This Life, This Day

I don't know what your high school experience was like, but mine was awesome. Seriously, it was fantastic. My parents gave my siblings and myself the loving gift of sending us to a small private school in Nashville that was known for being 'different'. Many of our competing schools referred to it as 'Camp CPA' because of its unusually wholesome and easy going feel.

Our teachers were the finest, they could have easily taught at bigger, more expensive schools but they saw the worth in such an institution and invested in it whole heartedly. About two months ago, I had a half dozen or so of them over for dinner along with some of our alumni. It was a very precious night. What a treat to let these teachers know how much they meant to us and to get to spend an evening laughing, talking, listening and just fellowshipping together. We stayed up until the next morning giggling over childish jokes with our biology teacher (and there was even a legendary 'that's what she said' joke uttered by an English man...) and I think all of us were a little sad that our days at CPA were so far gone.

Today I was reminded why I remember that community so fondly.

Part of the mystique that surrounds CPA is how the community continues on even after you have left the halls. One, two, five, seven, eight years after graduating, I still respond sharply to the things that affect that family. Their triumphs bring me pride, their good tidings bring me joy and their trials carry in my heart.

A member of their family, Michael Daniel, a sophomore, passed away yesterday afternoon following a traumatic accident. I did not know Michael Daniel, I do not know the Daniel family, they are multiple generations younger in this academic genealogy than myself. But when I heard about his admission to the hospital, I followed the updates constantly-praying that one of the posts would bring good news.

And in a way, it did bring good news. Even in his death, the Daniel family still proclaimed God's goodness. What a testament of faith the following words are:

"Precious son.  Precious brother.  Precious uncle.  Precious friend.  Today we say goodbye to our Precious Michael.

A little after 6 PM Michael's earthly journey came to an end.  Though the original plan was to assess his condition tomorrow morning, his body had had enough.  And truly, it was Michael's way to do things on his own terms.  

Michael, we know, has gone home.  He is made new -- perfect and full of peace.  And in this we find peace too.

Over the past few days, there have been many prayers for a miracle.  God answered that prayer 17 years ago when he made Michael.  There have been many prayers for healing.  God answered this prayer by taking him home.

More to come this evening.  For now, we thank God for Michael, our miracle, and continue to pray for strength and faith."


Reading that reminded me of Soren Kierkegaard's work Fear And Trembling.  In Fear And Trembling, Kierkegaard uses Abraham's trip up the mountain with Isaac as an examination of faith and Abraham's belief in the promise God made to him. It's the same promise God has made to all of us: to love and protect us and never leave us. Such a hard promise to remember during hard circumstances. Kierkegaard elaborates:


"Yet Abraham believed, and believed for this life. Yea, if his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong...But Abraham believed precisely for this life, that he was to grow old in the land, honored by the people, blessed by his generation, remembered forever in Isaac, his dearest thing in life, whom he embraced with a love for which it would be a poor expression to say that he loyally fulfilled the father's duty of loving the son, as indeed is evinced in the words of the summons, ''the son whom thou lovest.'' Jacob has twelve sons, and one of them he loved; Abraham had only one, the son whom he loved. Yet Abraham believed and did not doubt, he believed the preposterous."


Here's to living today and recognizing that His promises of hope, peace and blessing are applicable not for the future but for this life, for this day. 


My heart goes out to the Daniel family and thanks them for being an example of embracing God's goodness today.


Blessings,


KB 
  

Before I Die...

"Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." 

-John Lennon

Last night I was perusing through one of my favorite websites, Good.Is and ran across this article about an artist named Candy Chang who converted an abandoned warehouse in New Orleans into a public bucket list. The side of the building has a chalkboard surface where people are encouraged to fill in the blank "before I die I want to...."write a book, travel, get married, save the world, etc. Such a neat use of space. 

I've never really made a 'bucket list' before. Honestly I had never heard the term until the movie "The Bucket List" was released a few years ago. Never saw, and no regrets. Seeing "The Bucket List" will not be on my 'bucket list'-pun intended. Apparently the concept of making a to-do list before you die is a pretty popular idea-there's even a website dedicated to people sharing their wish lists on Bucketlist.org. 

Obviously there is an immense opportunity to delve into the idea of something like a bucket list and I'm sure at some point I will but for now I will leave you with the words of  Brian Friel, one of the greatest playwrights from Ireland known most famously for Dancing at Lughnasa, who was notorious for his privacy. This was one of his rare answers in an interview and I think it's appropriate-just the facts of his life and goals that aren't overly heroic:

''I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit, read a lot, worry a lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the involvement, and hope that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at this moment."

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Listening to Ryan Adams' "Gold" as summer creeps into Tennessee

Death And All Its Friends

Awake
by Michael Heffernan

I lay down in my bed and went to sleep

but only after worrying that the pain

that came up in my chest, seemingly deep

inside it where my heart was, was a plain

signal that I might not survive the night

and could be lying cold beside my wife

when she got up, as she does, with the light,

to start another day in her own life,

while mine was over, unbeknown to us,

including me. As I was worrying

I went to sleep and woke up in four hours

to use the bathroom. Birds had begun to sing.

Two dogs were barking. Nothing perilous

had come to find us. What was ours was ours.

There is just something so painful when a period comes to a close. And it's a repetitive process. Soccer season would come to a close and it wasn't just the hurt of not making it to the state championship, but it was sad knowing that this particular group of girls would never share this field again. Same feeling for high school and college graduations, people moving, breakups, etc. Even though these experiences usually don't end in death, there is still a finality to it. It's amazing how the situation, the context dictates so much of our experience with other people. Those moments are gone and there are plenty of more moments ahead-they're just different moments with a different cast and crew.

One of the vocational hazards of working in an ICU is that you encounter death a lot. And it is only a matter of time before you start to think of your own mortality. How will I die? Will it be painful? Will I get a chance to say goodbye? etc. These thoughts of mortality have even prompted me to draw up a last will and testament at the age of 26. Maybe I'm strange, but I don't find that morbid at all.

Last week I heard a message on death and its relationship with Christianity. We focus so much on life and resurrection in Christianity but I personally had never stopped and thought about the death side of it to this degree. The pastor delivering the message suggested that everything we believe about Christianity, about Christ and about who He was hinged on what we thought about death-more specifically, did Christ really die? Did He really go to a place beyond goodbyes for three days? Because if He didn't really conquer death, then that changes Christianity. And if He didn't die, does that affect your life at all?

This is where the message has stayed with me for the last eight days: if Christ didn't raise up after three days of no pulse, would you feel like you had wasted your life or would you be irritated on the level of when they demoted Pluto from planet to star? To ask the question a different way: have you lived your life so sold out for Christ that if it turned out to be a hoax you would have felt robbed of a life wasted and not just annoyed at the biggest scam of all time? For myself, that was a convicting question.

It is so hard to discuss this topic well and be concise. I am choosing to be concise. And I am also choosing to leave you with Solomon Burke and Dolly Parton's duet "Tomorrow Is Forever". It's what I'm spinning today and it's a nice reminder that forever has yet to come.




Blessings,

KB

P.S. Solomon Burke's project "Nashville" is fantastic.