April 29, 2006
having children
You have considered that because Christ was born into this world and suffered and died, He can relate to us. But did it ever occur to you that you have been born into a world of risk and suffering in order for you to be able to relate to Him?
I have never understood the people in my own generation. They don't want children. Ok, obviously a lot of them do, and have them, but honestly, why are there are so many who don't want children or fear having them?
What is this fear? Is it purely a fear of responsibility? If that's the case, the fear comes in two flavors; the selfish and the selfless. The selfish ones patently fear the loss of liberty which having children seems to entail. But the selfless fear is, to be perfectly blunt, more repulsive to me. This is the fear which says, "I'm not able to handle this responsibility, and it would be unfair to the child to be born into my care.
Posh. There may be good reasons not to have children, but if it really does come down to fear, then shame and fie. After all, look at me. I'm a father, and do I have fear? I'm scared shitless.
Shall I enumerate the reasons I'm terrified that I'll ruin my son? They are too many. Suffice it to say my mistakes and shortcomings give me cause for profound, agonizing terror. My family is a broken, rag-tag cadre of lag behinds, starting with the head, me. (I'm only telling you how I feel, not what it may look like to my gracious and encouraging friends.)
Let me say this unequivically: my son deserves better. I so deeply wish for him to have better than the best I can cobble together.
Tough bananas. He didn't get better, he got me. And now for that thing that comforts me in all this miserable angst: my son and I got the same deal. And my father got the same deal. All my friends got the same deal. We were born, utterly without choice or even forknowledge, to sub-par parents. I don't know anybody who got perfect parents.
But we all got life. And as tough as this life is --and as painful as it is to see how tough it is and will continue to be for my son-- I can honestly say that every single day I am thankful to be alive. I'm thankful for both the pain and the joy, for both are a gift, and I'm thankful that my Heavenly Father is also a father for my son.
Having children is like agreeing to go over Niagra Falls in a barrel. And not just any barrel, but this barrel right here: this shoddy-looking, banged up barrel with the brackish water sloshing around in the bottom. And you're going right now, right this second, with barely enough time to hand your car keys, wallet and cell phone to your new, shady looking friend standing nearby. That's what having children is like. In some sense that's what it'll always be like, no matter how long you put it off, or how well you try to prepare. If it's God's time for you to have children, there is no such thing as getting prepared first because He has already prepared you in ways you cannot percieve.
Besides, c'mon: it's Niagra Falls. As you step into your unworthy craft, the corona of spray makes the sunlight dance even as its damp chill raises bumps on your arms. You couldn't go on a better adventure. You couldn't go on a better day.
Posted by joel at 03:03 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
July 11, 2005
the love life of joel hoagland (page 128)
"Joel, I think we should break up."
I looked at my dearest friend, and tried to fathom what she meant. "Break what up?"
But she didn't know, any more than I did. She talked for a while about what other people think, and very little about us. And I listened to her heart while she spoke, and her heart said I am afraid. You don't know what it's like to be afraid.
And then came the moment, as we walked along beside the water, when there was nothing more I could say. After an awkward pause, she turned and walked another direction, and I walked on in numbness and confusion. And that is how I came into the second grade with no friends.
Pamela had been my only classmate in kindergarten and the first grade. Both our parents taught in the tiny private school which we attended, and so even as kindergarteners, we stayed at school the whole day until well after the other students had left. After our schoolwork was done (very often by midmorning) we would play all day long.
I suppose the older students were jealous, though I couldn't sympathize with such an emotion myself today; children are meant to be happy, and anyone who resents their happiness is still a child himself. But it was reported to my father that I had kissed Pamela, and on the mouth, no less. If I did, I dearly wish I could remember it. But I have no recollection of any such thing ever happening. In any case, I was punished, but before my father punished me, he talked to me about girls. He told me that girls were to be protected and honored. And he recited a nursery rhyme to me: "Georgie, porgie, pudding pie, kissed the girls and made them cry."
I don't remember if I ever made Pamela cry, but I do remember that she seemed to hate me, right up to the eight grade, the last year we attended the same school. She became firmly attached to Cheryl, a girl who first appeared on the scene in second grade, and who could beat up two boys her age at the same time. Pamela would sit next to Cheryl in our eighth grade Greek class, and ridicule me with the vitriol that none of my other classmates ever showed. And Cheryl would laugh.
It hurts to be left behind on the shore of Mona Lake, to be cast aside as a social liability by a pretty girl afraid I could not help her in the pecking order of the second grade. Such pain is a cruel headmaster teaching us to fear. But there is a truth bigger than all the heartache in the world: "Perfect love casts out fear." [1 John 4:18] I do know what it's like to be afraid. But I also know what it's like to fly heedless of the fear into the teeth of the storm; for to love at the risk of pain is the only love worthy of the name. I hope, wherever she is, that Pamela is not afraid.
Posted by joel at 12:40 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
June 29, 2005
signs and wonders
"It is a wicked and a perverse generation," Jesus said to the Pharisees, "which seeks for a sign." Perversely enough, I seem to have a gift for making signs (in case you were seeking).
It started with last night's post with the church signs, created at churchsigngenerator.com. But my sign making days have just begun, because I've suddenly found I'm good at it. I just kinda look at a blank sign, and suddenly it starts to speak to me. Take this fortune cookie, for instance:
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The sign of the fortune cookie couldn't have been written any other way (don't bother trying, I already checked). But even more "sign"-ificant are those moments when a sign comes together in a single word:
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I also prize signs which seem to tell a story, or at least the beginning of a story:
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All subtlety aside, sometimes a budding young signmaker must demonstrate versatility through directness:
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The ultimate aim of signmaking is always commercial, of course. At the end of the series you must work in a sly yet captivating product placement:
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Don't be afraid, when making signs, to borrow or even steal other people's ideas. If someone else has spent millions on a television ad campaign which is pure genious, for heaven's sake, use their material! And use their tools and software, too. For instance, I shamelessly copped all these signs from the homeless advocacy website sparesomechange.com and didn't even give them an attribution until the bottom of my blog entry.
Posted by joel at 12:41 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
March 02, 2005
the alpha wolf
The alpha wolf is out;
with jaws, and throat, and tooth of grout.
He burns a slender track upon the heath
and catches up the foundlings in his teeth.
He passes in a hungry blur
the horse's hoof, the cowboy's boot and spur.
His knotted belly is all hair and reproduction;
a wary glance and growl is his seduction.
His fate is in his glands;
his chartered firth leads forth to barren lands.
He pauses at the ridge's peak
to scent the frigid darkness and to speak.
The elk, the moose, the mountain cat,
startled in their distant habitat,
knuckle to their knees,
moan and gaze white-eyed at the husky trunks of trees.
He haunts the creekbed plans
and harries grizzled claimers at their pans.
They hush their conversation out,
ease to the saddles, seize a bolt of thunder and turn about.
© Joel Helbling, 03/2005 (all rights reserved)
Posted by joel at 09:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
February 07, 2005
the love life of joel hoagland (page 62)
"There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a maiden. --Proverbs 30:18,19
Once when I was a boy, I asked a girl to be my girlfriend. I wrote her a note which read, "It is with the utmost respect that I ask you to be my girlfriend." The note was intercepted by her teacher, who read it, and was so impressed she waited until the end of the class and then let some other teachers read it. Eventually she handed it back to the girl for whom I'd written the note. Her name was Jennifer.
After that, nothing ever happened between us. I think we talked a time or two. But I remember distinctly, a time shortly after she'd received my note, when she crossed the lobby amid her bevy of friends. Her path was perpendicular to my rapt attention, but she looked sideways at me with a coy smile and then passed on. She was in the eighth grade. I was in the ninth.
I'm sure I left a very minor impression on Jennifer, but I'd like think, at least, that I was no hurt to her, for I cared for her. It was my awkwardness, as much as old-fashioned gentility, which conspired to keep me a paragon of circumspection and virtue in my youth. I hurt others later, and was also hurt. But I wouldn't change the way my love life has played out, even if I could.
It costs much to love, and it seems, at certain moments, that we lose more than win. Do not regret, and do not despair, but hope in the fact of Love in this world. Each of us who loves another is infinitesimal but glittering, like a single grain of sand on a paradisaical shore, basking in the empyrean light of the Love of God. Who can understand why one person comes to fix his heart upon a beloved?
Posted by joel at 08:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
January 29, 2005
the love life of joel hoagland (page 32)
"I'm sorry," she said, "I can't."
"Why not?" I asked, switching the phone to my other ear with shaking hands.
"Because I hate folk music."
"Oh really?"
"Yes."
"Is that a fact?"
"It is indeed."
"Well," I huffed, "it just so happens that I hate...help me out here, I need a retort. What do I hate?"
"Good music?" she offered.
"I hate good music!"
"In all it's forms," she added.
"Especially in all its forms," I rejoined.
"What time does it start?" she asked.
"How would I know? It's starting all the time. But I don't pay any attention, because I just hate it."
"No, silly, the concert."
"Eight pm. Why, are you planning a protest?"
"If it's bad enough, yes. Pick me up at seven."
"Good idea."
"That remains to be seen."
[It never happens this way. The only truth in this story is the part about the shaking hands. But this is the conversation I woulda, coulda, shoulda had, or hope I someday will have.]
Posted by joel at 02:20 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
January 25, 2005
the love life of joel hoagland (page 16)
"How would you describe...her?" she pointed with her uptilted nose across the leaf-strewn grass at a young woman in an oversized green sweater.
"Hmmmmm."
"Sensuous?"
"Well, no. I'm saving that word."
"You're saving it? Well. Chivalry is not dead."
"It's a good word, and I might want to use it later."
"Oh? And for what might you want to use it?"
I turned to look at her, and saw the crinkles around her laughing eyes, and knew that this was serious. "Suppose that sometime I wanted to call you sensuous," I began. "Would you really want to be thinking of her, in her manufactured Land's End innocence at the very moment when I'm trying to call you sensuous?"
"Well, that's inevitable now, isn't it?"
"I hope, if you remember her, you'll remember her in contrast and not in comparison."
"What's wrong with her?"
"Nothing at all. She has a kind of perfection to us from this distance, and in her anonymity, but that perfection could never be sensuousness."
"And why not?"
"Because sensuality does not exist without potential. For a man to find a woman sensuous he must imagine the possibility of intimacy with her."
"And you can't imagine being intimate with Miss Land's End?"
"I wouldn't say 'can't.' But I certainly don't."
"Because you're preoccupied with me."
"No. Not necessarily. I mean, perhaps not. I don't think so."
"Your confidence inspires me."
"Yes, well, this is my minefield gait. Rather stilted, I admit. What I mean is that there is nothing about this green-sleeved autumn sprite that bewitches me. Yes, you're here, and you're always a distraction," I gave her a glance of mock-irritation, "but I'm not convinced that were you absent or even unknown to me that she" --I nodded across the lawn-- "would somehow become captivating."
"So I'm captivating. How so?"
"Your confidence inspires me." I paused for several seconds waiting for the punchline to be acknowledged, but she looked at me, disconcerted.
"My confidence?"
I laughed out loud, embarrassed. "No, sorry, it was a joke...Ok, it's like...when I first saw you, I became quiet."
"Tell me about it. I thought you'd never come over and talk to me."
"Very funny. I mean before that. When I first saw you, I felt completely and utterly content to watch you."
"What was I doing?"
"Folding napkins."
"You fell in love with me while I was folding napkins?"
I looked at her for a second, to let her know I wasn't teasing her, and then said, "Yes. Quite so."
"Why on earth?"
"Indeed, I've often pondered that question. It was in the silence of your hands. They were swift yet unhurried; confident but subtle and deft. Also it was in your concentration. You seemed utterly unaware of the rest of the world, as if you were alone in the room with nothing to do all day but fold napkins."
She was silent for a moment, looking out across the park at the orange and gold maple trees that lined the bike path. "So that was sensuous?"
"I wouldn't say so, no. But you captivated me at that moment in such a way that eventually, inevitably, I saw you as sensuous."
She was quiet again for a moment. "So eventually you saw me as beautiful."
I looked over at her sharply. "Now we're talking about beauty?"
"You said 'eventually'," she accused.
"Sensuality and beauty are two different things."
She looked at me skeptically, but I was delighted to see a hint of humor in her eyes again.
"Mountains are beautiful, but not sensuous. Ditto for diamonds, waterfalls and macaws. Crum, if you want talk about beauty, sweater girl there is certainly beautiful. My point is that when I first saw you, you were beautiful, but not merely beautiful. And that, for me, is the very zygote of sensuality."
"Interesting choice of words: 'zygote of sensuality'."
"Well I couldn't very well say 'the seed of sensuality,' could I?"
"How about zeitgeist?"
I winced slightly and shook my head. "The soul of sensuality. See, that just doesn't work either."
"Sole of sensuality," she repeated. "It sounds like you stepped in something."
"I think it's obvious that I did."
She punched me in the arm. Then she put her head on my shoulder.
"The gestalt of sensuality," she said conclusively. I wished I'd thought of it first.
"I do believed you've singlehandedly saved that word."
"Good," she replied. "You can use it later."
Posted by joel at 01:19 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
