable) obstacle to reading more of their book or playing with a camera?

I remember riding the Cog Railway up to the top of Pikes Peak two summers ago, appalled at the young teenager a few seats over. She was sitting with her family, but she was not with them or the mountain. She was alone, buried in a book, letting the mountain air pass by unacknowledged and unappreciated. She wasn’t rude. She was just not there. And I prayed that someday I would not need to convince my children to soak in all that I had spent 30+ years not seeing, not have to talk around them while they endured some trite little excursion to some other place with some other thing that others strained their necks to see while murmuring distractions.

The struggle is real. But we will continue to travel, here in this privileged youth they are living. And I will continue to point, to speak, to demand page-free hours, hoping to protect them from entitlement and indifference.

What my children want, though, is not necessarily beauty they can see, but an adventure they can live. Rocks to climb. Boulders to conquer. Streams to splash. Wild mustangs to beckon. Gold to pan. Prairie dogs to tempt. It is the doing that excites their soul, and I recognize that better now that the trip is over. This is their awe – what they can experience that they had never experienced before. And I see that in their DNA now. I have felt it before. 

The mistake that’s easy for me to make is to want for them to understand and do what I understand and do now. But this is my stage, and theirs is theirs, and if they miss the grandeur that I take in now, perhaps when they are in their 30’s and taking their children across the country, they can take it in then. There was a stirring in my soul to take a full day in the 100 degree heat and hike a 10 mile trail on treacherous terrain in the Badlands. I wanted to go and do and conquer, too. I can only hope that I don’t lose that passion, or the physical ability to do so, when they are at an age where our desires match.

Until then, we will continue to travel, and we will come home writing about what we saw and did, in our journal or in our blog, and hopefully about what we learned about each other on the way.

A Fridge Full of Wisdom

A friend of mine has placed the core truths on which their family is built on their refrigerator. Like most families, everyone in the house passes by the refrigerator dozens of times each day. As they pass, there in dry erase marker is what they believe and value. The list does not change. In the ebb and flow of family life, in the celebrations and fights and laughter and love and frustration, a few key phrases written out serve to remind everyone there that this is who we are.

I was speaking to someone else recently, someone whose family was going through a major occupational change. They chose the change, chose it for good reasons, and now were dealing with the losses associated with that decision. They seemed to be drowning in that loss. A decision they made that they believed in was now clouded by their feelings. I understand what they are dealing with. When Emily and I decided to leave Nebraska, it was the wisest and most rational decision based on the goals we had for our family. We made the decision and were confident in it; but in the final weeks before we left, we realized just how much we had there. We felt the stings of many farewells to people who still mean a lot to us to this day. Saying goodbye was brutal. But we knew why we were doing it. And we had to keep reminding ourselves of that in the midst of the mourning.

In the first century the apostle Paul was in Rome, in prison, with death imminent, and he wrote a passionate letter to his friend and younger coworker Timothy to encourage him. Typically it is the imprisoned who need encouraging, but Paul had a different perspective. He had more to give, more words of wisdom and support and encouragement, and he pours himself out in this letter. It's a fascinating letter when considering this is essentially the last letter to a close friend, a farewell of sorts, and that Paul must write it under the circumstances in which he finds himself.

Eventually in the letter Paul gives a profound reflection on his circumstances: he is "bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound! Therefore I endure everything . . ."

Paul will not allow his situation to define him. Being "bound with chains" is where he is but not who he is. More importantly, he will not allow his situation to define God. There is nothing more true and more important to him that the reality of God's grace and his responsibility to spread the hope and salvation provided by that grace. And he refuses to allow his situation to limit God. Paul understands that the power of the gospel is unchanging, regardless of where he is and how he feels.

It is so easy to make this mistake. We allow our situation and our feelings to create reality for us, rather than what we say we believe is true. But we have to fight that. A little anger and frustration does not change the fact that service and sacrifice bring us great joy and purpose. The folly of politicians should not make us forget that we live in a great country that we are responsible to for more than exasperated complaints. Fatigue does not decrease the importance of our values and desires, and we should not let it allow us to push them off for another day. A loss of job does not change your value. A fight does not change the treasure that is your spouse. A day filled with disobedience and constant mess should not diminish the immense gratitude for our children, the same gratitude felt on the day of their birth. It might be gratitude through gritted teeth, but gratitude nonetheless.

Life and circumstance change us, but they do not change truth. That's why it's so important to constantly repeat the core truths that we believe, whether those core truths are founded on the gospel of Christ or not. Whatever is true, we must speak it to ourselves and to those who share those convictions. Because our chains, our feelings, our limitations, and our circumstances will blow us back and forth and turn us upside down and threaten to crush us at times, and we will need to be tethered to the foundation of who we are and why we do what we do.

In one of my favorite poems that I teach to my AP students, A. E. Housman writes that

"Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, 
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good."

So we must train. And we train through repetition. We need teachers and coaches and mentors in our lives speaking wisdom through experience when we struggle. We need dinners and stories with friends that remind us of what really matters, matters more than our comfort, more than our job, more than our last argument, more than our to-do list. Christians, we need the repetition and unity of the Bible. We all need those words on the fridge, reminding us one snack or drink at a time, who and what we most hold dear.

The Right (and Wrong) Kind of Memorable

There is a moment, or a collection of moments, from a high school baseball game that has stayed with me for longer than the night of the game. Last week was my last week of umpiring for the summer, and much of it has been forgettable. Forgettable is good, generally. Forgettable means that people behaved as people should, at least most of the time, that we marched inning to inning slowly or quickly, kids maybe made memories while my partner and I facilitated, offering structure to this activity that they say is important. Memorable is often bad. Bad like the unspeakable quagmire of a display last week we had to witness from a team and a community who appears to have no adults to speak of, at least none with any contact or concern with their baseball program. That embarrassing evening, a 4 hour marathon of affronts to humanity, was not forgettable. I hope I can wash it away soon.

But it is a different evening I linger with here. A better evening. It was forgettable in most ways. I don't remember the score. I remember who won, but I won't in six months, and I know none of the players. I couldn't even tell you the first names of the kids who pitched. What I remember is the demeanor of the head coach. It's simple, really: he taught. He taught the whole game. He taught on nearly every pitch. Mistakes or successes, ahead or behind, first inning or last, he taught. He encouraged, but not the fake kind of encouragement that no one believes; instead, it was the encouragement of instruction, of saying that Hey, you said this is important to you, so I'm going to make you important to me and teach you how to do this thing. I'm going to show you the way, and I believe that you are not perfect and never will be perfect but can be better, just a little bit better, right now, and again next time, and again next time, and I'm going to keep speaking better into you so long as you're here and valuing this.

This is hard. Unspeakably hard. Few people know how hard it actually is. If you've been to high school athletics, I'm sure you've heard encouragers and teachers. For the whole game, though? It's rare. If you see it, value it. Take it in. Listen and appreciate to the job few are willing or maybe able to perform.

Full-time teaching says a few things. It says that every action matters. That each movement, each decision, is of consequence for the player and for the team. And it is. Full-time teaching says that the player himself is important. Instruction implies that improvement is both possible and important. Full-time teaching tells a player that you're not done yet, that you're not a finished product, that you never will be, that while you are not now good enough you are better than you were and you will continue on this journey during this minute, and the next one, and the next one, with a coach who sees a spectacular and unwritten future for you if you just remember all the time that you're not done yet.

It's easy to see what's wrong with youth and high school athletics today, particularly from the perspective of an umpire. I see a lot of disinterested people, not quite sure why they're doing what they're doing. I see a lot of ultra-interested people, defining this as life and not a mere part of life or a preparation and means for living well. I see money - lots and lots of money - and how many people are making it on the backs of children. I see self-promotion as the new idol, rather than self-sacrifice. Frankly, I often don't see a lot of joy. But then there are nights, nights like this one, where I get to see what's good and right about a bus-full of kids on a diamond in a town 30 miles away on a Tuesday night.

I don't think this team will ever be state champions. Conference championships will be rare enough. But what they will be are carpenters and farmers and real estate agents and fathers who will have had a time in their life when someone told them to get better today, because you matter, because what you do matters, and it matters to a whole lot more people than just yourself.

The team I described in the opening paragraph is also full of kids who are learning. But they are learning without the teaching. They are learning to act on impulse. They are learning that comedy, particularly self-deprecating and self-promoting comedy, is a lot easier than success. They are learning victimhood. And they are learning the silence of adults, the silence of coaches and parents who have decided that they are just not quite worth the effort. I am sorry for them.

I'm not sure how many people think about that when they're watching a high school baseball game or looking at scores in the paper. But I do. I've got a lot of time to think, inning after inning, mile after mile, season after season. I've got time to consider why we're all doing this - umpires and coaches and players and parents alike. And on both kinds of memorable nights, I know.

Today's Verdict

I've been re-reading Ann Lamott's book Bird by Bird the last few days. And I want to write. That's primarily why I picked the book up - out of of hope that it would kick-start me into a more regular pattern of writing. I've found little to write about over the past six months - the only blog posts I've been motivated to write have been about my father, my mother, a basketball season, and my writing failures. All worthy topics. And all prominent in my mind. But I think that's a lie in some ways - it's not all I've found to write about. There have been bits here and there that I always intended to get down but never did, bits that are either lost forever or that will mercifully poke their heads out on a random day yet to be determined. I just couldn't make myself get those words down.

This has been a summer about reclaiming who I am and who I want to be. I don't know if failure is the right word for who I've been over the last several months, but disappointment probably hits close to the mark. Or dissatisfaction. There have been victories; don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed the good. I've had fantastic evenings with my wife, commenting on the complexities of Tim Riggins' character complexities on our weekly Thursday night Friday Night Lights dates, one episode (and gin and tonic) at a time. I lived a great basketball season with my friend. I think the classroom is going well. Friendships are strong. But I cannot help shaking the feeling that I am not who I want to be. Too many late nights in front of the television. Too much fatigue, mostly created by late nights in front of the television. No regular prayer life. No regular reading life. And no regular writing life. I could never make myself do them, daily, those things that I know I most wanted to do. I could do them for a day or two. Maybe one a week for a string of weeks, or a standout week of 3 or 4 times. But the success would lull me into a well-earned day off, which turned into three, which turned into 3 or 4 or 7 straight days of bad eating and empty living in the spare minutes when I could have had so much more.

This was going to be a week of writing, for instance. Finally. I had been waiting for the summer to start up again, to really start up, to just get down words, a few at a time, each day until I found something worth saying. And summer came, and every day got filled. With what, I don't know. Trips to the post office. Dishes. A most maddening war against the cell phone industry that I was ill-equipped to fight. Books. A sermon. Hikes. Naps. Lots of naps. Notes I was supposed to write weeks ago. There was always something else. But this week - this was the week. This was the week that my kids were at church camp all day long, and I was merely at home, just me, no guilt at all for ducking out into my office and doing whatever it is I wanted to do, which is to write words like these. I will write every day, I told myself. I will read my precious Ann Lamott and her quips about the writing life, and I will think, and I will get something down.

But today is Wednesday. I have not written every day. Honestly, it's taken a Herculean effort to write today, these words. I wanted to do so many other things first. Take notes, for instance, on the Ann Lamott pages I've read already, and jot down a list of things I could write about from those pages. I had to shut the book in shame, getting out of my comfortable recliner, all warm from my nap, and sit down and get the keys moving. And I think back and wonder, where did my week go? Where did all that writing time go? It's been a worthy week in many ways. I got stuff done. Vacation planning, for instance. We leave for the Black Hills in a week and a half, and I had been "too busy" to do research and logistics. Not so, now. I can tell you train times and parking fees at National Monuments and give you 5 different options for horseback riding. I've kept a relatively clean house for my lovely wife, who doesn't have the luxury of a season job providing summer hours at home. I've hiked the beloved lab. I've taken extensive notes over 1 and 2 Timothy. I've prayed, another activity I've been desperate to do. And I fired the final cannon shot in my cellular provider war (I hope), a shot more to make noise than to do any real damage, a shot signaling a cease-fire where we'll drunkenly flip a coin and blindly draw up new territory lines in the part-time peace treaty.

All of this to say, that even when I'm not wasting time, it's still hard to find time to do what I want to do. But not impossible. It's not impossible today, and it won't be impossible in the middle of January when I'm coaching 3 games a week and teaching all day and holding on to the waking moments I share with my wife and daughters. It simply comes down to a decision. Today I write. Today I do what I say is important to me. Today I act on behalf of who I want to be.

Tomorrow is another thing entirely. I fear tomorrow. I fear not making it to the screen, and not making it into my prayer journal, not stringing two days together so that I can make it three. But I cannot handle tomorrow. Just today. And today I wrote honest words.

This is hard, of course. And I don't mean writing. It is hard to do anything that makes us who we want to be. It is hard to make time, to make yourself act, to decide that the idea is only real if the action makes it so. A line I remember reading from Bird by Bird while I was distracting myself from not writing was this: "The evidence is in, and the verdict is you." Or something like that. I want to go look and make sure I've got it right, word for word, but I know if I do I won't make it back to this screen for a good twenty minutes. But the idea seems appropriate. We are the verdict of the evidence we've lived. You are not who you want to be without doing the things you say you do. Some of the things you say you are, or want to be, are hard. If you're lucky. For me that is prayer and reading and writing. And it will always be hard. But today, for a short half an hour, I did it. And these words are the verdict.

Summers are for Fathering

We live a very seasonal life here in the Dykstra household. The life of a teacher always will be, particularly a teacher who coaches a little as well. There are ebbs and flows to our seasons; but for my daughters and I, the summer is ours.

Summer is for fathering. I do not ignore my responsibilities or excuse away the other seasons; however, I know that the summer is prime time. Our time to eat breakfast together on the patio. Our time to play in the yard. Our time to grill and bike and swim and hike and read every day in the recliner right after lunch in a pile that I hope never gets too sweaty or too crowded to change locations. It is summer when we will talk about everything and nothing, when I challenge them to grow, and when they challenge me to slow down.

Summer has always been the season of fathering in my life. While my father is not a teacher, I was a student, and the place for a boy out of school in the summer months, whether he is a young boy or a boy old enough to think he is no longer a boy, is on a farm. I never really thought about it until discussing my opportunities with my girls in the summer, but I know now that so much of my time with Dad was from the summer months when timed slowed down and we were suddenly together for most hours every week.

A lot of summer was for work. I know that at first my "work" was tagging along and serving essential management duties, but eventually I was taught (and told) to get my hands dirty. Dad bought me a couple of bottle calves to take care of one summer, a precursor to eventually being charged with upwards of 30-40 young calves at a time. There was work we did together, and work I simply got pointed to. We shoveled our share of manure together. I walked beans a time or two. We baled hay on many a July afternoon, the equitable distribution of labor involving me on the rack stacking, Dad curating my language with every baler breakdown. Eventually summer was for factory work as well, as I worked with Dad on the midnight to 8 AM shift the summer before college. Farm work is where I wanted to prove my worth, and factory work is where I wanted to prove my manhood.

I worked, and Dad worked harder, but summer was also for play. On some summer days there was enough margin to randomly shoot the BB gun together, competitively mocking each other's accuracy. We took aim at sparrows, tin cans, burned out light bulbs, glass pop bottles, fence posts - whatever was handy. There were evenings of wiffle ball in the backyard. There were church softball games that I tagged along to, playing catch with Dad in between men and learning how to talk the game, and compete, and that Dutch Reformed blood runs the hottest, and that even sometimes pastors say shit under their breath after a bad at bat. And there was the annual end of summer trip to Adventureland, where there were no responsibilities, just play, and Dad daring to do what none of us could - the vomit-inducing Silly Silo that makes me dizzy just writing about it.

Summer was for setting an example. I learned by watching, never aware at the time that I was learning. The summers were not centered around keeping me entertained, they were scheduled based on what needed to be done. So I learned how to ride in the truck, sometimes talking, sometimes not, always with the volume up for "The Rest of the Story." I learned how to patiently wait for a cattle tank to fill with water without needing to be entertained. I learned how to talk to men, hard-working blue collar men, the kind who weld and run hardware stores and farm on neighboring land, and I learned it's important to be willing to have the time, to slow down, to shoot the breeze and listen to gossip and stories and rumors and weather reports with these men rather than demand a service and then move on. I learned how to raise a single index finger on the steering wheel to greet oncoming traffic.

Summer was for shared meals, primarily lunch. Most days that was on the farm, with grandma cooking. But some days, lucky days, days I never saw coming, were diner days in town. It was the Maid-Rite for years, later the Mustang Diner, and I knew the magic of summer when the truck pulled in there. We shared the paper as we waited, taking turns between the comics and the sports page. I don't remember anything in particular happening there. Just a man and his son, and sometimes that man's father as well, taking in the local flavor (both in calories and conversation). But I knew it was a good day, a day of significant value, to get to be there.

And sometimes summer was as simple as a surprise bottle of pop from the gas station, swilled down with great satisfaction and strangely a feeling of importance and maturity, particularly if it were after a remarkably sweaty, dirty day in the sun.

And so here it is, another summer, the season of fathering, and I fondly remember being fathered well through many summers of my own. And I am grateful, knowing that being a child in summer under my father's fathering prepared me for these most important summers of my life that I live now.

A Balancing Act

Parenting is balance. It's a constant high-wire act with repeated recalibrations and frequent falls. Lean too far to the right, fall. Get back on, favor the left, fall. Climb up one more time, focus on the center, wobble left, move right, tip-toe forward and then back again, only to crash towards impending doom once again. There's no way to get off the wire, either, no matter how many times you fall; each new day calls you to get back and wobble towards the next day again.

On a bike ride with a good friend and fellow aspiring father, I spoke about that balance and struggle for me. He asked for examples. I had plenty. Too stern, too demanding, and my children fall tear-ridden into a perception of a hard to please father. Too loose and playful, and we're one fart joke away from total anarchy. Or the balance between making Bible reading for them intriguing and required, their faith both a family habit and their own. Or giving them the freedom to play and explore and create and imagine on their own absent my influence without abandoning them completely and losing out on the precious few hours of their lives when they are still interested in spending time with me. I'm getting wobbly just writing about it.

Impossible? It certainly feels that way. But I'm fortunate to have role models in my life who have made it seem easy or downright pedestrian. It's ironic that the woman whose genetics gave me my intense motion sickness would be my model for the balance I strive for. But when I look back over 37 years of being a son, I see the balance I seek in all that my mother has done for me.

What does that balance look like?

That balance is someone who spoke of my value in one breath and how I can or should or would be better in the next with the same love behind each statement. It's a mother who wouldn't let me be limited by how I felt or what I thought was good enough, who never let my peers be the standard of excellence, who instead spoke value into who I was (and am) and then said go be that good, put in that kind of effort, don't settle for the half effort you're trying to get away with now.

It's the kind of balance that made my mother committed to her job and proud of her work without ever being too busy or too tired or too distracted by it to be a mother.

It's the balance of caring so much to worry constantly but speaking of the worry sparingly.

My mother showed that balance by loving and being invested in what I did without ever trying to live through me, without being defined by my success or failure. She showed up and cared and served.

That balance means working hard to clean the house but still using the home to play wiffle ball and ping pong and UNO. It's demanding that your kids care about a clean house too, that they not be too helpless or absent-minded to pick up after themselves and put away some dishes, and it's using the freedom of that order to play.

The balance was there in my childhood, and it's there in my adulthood as well, as she's given me the independence to live and explore and do as I best saw fit, and she's been there to talk on the phone once a week, 8:30 pm on Sunday nights, to offer commentary and advice and stories and a listening ear. It's the magic of influencing without demanding, of effort without opinion, of being there when needed, of that being statement enough, that and a million acts of love that include saying yes many times and no some times but always at a balance, a settling balance, that has leveled even the choppiest of waters in my life.

To be emboldened by the trust and confidence of a loving mother and comforted by her presence at the same time is that art of the balance, and it's certainly something that no 10 or 16 or 21 or probably even 25 year old can readily grasp. At least I couldn't. I took it for granted as logical and common. Of course that's what happens, right? With two children of my own, challenging my concept of time as they speed through life in an uncontrollable assault on my fictitious grip on the days of their upbringing, I realize how hard it was and is. I get up each day and wiggle right, and wobble left, and rub the scars from yesterday's falls as I try to get my footing. And on days like this, I realize how much steadier my balancing act is because of the stability of my mother.

Happy Mother's Day.

Epilogue to a Season Part 4: My Friend

This is one in a series of posts reflecting on the most recent basketball season. My goal in each of the next several posts is to look at a separate aspect of what made this year such a memorable experience for me personally. 

I'm not a very good assistant coach, but I've been an assistant for the past 6 years of my coaching career. It is not a natural fit for me. I began my career as a head coach, and I like input. I like control. I'm a vision guy, a planner, someone who likes to have things his way. Therefore, it takes a special situation for me to make it work sitting in the 2nd seat. For my last four years of coaching varsity basketball in Mason City, I was the assistant coach for my best friend in the district. That worked. Well. And it worked because I got to spend 2 hours a day in a gym with that friend, and he trusted me and understood me and used what I had to bring to the table. I could have done that for the rest of my career and happily been an assistant coach. I was devastated when the situation there changed and we would no longer work together.

A year later, my best friend from Nora Springs asked what I thought about coaching with him. He also understands me. He knows that I'm a head coach at heart, and he wanted me anyway. I carefully weighed the situation, and it didn't take me long to agree. It was another chance to be in a gym, sure; but I wasn't desperate for that. More than anything, it was a chance to spend every day for 4 months out of the year with my friend. There are probably only 4 or 5 total people in this world that I know I could happily be an assistant coach for. I'm not sure I could even name the others.

I knew when I said yes that it would be short term. Two years probably. Three at the most. Bob was at the end of his career, a topic we had discussed at length. He wanted me there for it. I wanted to be there too.

Bob and I live two houses apart. We've shared a lot in the last 13 years, very little of it basketball related. Marriages and miscarriages, death of family and the death of a school, road trips and casino trips, renovations and rental houses, to name a few. We've got stories. Adding daily basketball to the mix, something we both know and care about, seemed like a good idea. It was.

I knew going into the year that it was almost certainly going to be Bob's final year of coaching after 30+ years. I'm glad we got to do it together. I wanted to be there, to enjoy walking through it with him, and to do everything I could to help give him the experience he was looking for. As someone who has known him for a long time, I felt specially qualified and personally responsible. It was the kind of responsibility I took great pleasure in doing and doing well.

When you get to be an adult of a certain age, some things become rare. Working every day with your friend on something you both care deeply about is one of them. You have friends, but they are scattered throughout the country, or even the world. They have their own families, their jobs, their own responsibilities. You get together when you can, you plan trips together, you eat meals, you text. But working? Daily? On work that you love?That was the situation. It was our job, our responsibility, to email each other throughout the day with questions and comments, both serious and sarcastic; to call each other at night rehashing practice and games; to sit side by side and tell stories and make new ones; to keep each other sane; to appreciate these players and the opportunity to be together each day. Coaching is high risk, high reward, and the emotions at the end of game day are far-ranging. To coach with someone close to you is to guarantee a friend is there to share it all. A silent handshake at the end of a hard fought win carries with it volumes of unspoken words.

My friend and I will continue to be friends. We will take road trips. We will make stories and tell them. We don't need basketball to make that happen. But I will miss my friend. And I walked into every day of the past season knowing just how good we had it.

Previous Posts in this Series:
- Part 1: The People
- Part 2: The Grit
- Part 3: Chemistry

Epilogue to a Season Part 3: Chemistry

This is one in a series of posts reflecting on the most recent basketball season. My goal in each of the next several posts is to look at a separate aspect of what made this year such a memorable experience for me personally. 

I'm a lot more mature now than when I started coaching. I both fear this and hope this - fear it for my former players and former self, hope for it in the name of personal progress. Either way, it's probably true. I'm mature enough now to recognize that players who don't approach the game the same way as I do are not necessarily immature or wrong. This season was a prime example of that.

Fifteen years ago I wouldn't have viewed the player demand of picking out my tie 25 minutes before the tip to a district game as a good sign. This year I knew it to be a necessity.

The group this year was a loose group. Constantly loose. Practice, pre-game, walk-throughs - it didn't matter. As coaches we eventually figured out that being loose meant that all was well with them. Some nights they were downright goofy. But they were goofy together. They were goofy and playing well. Some nights they compared the power of the stench from their armpits. Another night they referred to a player on an opposing scouting report not with a number or name, but as "the eyebrow girl" to a chorus of knowing recognition from the whole group.

They liked each other. It's that easy. And hard. Ask ten coaches, and all ten will tell you that having a group that likes each other is rare. Some overcome that. Many don't. From my seat, it looked like a non-issue for us. The gym was a great place to be because they liked being there. I think many of them would like being just about anywhere, as long as they were together. It just happened to be basketball season, so I got to be a part of it.

I always dread the locker room after the final game of the season. Having yet to win a state championship, I don't know the experience of ending on a winning note. Instead, the pain of losing is typically magnified by the finality, particularly for seniors. I didn't know what to expect walking in to ours after the final horn of the final defeat. They were sad, yes; that was obvious. But too much heaviness would have been off for this group. I had to try to hold in my own heaviness, for I knew what I was leaving, and I knew I could be leaving it, and them, for good, depending on the decision-making of the powers that be. When it was my turn to talk, there were a thousand things I wanted to say but couldn't. Instead, I managed to stutter out, "I think you guys know what you mean to me." And then I added, "I know I can be a crabby bastard, but I really enjoyed my time with you." In the middle of the laughter, they were not shy in agreeing, that yes, Coach Dykstra, you were in fact a crabby bastard at times.

And perhaps that was the magic dust for me personally. They put up with me telling them to read more books. They tolerated my anti-cell phone rants. They rolled their eyes plenty, but they tolerated it. I'm sure I rolled my eyes plenty as well. They knew exactly what I was, and who I needed to be in order to bring what I could bring as a coach to the team. And I figured out who they were and who they needed to be in order to bring what they could as players to the team. There is a freedom in that. I don't know when we all came to that understanding, or to that maturity, as I called it at the opening. But I'm glad we did. Because being in the gym was a lot of fun with that kind of chemistry.

Previous Posts in this Series:
- Part 1: The People
- Part 2: The Grit

Epilogue to a Season Part 2: The Grit

This is one in a series of posts reflecting on the most recent basketball season. My goal in each of the next several posts is to look at a separate aspect of what made this year such a memorable experience for me personally. 

I never imagined that dealing with 3 concussion diagnoses within a 2 week time period would be a positive thing. And it's not, of course. If I could go back and undo those and play the season out at full strength, I would. But the fact remains that the concussions did happen, as did a season-ending broken nose, a relentless flu bug, and a case or two of bronchitis. That was how we ended the season - short-handed and scrambling, not knowing from day to day who could play or how long they could play and even if they could play the positions we were going to have to ask them to play.

That was rewarding. And I don't think we could have appreciated what was going on without the adversity.

Going into what turned out to be one of the biggest wins in several years for the program, we were without three major contributors to the team due to injury, all of them post players. We were left with one post player who had played the position at the varsity level, and we were accustomed to having two on the court at all times. Also, we were facing a first team all conference post player. No matter. We won anyway. We won because we asked kids to do more than they were capable of doing, and they didn't flinch. They just said okay and went out and won the game.

At the end of that game we lost another player to a concussion. We were facing about 6 games in 9 days, three of them back-to-back-to-back. It was an easy time to say, "Well at least we had this win. It was a good run." Instead they just kept fighting.

In one of the games, we found ourselves with the score close in the 4th quarter of a game we really had no business being in. We had been down big. Then all of a sudden we weren't. It was a battle. Two or three of our kids were playing heavy minutes while sick. One of them was wrapped in a blanket and lying on the bleachers before the game. Up 2 with just a few seconds to go, the game was ours. It was ours until a player  of theirs air-balled a shot, which was rebounded just as awkwardly and thrown in to tie the game and send it into overtime. Our players looked shocked and exhausted heading into overtime. They had climbed the mountain, overcome the deficit, on nothing but guts, and now they had to go play some more. And they did. Victoriously.

I'll never forget the locker room after that game. Walking in, there was a general silence. Typically after a game like that you can expect a raucous congratulatory chorus. Instead, mixed in a sea of coughing and hacking, was a look of relief. They got to be done for a bit. They had used it all - everything they had left. There was no energy left to celebrate a come-from-behind overtime victory. Just a silent satisfaction to reward their exhaustion. And the knowledge that we had to play again in 18 hours.

Our point guard scored 32 with the flu. She was on the couch for the next 3 days. On her first night back, she managed another 20.

Our concussionees were told by doctors they probably wouldn't get cleared before the end of the season. They kept working anyway. They came back. We were desperate to have them, and they looked desperate to come back. They didn't choose to get an early start on Spring Break.

Going into the first round of districts, we weren't even able to go 5-on-5 for most of the practices due to all the illnesses attacking the team. We won that one by 20, against a team we had squeaked by in a 2-point win earlier in the week.

It's easy to be disappointed in high school kids. Really easy. They are not consistent. Toughness is a rare commodity. They seem self-centered and easily discouraged. Self-demeaning jokes trump perseverance and effort on most days. Daring to even try at that which is not guaranteed success is a foreign concept, particularly when their educational lives have been dominated primarily by concerns for self-esteem and personal exploration. To put all this bluntly, it was just really nice to not be disappointed in them, our players. To have somebody to believe in, and have those somebodies be 16 and 17 and 18 year olds who risked failure by caring and striving instead of accepting the free pass of excuses that was offered at their feet, one medical report at a time.

The losses were just as sweet. It's easy to talk about grit and hard work when you win. That same approach was there when they didn't. That fact was not lost on me. As a coaching staff we worked damn hard to find ways to win games in that stretch. Typically, the reflection after a loss is about who didn't play well, or what went wrong, or what we need to work on the next day. In the last month of the season, after a loss, the only real thought that came to my mind was, We just can't ask for anything more out of them. Even the losses revealed their character.

It's a hard thing to describe, but it just got to the point where we honestly didn't know exactly what we would see each night going into a game. We knew they would show up, they wouldn't disappoint, and there was a chance we would see something special. At the risk of overusing the word, this group is special to me because I came to expect the special out of them.

I am not thankful for the injuries. I'm not thankful for the illness. But we couldn't have been who we ended up being without it. Adversity is what allowed me to expect anything, and always the best, out of a group of teenage girls.

***Read "Part 1: The People" here. 

Epilogue to a Season Part 1: The People

This is one in a series of posts reflecting on the most recent basketball season. My goal in each of the next several posts is to look at a separate aspect of what made this year such a memorable experience for me personally. 

The other night we had friends over for supper. They're a couple we've planned to eat with often, both of us waiting for the end of the season to catch our breath and be able to make it work He is an old assistant coach of mine, and we've been friends ever since. Our kids are around the same age, and we share a love for the Chicago Bulls, 90's bands, and banter. He is part of one of the reasons this season was such a positive experience for me. 

I'm a relational guy. When I got into coaching, I was passionate about the game and about leading. That was enough. It's not, now, if I'm being honest. Somewhere along the way I figured out that who I work with matters. A lot. And if I don't enjoy who I'm working with, then coaching is simply not a responsible use of my time. When I left coaching for a year, I knew that the only way back was with the right people, and I only said yes when the right person to work with came along.

Most of my best friends are people I have coached with. That's just the way it is. We understand each other. We understand the competitive fire, the frustrations, the challenges, the rewards. Everything I will say in this post, they know. They get it. We've been through the battles together - the daily practice grind, the road trips, the nail-biters, the blowouts; one knowing glance is all it takes to communicate the joy, relief, frustration, exasperation, fulfillment that we share.

The people I was around this season made many of the nights in gyms special to me. I remember one night in particular. It was in our gym, but the opponent was a familiar one. On the other bench coaching against us was a former player. I now call him a friend. In the boys game coached my former assistant, the one with whom I would share a supper table and stories and a exuberant game of UNO around a table full of our young children. I remember coming home that night and telling my wife that it was a great, great night. I barely remember the game. I know that we won, and there is little else that I recall. But I do remember all the stories we told that night. I remember the hugs and handshakes and shared X's and O's and fatherhood tales. I remember knowing that without basketball as a setting, we wouldn't all be in the same place, in the same time, sharing what we were sharing.

So much of what coaching is to me now is that: being in the same place at the same time with people I really enjoy. A couple of times a year my parents are in the gym. My in-laws are there for nearly every game. A college buddy of mine came to one on his way through. I had so many conversations with people I respect and enjoy - those I've coached with and against, those I've umpired with, others I've taught with. We can say that we don't need a ball and a crowd and some lights and a couple of whistles to get together, but the reality is that we do. Why? I'm not sure. Life, I guess. And this is why coaching basketball can be a good part of life.

One night I sat next to a guy I used to coach against and listened to him talk about how he made the decision that this was his last year. On another night I was a spectator supporting one of my coaching friends, and I got to sit next to another former coaching opponent. Two other friends of mine who I don't get to coach with much now both volunteered to come and work with my players on a Saturday. A college friend I hadn't spoke to in at least five years ended up recruiting one of our players. 

People matter. Of course the players matter, and they will receive their time and place in this account. But I cannot ignore all the good people I saw over the course of 4 months and the smiles they allowed me to have. Coaching has given me some of the most important relationships in my life. The rewards are deep.

Epilogue to a Basketball Season

When the most recent basketball season ended for me, I began writing again. I needed to get a few ideas down. Ever the optimist, I figured that it would all come out in the writing and I'd have a clean picture of what I was looking for. Having worked on this project off and on for a couple of weeks, I know now there's nothing clean about it. But there is something there.

My next few blog posts will be what came out, in the most organized manner I could find. Whether you care about basketball or not, I think there's something there for you. Either way there's something there for me, and I know that makes the writing worth it. 

What follows in this post is the beginning of the writing and the direction for the next few posts. I started it about a month ago. Thanks for reading. . .

I have exited another basketball season, this one number 15. And it is the exit that is always hard. I have been a basketball coach, and almost nothing else, for months. Now I hit the reset and attempt, as soon as possible, to be a different man. A nightly father who checks homework and helps to set the table. A husband who woos his wife on Friday nights rather than making eye contact from across the gym and an adrenaline-cluttered post-game rehash on the couch. A friend who communicates. A writer. These have been foreign to me. How long will it take to make those clothes fit once again and recognize myself in them?

Some years the transition is easier than others. I have never been okay with losing. I've got to state that right away. But some seasons - the ones without chemistry, the ones with unnecessary strife, the ones with uninterested players - those seasons I was more ready to turn the page. Those seasons I walked out of the gym after the tournament loss and breathed the air of newfound freedom. There are years like that. Any coach telling you the truth will say that.

This year was not that way, though. Not even close. I've been telling a few people close to me that there was a 3-4 week stretch at the end of our season that was as good as any month that I've coached in my 15 years doing this. The joy in the gym was palpable for so many reasons, reasons I could never have predicted. If I could only bottle it. . . And now it's done.

I'm stuck now, because I'm a week out of it, and I'm sitting here at this keyboard wondering if I should, in fact, be at the keyboard. On the one hand, I've had my mourning process. I was sad last Tuesday night when it was done. Really sad. I knew what I was saying goodbye to. Whether or not I get to coach with this program next year, it doesn't change the fact that what this group was and what this experience was will not occur again. So I allowed myself to be sad, and my family not only allowed me to be sad but were sad right along with me. But I did that already. I lost the sleep. I wandered about the house aimlessly in the middle of the afternoon the day after, wishing I were in the gym. I tried to inject myself back into the daily rhythms of our home, stumbling in and out of the way. That's all done now. And to sit here and write about it risks me thinking about it at 3 AM when I'm awoken by any random nothing and left to the wanderings of my brain. Much of me wants to make a clean break and move on.

But there's another part of me that wants to make sense of it by writing about it, that wants to figure out what made it so, so good and get it down so that I can understand it. There's a part of me that knows I'll forget it, that I've already forgotten pieces of it, and if I don't get it down now I may never remember exactly how this felt and why it felt that way. And there's the part of me that wants to be a writer again, wants to prove that I can focus on something longer than 15 minutes, that I can write what I know and write so that I can know because I haven't been that guy in a while. That's probably the guy who found 6 other things to do tonight before I faced the keyboard, the same guy who waited a week to do what he said he wanted to do when the season was over.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I've decided the journey is worth it. I'm going to get the words down and find out what's there.

Over the next several posts I'm going to attempt to explain, partly to an audience, mostly to myself, why this was special. I haven't got it all figured out, but it's in pieces. And the pieces fit together somewhere inside of me, in the part that appreciates these couple of months and knows it wasn't just another season. Little by little, I'll be sharing those pieces here.

At the End of the Shot Clock

It is a blessing for me anytime I can compare basketball philosophy, particularly defensive grit, with New Testament writing.

On Sunday morning before church I was checking up on my beloved Panthers and the upcoming basketball season. I came across an article about the progress made early in the season, particularly among all the new faces in the program this year. In it I found this quote from head coach Ben Jacobson: "I've liked everything up to the point where we get a little bit tired," he explained. We've got some work to do at that point. Once we get tired, we aren't competing at the level that's going to be necessary for us to do well." This, he said is what it would take to "make plays when it matters most, and that is at the end of the shot clock or . . . late in a game."

That quote came to mind as I sat in the pew during our church service and listened to the sermon on 2 Peter. In his letter Peter writes that the proper response to grace is effort. While effort does not save, it is an appropriate form of gratitude for salvation. The effort Peter encourages his readers to exert is in supplementing faith with various qualities, such as virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love. It is the quality of being steadfast that stands out to me. My eyes always stop on that word when I come across it. That term has played a role in other of my blog posts. It is a word that I respect and revere and find central to my teaching and coaching. And it is at the heart of some of my greatest struggles.

Physically, I've taken pride in my ability to press on when tired, particularly in my younger, more athletic, less, well, humbling years. Now, however, I find it very difficult to make disciplined, wise mental choices in fatigue. Rather than remaining steadfast to the causes I've prioritized, I allow fatigue to win far too often. In writing, for instance. Or reading. I wanted to quit this post after five minutes of starting it. I rubbed my eyes and thought about shutting my laptop and "taking a break" that I know would have lasted far longer than 24 hours. And it was just a little fatigue. But the temptation to quit was there.

Would me quitting on this post tonight have been a big deal, in the scheme of things? Probably not. But it is practice. It's an opportunity to say yes to what I want to do and no to what I feel like doing. I need practice at not giving in to fatigue. When the shot clock is running down, when I've battled hard all day and don't have much left in the tank, can I string together a few defensive possessions, a few tiny decisions like getting words down on a post or writing a letter or studying some basketball or calling a friend? Will I be practiced at not giving in to fatigue? Or would I just prefer to hope I don't give in and fail in my steadfastness when the fatigue is big and the stakes are bigger? And am I able to see that many tiny decisions define a lifetime?

Also, failing in the small stuff affects far more than me. It convenient to think that I'm the only one I let down when I am not steadfast. But Peter goes on to say that qualities like this "keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful." In other words, without them I have little to offer to a world I'm quite certain I've been called by grace to serve. "For whoever lacks these qualities," writes Peter, "is so nearsighted that he is blind." Falling to fatigue shows I am too present-minded to see anything.

I was fortunate to have a friend of mine stop me after church and out of nowhere mention that he appreciates reading my blog when I get a chance to write. I've known this person for probably a decade, and I've never known he's read this. His words were an encouragement to me. They were also a challenge. I don't delude myself into thinking that the weight of the free world hinges on anything I think or write, or that the world is even that much different based on what I post here. But it is an opportunity for me to offer something to others, to encourage, to prod, to challenge, or even to just say, "you're not alone in this." When I succumb to fatigue, I lose that opportunity. I am unfruitful and so near-sighted that I can only see the discomfort in the here and now.

A few defensive possessions at the end of the shot clock or late in games can define a whole season. It can define a whole life too. And what the New Testament and defensive philosophy teach me is that the consequences matter to far more than just me.

Count tonight as one possession won.

Vote Like Thoreau

The slow, day-by-day inebriated stumble through the election season has been a maddening comedy of errors. It is ridiculous. It is depressing. It is undeniably real. And the hand-wringing from all corners of the country and the "what can I do" barrage of self and societal questioning has dominated all water cooler conversations in my water cooler-less life.

Of particular interest to me has been the muddled response from Christians, primarily those who feel the need to speak to and for the "Evangelical voting block" that is often (though less so now) coveted by major party candidates. It is both damning and comical to watch the "yeah, but . . ." doctrine of morality that makes a mockery of good and evil by trading it in for an argument of degrees of harm one candidate will do versus the other. No matter how ugly, how hateful, how denigrating the message, some in the Christian community cling to the battle-cry of "but at least it's not as bad as what a former president who is not now running for president did two decades ago." They sing the praises of the hog confinement they sleep in as they hold their nose in their daily hike past their neighbor's manure pile.

So what is one to do? Based on the conversations I am a part of and around in this never-ending political nightmare, the question seems to be one of how to vote. We talk, and we talk, and we talk, and soon there must be a mark on a sheet of paper that we can put our name next to. We complain, loudly. We laugh, and we watch Saturday Night Live sketches, and we watch debates wondering just what will happen next. We express disdain and hopelessness. We slowly approach election day. What should we do?

I found an answer of sorts while teaching Thoreau's essay "Resistance to Civil Government" in my American Lit course this week. In it Thoreau challenges his readers to stand up for the morals they believe in, as he has by not paying taxes in protest of the Mexican War and the slave trade. The essay is famous for its direct connections to the Civil Rights Movement and Ghandi's nonviolent civil disobedience. It is extreme in spots, but I suppose all foundational pieces of literature are.

But I found a few relevant gems as I read it this time around in the untenable situation so many of us find ourselves in. In one passage, Thoreau writes, "Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it." He adds later, "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely."

Here I see wisdom and a challenge. In these words, Thoreau makes clear that the most monumental decision we have to make is not in how to vote. Instead, it's in how to live. Voting might be a statement of belief, but it pales in comparison to the statement of every day action. Our whole vote - our leisure and our money and our education and our time - those matter far more than the flawed holder of the office of President of the United States.

If one candidate cannot be trusted, and the other causes harm and embarrassment with every "honest" statement he utters, then we must look to ourselves. It is easy to speak about our disappointment in the direction of the discourse and politics of our country. But what do our actions say? How do we spend our time and money and emotion? On reality TV? On being entertained? Do we question the intelligence of our candidates at the same time we choose not to learn and grow and become educated in the values we claim to profess? Do we bemoan lying while telling half-truths to ourselves and others, always pardoning it away with excuses of convenience? Are we disgusted by the power-hungry, say-anything, win-at-all costs approach and yet chase the quickest path to victory, to promotion, to attention? Do we mock a candidate's Twitter idiocy and live on our own Twitter account more than a newspaper?

I know I don't share the same position as everyone. Perhaps not even most. But from this seat it looks like we will all lose in November, no matter what; and our whole votes, not just our paper ones, have put us here. Doug Wilson, in the most intriguing article on the election I've read, writes that "We have met the enemy, and he is us. . . We all pretend to be shocked, shocked, by something that we have allowed to become an acceptable mainstream standard."

The real question is not one of voting. Not paper voting anyway. It is not how bad are these candidates, but rather what in them do I see in me? Perhaps when these are the questions being examined, we will quit excusing the inexcusable, comparison-shopping for morality, and laughing at what is not funny. Instead, we will cast our whole vote.

We Read to Know That. . .

Last year we were facing a decorating existential crisis in our dining room.

It was time for a change, and the opportunity presented itself in the form of re-plastering the cracked walls in our hundred year old home. We decided to change what had not been changed in the near decade we had owned the house. Now, I'm not one who knows much or even cares about what interior decorating is supposed to look like. I couldn't tell you what's on the walls of any of our friends' homes with any sort of clarity.

However, this was something I wanted to take great care with; I knew that what we decided was worthy of hanging on our walls, in the room where we most often host, was going to say something about who we are. We searched randomly, never very seriously, hoping that inspiration or a fortuitous purchasing experience would strike that brought into our dining room an element of class, personality, originality, and a clear indication to guests that they were dining with the coolest people they'd ever met. It was no small task.

After an introduction for me to the world of Etsy.com, we settled on a literary theme. We already had a tribute to the settings of all of Steinbeck's California novels given to me by a friend who had recently visited the land of one of my favorite authors. To that we added some C.S. Lewis-themed art. One of the pieces is a dictionary page used as the background for the featured Lewis quote, "We read to know that we are not alone."

I have felt particularly not alone in the last two weeks, awakening me to the beauty of this quote.

A week or two ago, a good friend of mine texted to ask if I had read or heard of a book he was reading. I had not. He responded by ordering the book from Amazon and having it sent to my house. I've had books recommended to me before, and I appreciate it. Realistically, though, I'm only going to get to about 20% of the books someone else thinks are good. I'm typically four or five books behind in the list I've already selected and often purchased. At least that many brand new books stand waiting on my shelf right now. But this is a recommendation on a whole other level. Here - read this. It's showing up at your doorstep. So I read it.

The book was good. Really good. It's a book I would have never picked up on my own, but the writing was engaging and real. I enjoyed the read. More important, though, was the experience of reading. Because I knew that the pages I was covering each night were the same pages that had moved him, it felt like he was there with me in the room on a nightly basis. I read, and I was not alone. I was not only connecting the book to my experiences, I was connecting it to his and the history of our friendship.

Reading not only connects us to the world around us, it connects us more closely to those who are already the closest to us. My wife Emily and I gave our daughter Elise the first Harry Potter book for her 9th birthday. We had never read it, but we wanted to give her something different. Emily decided to read the book as well, and the two of them have had their own little book club conversations together as they each individually worked their way through the plot.

Elise and I read Calvin and Hobbes together to know that we are not alone. I get to watch her read the same strips I read at her age and see her reaction identifying with Calvin, while I now read it with a tendency to nod my heart knowingly towards the diatribes of Calvin's poor father. When we read together, she is reminded that I was once a kid her age, and I am reminded of the exact same thing.

Two separate former students who are now in college emailed me this past week to say hi and offer their own book suggestions.

Our family has come up with a group Halloween costume idea each year in which we all have a roll to play. This year's idea comes from a book the girls and I read together at the end of the summer.

18 years ago I knew it was true love when I told Emily to read two books that I loved and thought spoke about me, and she did.

Last week I sent a letter to another friend who had agreed to read the New Testament book of Colossians with me. I read it, knowing he also was reading it, and I sent him my personal reactions and thoughts, knowing that he cared. I knew that while I read those passages, piece by piece, I was not alone.

It's my turn, now. Emboldened, I purchased the next book on my shelf and sent it to the doorstep of my friend. One sword fight at a time, we'll be sharing our way through Steinbeck's re-telling of Arthurian Legend. One hundred miles apart from each other, we will not be alone.

The Long Road Back

So how do you turn a writer into a non-writer? How do you make a blog go silent?

One way is to get a dog. A puppy anyway. A big hulking chocolate lab puppy who drops toys onto your lap whenever you sit at the computer screen. A mass of energy who alternates between making you laugh and play and scream in frustration at yet another clandestine mission of destruction. That will slow a writer down in a hurry.

Or you ignore the laws of momentum until the snowball is rolling at uncontrollable speeds. One day of doing anything is nothing. But string two or three or four together, and the immutable laws of physics kick in, the gravitational pull hurtling your motivation downward at a steady increase of  9.86 meters per second. Make that six weeks worth of days and momentum, and you wake up and realize you don't have any idea how to reverse it. You want to, and you need to, but you forget how after so many days of just not writing.

You also start worrying about who your audience is and how to please them. You wonder who that audience is, and you forget that it never really mattered before. You start thinking about how to grow the audience. You become a marketer of that audience rather than a writer who needs none. And every time you want to write again, the doubting voice in the back of your head whispers, "Who really cares about this? Who would actually read this?"

You then want to make sure that whatever you write after an absence of writing is worthy of that absence. Finding nothing, the absence grows larger.

Worst of all, you fear that you really have nothing to say. And you realize that the reality is you probably don't. And you don't because you quit asking so many questions, quit viewing events as part of a larger story rather than an immediacy to be dealt with. You don't read as much and think as much and listen as much. You allow yourself to run near empty, believing that much activity is the same as good activity. You allow fatigue to produce fear and you call it rest. When there is nothing to say, there is no hunger to say it. The blinking cursor chastises. It is far easier to not having something to say away from the keyboard than it is right in front of it.

Then it just seems hard. Too hard. And it is hard. Momentum has made it so. You may want so badly to turn it all around, but every day of not writing, of waiting, has a price. That price is the feeling right now, the one making each clause seem impossible. That price is the long road back.

The long road back starts with a single post. Sometimes it starts with several single failed posts, or a handful of half-started ideas jotted on envelopes or paper scraps that sometimes make it to the table and sometimes don't. But those failures lead to something, eventually. Hopefully a small victory.

The first post is easier than the second. The second is probably easier than the third. But a third, and then a fourth, scratching those out when the renewed freshness is gone and the grind is back, those are the hurdles to getting momentum back in your favor. A mere relapse away from idleness becomes a rhythm. I seek the rhythm.

How does a writer become a non-writer? How does a marriage become distant? How does a prayerful life become prayerless? How does the disciplined diet become an extra 8-pound afterthought? For many reasons. Some of them good. But of more interest to me now is the long road back.

Help, Please

I've never liked asking for help.

More than anything, asking for help is admitting deficiency or need. At times it requires a sheepish shrug of the shoulders, a nodding "I know I should know how to do this but I don't" look on your face, a hint of pleading without clear desperation as you ask someone to sacrifice their time or resources to meet needs that are not their own. It is a pride-swallowing admission that "you know something I don't know" or "I don't have it all figured out like I want you to believe I do." Whether it's help moving, help fixing, help learning, or help providing, the request puts you in a clear position of inferiority.

There are people who take pride in never having to ask for help. They may want help. Help may make their situation easier. But they will not ask, because, just to be clear, they do not need it. I have never had the skills or resources to be one of those people. Now I don't even want to be.

This week I came to realize more fully why asking for help is one of the best requests you can make. At the beginning of the week I spent two days on RAGBRAI, a major bike ride across the state of Iowa. I love the ride and have been thrilled to have ridden parts of it over the past four years with a good friend of mine, but it can be an absolute logistical nightmare. First, my friend and I needed transportation to the western edge of the state. We also needed places to stay in two different locations. Then we needed someone to come pick us up in the middle of nowhere. Also, I needed someone to watch my kids and my dog. All this for the selfish cause of two days on a bike with a good friend consuming gluttonous amounts of roadside calories.

The favor requests began. And they were all met. My wife agreed to give up much of her weekend to drive us to the start. Her sister offered us supper and a place to sleep on Saturday night. My sister volunteered to watch both my kids and our 5-month old lab. An old friend from high school supplied food and lodging on the second night. Strangers we've never met before transported our bags from one town to another. My friend's parents picked us up after two days. Obviously we were blessed, blessed beyond belief, helped in every way to meet every need (or want) that we requested. We asked for help. We were provided for. But it was more than that.

Asking for help felt like I was making a huge burden of myself. And I probably was. But in reality, I see that what asking for help did was provide me the opportunity to build relationships, or strengthen them, and to share time and stories and laughs. Every person who agreed to help provided that. I would not have spent two hours with my sister and her husband on Saturday if we had not asked for help. Similarly, I wouldn't have had a couple of road hours with my wife, or a great meal and good stories with my sister-in-law and her family, or a stroll down the Iowa Walk of Fame on the sidewalks of Shenendoah, Iowa with an old friend and her husband. They were all so eager to offer help, and what I see now is that they were eager to offer themselves.

Looking back, I know that every time I've asked a friend to help me figure out a home improvement project, or to borrow a tool, or to water my garden, it's given us more time together. When I ask my parents, or my in-laws for help, we become closer. And when I admit to my wife what I won't admit to anyone else, that I just can't do it all, that I need her, need emotional support, need energy, need prayers, need someone to help me limp across whatever finish line there may be, need her, that it is then that we are the strongest. I've built and grown many relationships on the premise of needing someone's help. I needed their help, but I mostly needed them in my life.

John Steinbeck said that, "people are more inclined to help each other in hard times. Good times don't bring out the best in people." In good times, we isolate. Pride swells. We are not vulnerable, we do not reach out, and we do not seek the connections that are the oxygen of living well. No matter how hard asking for help seems, we are always better, in many more ways than we sought, after having done so.

The best of times, it seems, is when we most need others.

Throw Away Your Novel

Martin Lloyd-Jones, in his book Preaching and Preachers, writes that "The best way of checking any tendency to pride - pride in your preaching or in anything else you may do or may be - is to read on Sunday nights the biography of some great saint." It is reading that will humble us, remind us that there is a vast universe, that we are a small part of it, and we are both nothing special in particular and also not alone in our pride and joy and fear and sin. Reading gets us out of our own way, out of our own world, and into a much larger reality. Biography, as Lloyd Jones mentions, is an excellent source for this. Not only does biography humble, it also inspires.

Reading about John Steinbeck's life and work has that effect on me. In my last post I discussed one of the reasons I love Steinbeck's works so much, citing his willingness to try anything that interested him, try it with passion, regardless of whether or not he thought he'd be good at it. Tonight I look at his doggedness, his ability to grind, and the understanding that he couldn't become a great novelist in a day.

In one of the interviews I recently read about him, the interviewer wrote this about him:

"He wrote hard for almost fifteen years before he had his first success. He has always written more than he has published. Indeed, he destroyed two full-length novels before Cup of Gold, his first published novel, made its appearance in 1929."

He destroyed two full novels. They're gone. Years of work, thousands of words, pages and pages of thoughts and ideas and communication of his heart and mind, and he threw them away. Gone. I typically have to cut and throw away 20% of any sermon I write for the purposes of time and clarity, and I am breathlessly despondent with each click of the delete key. But I've never had to throw away a whole sermon, or even a blog post, let alone a novel.

It took Steinbeck fifteen years worth of grinding out pages that would never be read to get to his first success. Let that one sink in.

What are you doing now, that in fifteen years, might define you? Can you name anything you do that will matter in fifteen years? Not because it lasted, but because you threw it away, and threw some more away, and threw enough time and energy doing what nobody would see to reach a lasting contribution?

Yes, this is a call to put hours and commitment into something and stick with it. Of course it's that. But more so than that, this is a call to be doing something today that might matter in fifteen years - something big, something that you love, something that feeds you and the world. It doesn't have to feed the world today. But might it, down the road, after it's fed you and you've thrown it away, be your contribution?

Steinbeck was beginning a life's work, a great literary career, and he didn't know it. He had no assurances that he was headed anywhere of significance. But he wrote anyway.

Someone asked him in an interview was his personal philosophy was. His response: "Like everyone else in the world I want to be good and strong and virtuous and wise and loved." Writing, unnoticed for a really long time, allowed him to do that. And it reminds me today to get down some words, take in another book, work on another sermon, and feed good and true and loving words into my daughters and wife as often as possible. No one may notice or remember any of it. But in fifteen years, that work will have produced something that matters greatly to me.

The Right Kind of Stupidity

I love John Steinbeck. It's an improbable love affair that has nothing to do with being introduced to his work in school or introducing him to students myself as an instructor now. Frankly, I don't know when it began. But his words squeeze truth and joy out of thin air, offering literary manna in the form of comedy and tragedy, whether written to alarm or agitate or educate or delight.

One of my first reads this summer was Douglas Wilson's book Writers to Read: Nine Names that Belong on Your Bookshelf. In it Wilson describes nine authors and their attributes that make them worthy of his recommendation, his admiration, and his desire to introduce them, on a personal level, to his audience. Writers Wilson, "If books are among our friends, we ought to apply similar standards to them that we apply to our flesh-and-blood friend. We should want to choose them wisely and well and hope that we will be the better for their companionship." He offers us, then, his favorite "friends" and the authors who have written them. 

It made me consider my own literary love affairs and why I would want anyone I know to be introduced. In that spirit, I begin with this post to attempt to share with you my relationship with Steinbeckian lyric and lore.

Steinbeck wrote a lot of stuff. A lot. Late in his career, he decided he wanted to try writing for the theater, which was far from what anyone would term his comfort zone. In an interview, he offered these thoughts: "I'm just determined I'm going to learn something about the theatre. Last time we were kicked around like dogs but I still want to do it. This shows a truly pure quality of stupidity. Just nuts. I'm so fascinated by everything about the theatre. I don't really care if the show's a flop."

John Steinbeck is the right kind of stupid, and I love him for it. Throughout his career, he tries. Just to find out. He just wants to see. See if part-time college work is for him. See if a California country boy can embrace living in New York. See if living in migratory camps and writing about it can change the American landscape. See if he can properly and accurately put his best friend Ed Ricketts into his works and have his audience be as pleased with him as Steinbeck is. Try war journalism, try breaking all the rules of writing a novel, try commentary on the past and commentary on the present and commentary on what it's like to get into a vehicle with a dog and drive across the country. 

Critics, be damned, he shouts with every swipe of the pen in a new direction. I don't write for you. 

And I am delighted by this. Reading a lesser known work of his, or one of his so-called "experiments" (which he considered such texts as Of Mice and Men and East of Eden), I can see him smirking, giddy at the attempt. There is joy in the words, in the tinkering, in the curiosity that must be satisfied. Can I do this? What will it look like? 

In Steinbeck's career, and sprinkled lightly in so many of his texts, I see his example, and it implores me: "Get out and do things, even if you'll be bad at them. Quit worrying about winning or being successful. Worry about doing. Find out. And find out for you."

Try. Experiment. Do. Wise thoughts, for sure. I can only hope to be stupid enough to dare them myself.