L’audace d’espére

“I just don’t know what else I can do.”

After an evening of eating with people who live on the streets of Chicago and then giving bagged lunches to people who were escaping the January cold in Union Station, the students had reached a point that good people always reach eventually. It’s not quite compassion fatigue, but it’s not far away from that either. Just by walking from Grace Place, an Episcopal church in Chicago’s South Loop, to Union Station—about a mile—we had gotten a taste of the winter outside. What good is a bagged lunch in the face of freezing in the streets?

Preparing to deliver bagged lunched with South Loop
Campus Ministry. (Photo by Kacie Greer)

The question came up in our debriefing session in Union Station just before the students boarded their train to return to the suburbs. I didn’t have enough time to delve into root causes and how through grass-roots organizing and advocacy for smart public policy we can address them. It was a shame, too, because that same day I had been part of a public meeting with S.O.U.L. that 1,000 people attended where we addressed public transportation, abandoned properties, and state and federal budget crises. Just imagine the homeless shelters, health care, and public jobs that we could fund if we had a more progressive tax code! That’s what else we can do!

The thought stayed with me when I saw Les Misérables with my girlfriend in a Naperville theater. Victor Hugo’s story that the movie is based on touches a lot of themes—justice, mercy, idealism, courtly love—and between the tears that Tom Hooper’s rendition provoked, I kept thinking about what runs the entirety of a story that covers 20 years. Hugo seems to say that among the Platonic ideals, there are few permanents. Not beauty; the beautiful Fantine dies and is buried in a public grave. Not justice; the principled Javert throws himself into the Seine because he can’t face a world where a fugitive can be free. Not idealistic revolution; the barricades are broken and all the revolutionaries are killed. The one constant seems to be,well, death.

However, somehow the protagonist Valjean continues to help everyone around him. He knows about mass incarceration, lack of health care, and the exploitation of low-wage workers, yet he only joins the June revolutionaries to get close to the man whom his adopted daughter loves. Of all the characters in Les Misérables, why does Valjean survive?

Then it occurred to me. I had just finished an intensive J-term class about prophetic proclamation that was taught by the famed Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Until that class, the only sermons I had heard from Rev. Wright were the ones that the mass media had cut up and edited to make him look like a Black nationalist demagogue. In fact, Rev. Wright turned out to be one of the great voices for reconciliation with whom I have ever come into contact. One the sermons that the news media didn’t show the public back in 2008 was titled “The Audacity to Hope”, which Barack Obama would later borrow for his best-selling book.

In this sermon, Rev. Wright waxes philosophic about a painting where a young woman is playing a harp while the world below is similar to the one Victor Hugo described a century prior. Full of injustice and pain, how can a person still find room for hope? And that is the great existential movement of Christianity—the movement from the conviction of personal and social sin to the liberation of grace. However, the movement does not end with the recognition of salvation by grace. The pilgrim’s progress continues in the guise of love, the kind of love that drives Valjean to the Parisian barricades and sewers. It is the all-sacrificing love of a parent for a child, what the Gospel writers called ἀγάπη, or “agape”.

Friends, that is what I propose drives us to help other people despite the seeming futility of the endeavor. We continue to do acts of mercy and organize for social justice, but it is only because of the love movement afforded us by divine grace. We do indeed have the audacity to hope, or perhaps as spoken by the kindly bishop who saves Valjean from prison labor, “l’audace d’espére”.

Crack open a can of worms

I recall the first time that I sat through a presentation on the origins of the Pentateuch. As a first year university student from a conservative, evangelical upbringing, my attitude was very incredulous. After all, what do J, P, E, and D sources have to do with my Methodist faith? I did not begin considering the historical context of biblical literature until the next year with my first in-depth Bible study and an introduction to the historical critical method. I soon found that once the lid is off of the metaphorical can of theological worms, the squirmy annelids do not return to their enclosed home. In fact, the theological worms bore new holes in unexpected places, and, in a surprising twist for a former conservative evangelical, they make the theological soil even more fertile.

It is in this fertile, theological worm-infested soil that the myths that parallel the Hebrew Bible stories are scattered. The process is indeed as messy as it sounds, but the revelation that the writers of the Hebrew Bible may have borrowed from religious stories from neighboring peoples does not have the shaking effect that I experienced as a sophomore undergraduate. I already was familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, but I must admit that I was surprised by the sheer number of myths, histories, and documents from the ancient Near East that are awfully similar to my favorite Bible stories. In the face of this religious milieu, I have tried to imagine what a perpetually occupied or conquered people might do in order to keep their people’s identity alive for posterity. I hope that it would not include molding a golden calf, but I can see how a priest or elder would borrow a popular myth and spice it to their people’s taste.

Sargon of Agade, yet another dude who
needed to learn to swim at an early age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad

A good example of this could be the story of Sargon of Agade. Sargon was a famous king of a great city-state who as an infant was plucked from a river by a royal attendant, raised in the royal courts, and then achieved great, miraculous exploits that cast a long shadow on the descendants of the ancient city-state. It roughly parallels the narrative of Moses, one of the most important figures in the Hebrew Bible. The story also precedes the biblical narrative by well over a thousand years, which is certainly enough time for an entirely different culture to acquire and add certain details to the life narrative of a great patriarch. The familiarity of the story adds authority to the Israelites’ traditions, and the J-source writers did not have to worry about intellectual property hounds on their tail. It makes perfect sense to me that the writers of the Hebrew Bible took details from other neighboring people’s myths to create their own traditions.

However, it is not easy to remove myself from 21^st century, Western ears and inhabit the space of a priest in 6^th century BCE Palestine. Christian and Jews alike regard the Pentateuch as the Mosaic Law, and the Torah lays the groundwork for the ancient ethics that multiple empires later used for their own societal laws. Needless to say, the stakes are quite high. Even so, whereas religion and state are separate in Western democracies, this is simply not the case for the civilizations of antiquity. Mythologies were a way of understanding the world, including the place of civil authorities, which students even find in the “right of kings” argument as late as 17^th century European monarchs.

In that way the Mosaic Law is not so unique in grounding its ethics and mandates in a covenant between a deity and ruler of the people. The beginning of the Code of Hammurabi is replete with honors from Babylonian gods that protect the empire and guarantee its prosperity. Hammurabi clearly wanted to show that his laws were not simply whims of a tyrant, though it seems likely that he could have ruled that way if he wanted. The king grounded his rule in religious imagery that is found throughout Babylonian mythology of Marduk, who is present in the Enuma Elish stories as well. The Israelites did not have a monarch until well after the establishment of the Law, but Moses did act as de facto leader of the Israelites during the Exodus. Ascending the mountain of God to receive the laws of the chosen people is not so unlike invoking the national god in unveiling a new system of imperial laws.

The individual laws of the Torah were at times also surprisingly similar, but nations today also borrow laws from constitutions that existed beforehand. For example, Hammurabi ordered that slaves be freed after three years, and the Sabbath laws of the Torah make many references to the fair treatment of slaves. Of course the Torah’s laws are to a whole different degree of justice than Hammurabi’s laws were, and considering that the priestly writers were in Hammurabi’s descendants’ empire while writing their notes, perhaps that makes sense. An oppressed people would naturally be more concerned about freedom for the captives, and they would likely have a vested interest in showing how much further their laws of justice go than the laws of their captors. Rather than lessening the power of the Mosaic Law, the context strengthens the claim that the Hebrew Bible is special in a way that other codes contemporary with it were not.

This is all to say that I personally am quite comfortable with the documentary hypothesis and that the Hebrew Bible is likely a conglomeration of ancient influences, many of which came from non-Israelite cultures. The debate enters an entirely different phase if I am to facilitate the same discussion within a local congregational context. As my conservative evangelical upbringing attests, many congregations do not teach the historical critical method. Many people base their faith in texts that they confidently assure each other have divine origins, namely that of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I would not be so quick to point out that the stories about the patriarchs are very similar to patriarchs of other ancient Near East civilizations, and that is not only because I want to keep a pastoral assignment.

I recognize that it took me years to come to grips with how my favorite Bible stories had a historical, cultural, and indeed even a political context. While the goal of a full-time student is to learn many new and exciting concepts that shake up prior conceptions, parishioners are often part of faith communities for very different reasons. It is like a community garden: most people participate in the community garden for fellowship and to get fresh produce. I am not sure that most community gardeners would want to know the fine art of bonsai, and the sort of pruning that is part of bonsai is not generally healthy for a bell pepper plant. There is a time and place for such teaching, but the pastor should be careful in introducing concepts like non-traditional origins of holy scriptures.

However, I do think that teaching the story of the creation of the Hebrew Bible (and the New Testament for that matter) can be quite communally edifying. In the same way that Americans celebrate the creation of the Constitution, people who claim the Pentateuch as holy scripture should also celebrate the creation of the Torah. That it survived at all is an incredible testament to favorable circumstances that could be viewed as the very hand of Providence. The writing process is also a testament of how different religions gave rise to an amazing prophetic tradition that has an afterlife that continues today. As a pastor, I would like to celebrate the diverse origins of the Hebrew Bible instead of hide them.

Various faith traditions claim that God is still speaking in the world today, including several Christian denominations. In my own Methodist tradition, I understand that scripture is only one-quarter of the revelation of God. Just as the writers of the Hebrew Bible used their creative and rational faculties to draw from millennia of ancient Near East mythology, increasingly Christians today draw from a variety of religious traditions to understand the world around them. This is the exciting, relatively new realm of postmodern interpretation, whether post-colonial, womanist, or some other tradition. In deconstructing metanarratives about the origins of holy scriptures, I become free to engage in the same creative processes that my spiritual ancestors did thousands of years ago. It is a can of theological worms worth opening.

Messiah of the misfits, marginalized, & minjung

Jesus of the People, by Janet McKenzie,
1999,  http://www.janetmckenzie.com/

When I was in college I did what I thought were some pretty intense Bible studies with my campus fellowship. After two weeks in seminary, maaaybe those Bible studies don’t seem quite as intense as they seemed when I was a sophomore at dear Bucknell, tucked away in the central Pennsylvania hills. But hey, times change. The Bible study that InterVarsity pushed hardest was a semester-long class on the first half of the Gospel of Mark. I did that with some of my closest friends, somehow interpreting Jesus’ cross-country trips as a pirate in a Winnebago. Studying the Bible does weird things to you, I guess. But while I can’t say that any of my classes for credit struck me and challenged me the way Mark study did. In fact, I enjoyed that study so much that I spent the week after classes ended that year studying the second half of Mark. That, too, was an amazing experience where I saw God’s Spirit whip around the room and inspire us to raise $5,000 to make sure one of my best friends could go back to school the next semester. It was awesome.

But looking back, there was something that could have been better about those Bible studies. See, we finished Mark 1, as we called the first-half Bible study, with the first half of today’s Gospel reading. I’m sure that ending the semester that way was intentional. Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah, so after a semester of studying an account about Jesus, who do we say Jesus is? (Hint: we do have a preferred answer.)

The problem is that I don’t think the story should be cut up that way because Peter only gives an incomplete answer. Peter answers Jesus question, “Who do you say that I am?” with “You are the Messiah,” so let’s dig into what exactly that means. Messiah, or the Greek title Christ, means “anointed one”, and there actually several people in the Old Testament were “anointed ones”, usually with monarchic and militarist implications. During the 1^st century Palestine under Roman occupation, a lot of folks were looking for such a messiah. You know, someone who would take names and kick arse.

So maybe when someone answers with Peter’s words to Jesus’ question, we should then ask, whose Messiah?

 Moving forward in the story, Jesus does start to define what kind of messiah he’ll be—one who will suffer, be rejected by the political bosses, die along the way, but then rise again after three days, so don’t worry. So hold up, where’s the glory to that? Peter says something along those lines, with maybe some fisherman’s preferred speech, and probably reminds Jesus what a messiah actually does. Except Jesus doesn’t need that. Jesus immediately tells Peter whose messiah that is—namely Satan’s.

Btw (pronounced bee-tee-dubs for short), that’s the second time Satan shows up in Mark’s Gospel. The first time was Jesus temptation in the wilderness. Connection, anyone?

So if Jesus’ way of doing Messiah isn’t about kicking Gentile oppressors’ arse and plates heaped with steaming glory, it must be something less appealing. Or at least at first. But take a look at who Jesus talks to. It’s not the apostles; it’s the crowd. In Greek the word is “ochlos”.  Korean liberation theologian Ahn Byung-Mu noted that this word is found throughout Mark’s Gospel referring to crowds, but especially when Jesus is curing sick and unclean people and generally caring for the folks that the Pharisees marginalized with their interpretation of Jewish law. For Korean liberation theologians, these folks are represented by the minjung, a marginalized group in that country, and their theology is named after them.

So whose Messiah is Jesus? Well, it kinda sounds like the misfits, marginalized, and left-behind folks’ Messiah, the ochlos’ Messiah. And when Jesus talks about suffering and how his followers must also suffer, maybe it’s because those folks are already suffering. I’m Methodist, and I love me some John Wesley, but I’ve really connected with Martin Luther’s concept of the theology of the cross. Jesus Christ, the Messiah, chose the path of the poor, the desperate, even the criminal, and he suffered like they suffer. Like they continue to suffer. And when Jesus warns against being ashamed of the Messiah, I must believe that Jesus is also warning against being ashamed the ochlos, the poor, desperate masses that so want to free of their situation.

However, there is a second reason why Jesus tells the crowd that his followers must expect suffering, specifically from persecution. See, Jesus had this practice of not only hanging out with the ochlos, but he also brought them into the center of the stage with him. Unclean women take precedence over the child of a local political boss. Lame folks distract from the sabbath laws. And Jesus parties with the loan shark whom he just called into his inner circle. Being with the ochlos is fine and good with the ruling class as long as the invisible curtains of caste remains, but when Jesus tear through that curtain…well, he ends up suffering, rejected by the ruling class, and eventually executed.

And Jesus calls us, his followers, to do the same.

I am truly proud and humbled that I am in a place that takes solidarity with the ochlos seriously. I like to call First Trinity the Church of the Misfits and Dissidents, and it is really unique. Last week at Hildegard Rastutin’s beautiful funeral we talked about how and why she loved this place. It’s so open and welcoming. Open enough that even why I had a conversation with Hildegard about religion, her response was lending me her copy of the Book of Mormon, because, you know, it’s important to learn about other people’s traditions. Yes, this is the Church of the Misfits and Dissidents, and it’s great.

However, let’s take our solidarity with the ochlos of Bridgeport and Chicago even further. Let’s follow in Jesus example and tear down that invisible sheet between our ruling class and our ochlos. It’s a wall made of numbers, and it separates revenue and expenses on the ledger. It’s a wall that separates the sick from needed health care, unemployed workers from jobs, students from a good education, neighbors from a 31^st Street bus. Dear friends, tearing down that wall is as much the work of the Messiah as clothing the naked for a day. And it is what will bring us up close and personal with the persecution of the Messiah.

So I ask you the same question my campus minister asked my class at the end of my grand study of Mark: who do you think Jesus is? But if you answer like Peter, “the Messiah,” be ready for me to ask a follow-up question: whose Messiah is this Jesus? I pray that you, as part of the ochlos, the minjung, this group of despised, misfit, and marginalized folks, answer “This Jesus is my Messiah.”

Upstream or downstream: a reflection from a kayak

The central Pennsylvania sky had cleared, and the sun was shining over the green ridges into the river. I paddled my kayak towards the western shore of the Susquehanna with my sister a few yards behind me. Herons and egrets took off as we approached them, and the nearby train tracks rumbled with coal-laden cars dieseling their way south. I had forgotten how beautiful this country is and how much it is a part of me.

I think it’s easy to forget our connection with the land when one lives in a large metropolitan area. I know that’s been true for me after living two years on the South Side of Chicago. The experience of going to sleep with the sound of crickets and frogs around hardly compares with the voices, car horns, and sirens that are the normal city night’s soundtrack.

My three days in central Pennsylvania were part of a longer vacation that was otherwise urban. I had started with a conference in Arlington, Virginia where we celebrated over 60 years of young adults in mission in the United Methodist Church. Next I moved to Philadelphia where several friends and family members have settled, and where soft pretzels lie down with the steak sandwiches (come, Lord Jesus). Then central PA, and now Pittsburgh, where I sip yerba mate with my cousin in the shadow of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning (don’t judge).

However, the question that seems to keep surfacing is one about the future. I begin seminary at Chicago Theological Seminary in September, and I can’t even imagine what kind of adventures wait for me there. But the question is less about seminary and more about where God is calling me in ministry. I’m talking about geographical location. John Wesley famously declared that “the world is my parish” in response to mounting pressure for him to take his father’s place at the rectory in Epworth, England, but every vocation occurs in a geographical and cultural context.

I have recently seen the stark contract between two contexts that I have called home. One is urban Chicago, a wildly diverse and dynamic setting, a setting which has been my home for the last two years and will be my home for the next three years as well. People come and go like a Lake Michigan breeze. The other area is central Pennsylvania, where rolling mountain ridges seem to stand guard against sudden, unexpected changes, and generation after generation maintain traditions that run deeper than any social media thread.

I’ve met people who have left central Pennsylvania and never plan to come back, and I’ve met others who did indeed return after a time of personal growth. I can see how my experience in community organizing and interfaith work could easily fit in one conference, but I also see room for growth in the other. I’ve gone to two United Methodist annual conferences in two years, I’ve seen two very different styles for ecclesiastic culture, but now both of those conferences are welcoming new leadership in the episcopacy. Where does that leave me?

I make some connections with my short foray into kayaking in the shallow Susquehanna waters. I had tried so hard to make my way upstream, but I found that I couldn’t pass a set of rapids no matter how hard I tried. However, by going downstream just a bit, I managed to continue upstream by starting up the Juniata River, which joins the Susquehanna at my hometown. God has called me to address root problems that plague our varied communities, and my experiences in Chicago have given me tools to fight those problems. However, I don’t need to always fight my way upstream through rapids that push me backwards and might even overturn me if I’m not careful. God is making a path for me that may require to me go downstream before I start to address root problems further upstream. How far downstream will I need to go, and where might that other river take me? I don’t know, but I have faith that God will provide a way to the source of life that will quench the thirst of a dry land. I just need to keep the nose of my kayak straight and paddle hard.

The confluence of the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers at Duncannon, Pennsylvania.

Wrestling with Doubt at Penuel

Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange by 
Eugène Delacroix 

When I was growing up, I liked to be the one with all the right answers. I remember some of my classmates in elementary school asked me if I was genius, and now I have to wonder what exactly I was saying or how I was saying it that they lumped me in with such an abnormal group of folks. At the time, I depended on my book knowledge and ability to BS to make up for a poor self-perception. It's not easy to be the fat, four-eyed kid in grade school, but at least I had my answers.

I am no longer so overweight, and I usually wear contact lenses instead of glasses these days. I'm also still pretty skilled in BS. After all, what else should a B.A. give you? However, I'm not so sure about the answers thing any more. I still take pride in having a lot of knowledge in a variety of areas, but I'm a lot more comfortable with responding, "I don't know" to questions.

That includes questions about my faith.

I am undeniably Christian. I honestly do believe in almost all the points of the Nicene Creed, though at some points I might want to qualify my beliefs a bit. I even believe in the physically impossible things, like the immaculate conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As I believe in an omnipotent deity, it's not difficult for me to believe that God could or would suspend the laws of physics to make a really good point.

However, the really tough questions, the ones about suffering, the existence of evil, the tightrope walk of Arminian free will, sometimes require an "I don't know". And the confession of uncertainty easily leads to doubt. If I don't know exactly what the origin of evil is, then how can I be sure of the benevolence of the God I worship? Or even her existence?

In the church we have few safe places where we can safely ask those questions. An awful lot of our ecclesial programming involves a confident leader proclaiming "truth! truth!" and the assumed response from the pewed followers is "truth received". And then we sing another song and go our separate ways, our lingering questions trailing after us like shadows before the twilight hour.

I think this tendency to leave hard questions and lingering doubt at the church doors also plays out in the kind  of discussion we do have during Sunday school, Bible study, and other programmed time. Many church-goers avoid controversial social issues because we will likely find disagreement, and disagreement violates the "truth proclaimed-truth received" equation.

I was reminded of this when I was in New York City with the newest cohort of young adult missionaries of the United Methodist Church. I was co-facilitating discussion about community organizing and worker justice, and I posed the question, "what has been your experience of justice in your faith context?" Several of the missionaries admitted that their churches never talked about justice. I had to admit back to them that my church had rarely talked about justice when I was growing up.

Of course there are theological reasons why a church may not discuss social justice issues like labor, women's rights, peace, and the environment. That church may follow a theology of glory, recognizing that this world is awful and broken but Jesus Christ will deliver us from evil in the next life. I personally disagree with such an emphasis on glory, siding much more Martin Luther in a theology of the cross, where Jesus Christ is present with us in all the tears and blood and shit that we encounter in our temporal lives.

However, the problem is that we have little space to discuss these important theological differences. Our consumerist culture begs us to continue shopping and watching the Olympics, which is, by the way, brought to you by Ralph Lauren. I think we often try to consume our faith in a similar way, but authentic faith is not to be swallowed whole. Authentic faith comes in the form of an unexpected opponent with whom we wrestle until daybreak, and even then we leave with a hip out of socket, a form that Jacob called "Penuel" because he saw the face of God and survived (Gen. 32:22-32).

I pray that we will create places we may call "Penuel", even if we must leave that place limping. However, if we leave limping in doubt, I have faith that God will carry us even when we are unable to walk.

The Missional Life Beyond Formal Commissioning

"What are you thinking about?", my friend Rachel asked me. "You just look so pensive."

Rachel Keller and me (Joe Hopkins) in New York Harbor,
with the Statue of Liberty to the right.

I was deep in thought, lost in my imagination of what the tens of millions of immigrants must have thought as they moved across New York Harbor to Ellis Island. What did the Statue of Liberty mean to them when they first saw it?

I was on one of the New York Harbor ferries that transport tourists from Manhattan to Ellis Island and Liberty Island. With me were my United Methodist young adult missionary peers, a collection of 10 people from all over the United States who had been sent out for 2-3 years to serve in children's homes, youth centers, homeless service centers, and advocacy organizations (among others). We had converged on New York City to celebrate the completion of our terms and to continue our commitment to justice in the world.

But what would that look like? What does the future ever look like?

In the last two years I had served in the national office of Interfaith Worker Justice, working diligently to help coordinate campaigns, facilitate communication, and make sure the logistical i's and t's were dotted and crossed. IWJ had sent me to Madison, Wisconsin at the high point of union protests in February 2011 and then to Indianapolis in January of this year just before right-to-work legislation passed in the Indiana state house. Outside of the IWJ context, I had developed roots in the near-South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, getting involved in a little Lutheran church, helping to form a new grassroots power organization, and living the daily chaos that is my housing co-op.

I brought those memories, and many, many others, with me to the US-2 missionary end-terms. And my peers brought their own triumphs, setbacks, pains, and joys with them to share with the rest of us and with the staff of the General Board of Global Ministries.

However, we didn't just come together to share our individual pasts. As young adult missionaries, we learned about the uglier sides of church and society--how people are excluded and oppressed for a large array of reasons. While we mourned the pain of those experiences, we also got righteously pissed off. How can we as a church deny the full humanity of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer sisters and brothers? How can we collectively wash our hands clean of the blood that runs in the production and distribution lines of goods we use every day? How can we claim vitality by consolidating power into fewer and fewer hands, leaving all but the already privileged and powerful out in the dark?

We couldn't, wouldn't, and didn't claim such preposterously anti-Christ-like ideas. In response to our collective sharing, we made the compact to continue our mission, though under different auspices. We were leaving our placement sites for grad school, seminary, and the larger workforce, but we would continue to carry our commission with us. We do not need the hands of a bishop to urge us to justice, though we sure do hope that bishops will join us in our missional lives.

A few years ago, I learned from a Dominican priest at the Universidad Católica de Argentina that we can look at our lives as perpetual pilgrimages. David Wildman at Global Ministries would argue that we are all migrants, "undocumented Christians", living in an increasingly hostile world. So we wander, guided by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, in the missional life where we cannot return to the ignorance of a materialist, middle-class life.

In the missional life, I live in solidarity with the tens of millions of people who left all they knew to find a new home, beginning at Ellis Island. In the missional life, missio dei connects me to my young adult missionary peers and the global, apostolic and catholic church.

In the missional life, what I call the Red Poppy Fields, I hope to find you there, too.

10 Lessons I Learned from Dad

It may come a day late, but I was hoping that a Father's Day card I wrote four years would somehow reappear in my parents' house in Pennsylvania. My plan was to copy down the text and upload it to this blog.  My ever-suffering mother couldn't find it, which means that  it can't be found. Period.

In any case, when I was wishing my dad a happy Father's Day from 700 miles away, we did come up with a majority of the points from that card. I had written it early on the morning of a Sunday in June 2008, just before I left for my summer internship at a church 30 miles away. I recall that it remained on my folks' refrigerator for a year or two.

10 LESSONS I LEARNED FROM DAD 

10. Anything can be fixed with enough duct tape. 

9. Keep that left arm straight, your head down, and enjoy the walk. 

8. CHECK YOUR DAMN OIL. 

7. It's not so weird to have Enya, the Who, and Jay-Z on the same playlist. 

6. Don't point that muzzle at nobody. 

5. 99% of lawyers give the other 1% a bad name. 

4. Once you've spread few yards of tanbark, you're allowed a few cuss words now and again. 

3. Knowing why the guy need $10 for gas isn't as important as actually giving him $10 for gas. 

2. If your crazy idea didn't work out, then it probably came your own head and not from God. 

1. Remember to treat the janitor the exact same way you treat the bishop.

Thanks, Dad, for all the lessons over the years. I bet you've got some more for me yet to come.