Category: Gratitude

For chosen family

On the 25th day, I am grateful for chosen family.

Renee and I have some friends in Raleigh named Karen and Toney who are retired jewelers, and they have had a life full of adventures. As a result, they have a wide range of friends from all over the world. And when we lived in their city, so far from our own families, they sort of adopted us. A mutual friend said once that Karen and Toney collect people. And we were part of their collection.

They lived in a large old house, filled with knick-knacks from their travels – there is the Persian rug brought back from Iran, over there the Buddha from India, the animal skin from the Southwest, the antique couch from Goodwill. It was an eclectic house, but in a good way.

And when we lived there, we went to their house for Thanksgiving. Everyone brought something, and just as their friends were eclectic, so was the meal – there was American style turkey and dressing, for sure, but there was also babaganoush, and eggrolls, and empanadas, and baklava. They would put out the invitation – if you don’t have a place to eat Thursday, well, now you do. Come as you are and bring what you can.

When you got there, the table was already full, but Karen would always say, ‘Don’t worry – we will make room”, and another chair magically appeared and people would scooch their chairs and now there was room for one more person at this most unlikely of feasts. By the end of the day there would be several tables added to the end of the dining room table that now extended into the living room.

And I am here to tell you, that would be the best meal you had all year, and the most diverse. The last year we were there we ate with, among others, an undocumented house painter, a professional dulcimer player, a nurse who worked on death row, a Syrian mathematician, a folk singer, and the woman who had worked the front desk at a nearby retirement community.

It was crowded, and there was lots of shuffling and “pardon me” and “let me scooch by”. There were kids playing and new people arriving and hugs and introductions and passing the potatoes and the deserts – my God, the desserts.

And after the meal the musical instruments would come out, and impromptu jam sessions would happen and people who had other obligations would come by to visit. Their daughter’s ex-husband was a vegetarian, and since he often had to work on Thanksgiving he would come by during this point, and Karen had always made sure there was food he could eat, and a plate would be made and his children would surround him as he ate, and tell him of their adventures that day.

And it would last until late in the evening, with people snacking the rest of the day, and guitar picking in the living room and camera flashes and…

It was always a very good day.

But we also got invited to birthday parties. Dance recitals. Block parties. Christmas. Easter. It was lovely – we were part of their family. You instantly had plans for every holiday, you had people who loved you, you had people who would miss you when you moved away. And people you miss since having moved away.

It seems to me that there are two types of family: those you are born to, and those you choose. And while the former is a biological fact, the second is a decision. On this thanksgiving day, I’m grateful for our friends who decided we are part of their family, and who have modeled for us, again and again over the years, the sort of lives we want to have.

For childhood memories of Thanksgiving

On the 24th day, I’m grateful for childhood memories of Thanksgiving.

Until the age of 12 or so, we spent every Thanksgiving at my uncle’s house in Memphis.

He was my Dad’s half-brother, from my grandmother’s first marriage, and he was 23 years older than older than Dad. After her first husband’s death, she had refused to remarry until her son was out of the house, as she thought it would be unfair to him, and from concerns that any new father would treat his step-son differently from his natural children. She had had a wicked step-mother herself, and knew the risks.

My uncle was a good man, tall and handsome, with shocking red hair and long deft fingers. He was a butcher, and had worked as a union meat cutter until he opened a barbeque restaurant, and was solidly middle-class. His wife was a short woman with a lot of improbable blonde hair that was always tortured into shape and held against its will by a generous application of some sort of shellac. Their grown daughter had married a musician, and while they all said the word “musician”, you got the sense from the way it was said they really meant to say degenerate.

Their house was a large brick colonial on a cul-de-sac, with a yard meant for looking at and not playing in. There was a room designated as the parlor, which children were not allowed to be in, and in which it seemed no one ever laughed. My aunt was a woman to whom propriety mattered, and who firmly believed children should be seen and not heard. Appearances were important to her.

I can only imagine how we wrecked her world when the folks from the country showed up, with their loud children and the huge station wagon, loaded down with the family from Mississippi. Every time I see the scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation when the family arrives, I imagine it must have been a lot like that at my uncle’s house on Thanksgiving.

They had a dining room that one got the sense that nobody ate at the rest of the year, and it had a huge table, with place settings and food set out in bowls and trays, served family style. People who hadn’t prayed out loud in 364 days pronounced a blessing over the food, and we ate food that had attachments and memories: Aunt Louise’s cranberry sauce, Mom’s fudge pies, Jamie’s turkey.

After the meal, my uncle and the musician would watch football and Dad would sit in there with them, but he had no interest in the game. I would play with the other children that were there, upstairs, out of the way, while the women all talked in the kitchen and tried to put order to things, before we would all pack up and head back to the country, to our small rectangular home on 33 acres, where the plates did not match and we had no rooms one did not use and that had whole fields where one could run and romp.

When my Dad’s aunt died when I was 12, we quit going to my uncle’s for Thanksgiving. I’m not sure why, other than she was the one who sort of held the family together, and the bridge between the very urbane middle-class life my dad’s half-brother had, and the hand to mouth existence we had in rural Mississippi. My uncle died in 1993, 11 years or so after the last of those meals, and I haven’t seen any of his family since the funeral. I don’t know how any of them are doing, how they made out, anything.

Despite my having had at least 37 Thanksgivings since the last time I was at their house for Thanksgiving, those meals still represent the Platonic ideal of Thanksgiving for me, and what I picture in my head when I hear that you are having Thanksgiving at your house. They also sum up for me the best part of this holiday, whatever its trash colonial origins: Unlikely, complicated people coming together to celebrate each other and our common memories, all the while building better ones.

I hope you have a good time tomorrow, however and with whomever you are celebrating. And if you are the one hosting, go easy on yourself. Something will go wrong. And in 10 years, nobody will care at all, and all they will remember is that on that day, they were loved.

Our yard

On the 23rd day, I’m grateful for our yard.

By the time I was born, we still had 33 acres of land from the original 120, the difference having been sold off in crisis sized increments over the decades before I was born. But we didn’t have a yard – not really. We had the part of the land we cut with a lawnmower and the part we cut with the bush-hog and the part that had cows or was the garden. But we didn’t have a “yard”.

My great-aunt had a proper yard – with a fence around it and foundation plantings and all of that. So did the people who owned the grocery store my grandmother had worked at. I remember they had rose bushes in the corner of a giant zoysia lawn, with concrete stepping stones crossing it, going from the driveway to their front door. I had never seen stepping stones before then, and of course every time we went over I would pretend the grass was burning hot lava and I would hop from stone to stone, unscathed.

They also had a huge covered front porch, with a swing on one end, and I dreamed of one day being rich enough to have my own porch swing.

From 1990 until 2013, I lived in places (like apartments) that didn’t have yards, or places where I didn’t have control of the yard (like duplexes). But in 2013, we bought a house. With a yard.

It was just under a 5th of an acre – 50 feet by 150 or so. The front yard was 50×25. I didn’t care – Over the five years we lived there, I turned it into a riotous cottage garden, packed with raspberries, blueberries, peaches, plums, roses, crabapples, black-eyed Susan’s, chickens, irises, and more. And there were concrete stepping stones across the tiny strip of lawn that led from the driveway to our front door.

Sadly, it was really my yard, not ours. Try as she might, Renee never really felt safe in that yard, alone. So while she appreciated it, there was no real sense she enjoyed being in it. She wouldn’t sit on the porch and hang out, for example.

Well, partly it was that she didn’t feel safe – but also we had a neighbor across the street who had poor boundaries. I lived across from him for two years, and never knew his name – he told us to call him “Moose”, and he had the habit of appending the word “Baby” to my name and calling Renee “darlin”.

“Hey, Hugh Baby!” he would shout across the street when I would walk out on the porch to check the mail. He did not have air conditioning, so he would sit on his porch shirtless and in boxer shorts most of the summer, shouting at people driving by and talking to people on his speaker phone. It added that special something to the experience. He would shout across the street – a distance of maybe 75 feet, porch to porch, rather than come over to talk.

One day I was doing something in my yard, and the roses were all abloom and it was just a carnival of color. This must have impressed Moose, because he walked out of his house, saw me, and yelled, “Hugh Baby, you are one green thumb motherfucker!”

Part of mine and Renee’s agreement moving here was that if we were going to disrupt our lives and move literally halfway across the continent, she got to pick the house. When we moved here, the housing cost differential was such that we could afford and bought a much more suburban-sized ranch house, with a large half acre yard on a quiet street, a street where people park in driveways and not on the curb, a street where people walk their dogs and will stop and chat with you as they go by. And most importantly, it’s a yard she feels safe spending time in.

Cottage garden is still my preferred aesthetic, but it takes longer in such a large yard. But it’s coming – there are rose bushes and bottle trees and vine covered arbors and metal folk art in the front yard, including a three-foot-tall metal chicken, and in the spring, daffodils and paper whites and in summer, tons of cosmos and zinnias.

Our fenced in backyard is in process, with a large potager garden going in this winter, and my workshop and the chicken coop and fire pit, and a wildlife border surrounding the whole thing.

It doesn’t have a huge front porch, but last year, I built an arbor and a swing in the shade of our huge magnolia tree. Most afternoons, Renee will sit in the swing and listen to music on her headphones and just enjoy the space. I will often take a break around then, and go out and sit with her, and we will watch the hummingbirds and the butterflies and chat with the people who walk by.

And our neighbors across the street here still yell at me when they see me, but they are six and three and they shout and dance and wave until you notice them and wave back, and how could anyone ever be upset at that?

For my friends who are atheists.

On the 22nd day, I’m grateful for my friends who are atheists.

Growing up, I never knew any atheists.  Literally everyone in my world was a low-church protestant. Well, the rich people we knew went to the Episcopalian church 10 miles away in the county seat, but the rest of us were Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian. Actually, most of us were Baptist or Methodist – the Presbyterian church in my hometown has had like 20 members as long as I can remember.

For none of us to actually know any atheists, we sure talked about them a lot. I went to a private, “Christian” school until the end of fourth grade. We were told that the kids who went to the public schools had parents who were probably atheists, and we prayed for them all because they weren’t allowed to pray in school. Also, the teachers were all probably atheists too because otherwise, they would teach at a Christian school.

In fact, in the 5th grade at my new, public school, I had spelling class after recess. My first day of class, I was put on the front row, up by the teacher, who had a Bible on her desk (which I later learned she liked to read during recess). I remember being afraid for her that she might get fired if the Principal learned she was a Christian. (As ridiculous as that was, I am, however, inordinately proud that 10-year-old me was worried for her, and took sides instinctively with the person I saw as being the victim in the scenario).

In Boot Camp, we were allowed to have 2 hours on Sunday morning for religious observation, and they split us into Catholic, Protestant, and Other. The Catholic and Protestant folks got to go to their respective chapel services, away from the Drill Instructors. Others were allowed to stay in the barracks (where the Drill Instructors also were). By the third week, everyone was either Catholic or Protestant.

I had, of course, read books about atheists, but that’s still very different than knowing one. Even as I came to know people in other faith traditions, belief in a higher power was still assumed.

I really don’t remember my first atheist friend. I do know that by the early 2000’s when I was living in Midtown Memphis, I knew lots of them. I had fallen into an arty crowd, and so I knew poets who felt what I felt in churches in the pages of a notebook, hikers who saw transcendence in nature, and scientists who saw it all as somewhat mechanistic. Instead of being a Christian surrounded by other Christians, I became a lot of people’s “Christian Friend”.

But when I began to do “ministry” work in North Carolina was when I really began to be influenced and shaped by them. Part of this was I had slipped away from the evangelicalism of my youth and embraced a far more universalistic idea of God, and if I no longer believed God would damn them to Hell, then there was no need to try to convince them I was right and they were wrong.

It’s amazing how much easier it is to have an honest relationship with people when you are not trying to get them to believe something they find impossible to believe.

I had many humanists and atheists volunteer with us over the years I did homelessness work. Because we refused to allow folks to preach to the people we shared food with, they fit right in. We didn’t want to convert anyone, and neither did they.

In fact, we came to look forward to working with atheist and humanist groups rather than Christian ones. Because they were there primarily out of altruism rather than their desire to convert folks, it made them much easier to deal with, and they instinctively got our desire to focus on promoting dignity and worth.

There was once an article about us in the paper, and the reporter, a Jewish woman, made a lot out of how we did not proselytize, nor allow our volunteers to do so, and that we had atheist volunteers. I got a couple of concerned emails from self-professed Christians that had never shown up to volunteer with us, not had they ever donated any money to the ministry I ran, yet it bothered them that atheists were “getting credit” for doing “God’s work”.

I wrote back and told them God would use whoever showed up to accomplish God’s plan of feeding hungry folks, and if the Christians stayed home, I’m sure God could use the atheists. I never got a reply to any of those emails.

The biggest thing I learned from my atheists and humanist friends, though, was responsibility. What if you couldn’t count on God to save you? What if there was no belief that God would fix this broken world in the next one? What if this was the only shot you got to relieve suffering, if the only way the hungry would be fed is if you did it, if the only way injustice was fixed was if you worked for it? What if the only chance at immortality you had was the way your memory lives on in the hearts of those you leave behind, if all the afterlife you could be assured of was the way they told your story after you were gone?

If all that was true, then it would matter how you live now. You are responsible. Your faith lies not in some “pie in the sky, it will be better when I die” future, but in your ability to work for change now, your ability to build community now, your ability to look reality dead in the face and keep going now, despite how hard it is, and knowing that any comfort you find will be in the community that surrounds you, your family that loves you, and whatever change your life and example bring about.

I pray that I may one day be strong enough to have the sort of faith that my atheist friends have.

For reliable, safe cars.

On the 21st day, I’m grateful for our safe, reliable cars.

In January of 2009 I was living in a small attic apartment near downtown in Raleigh, NC.  I think my rent was $400 a month. I was not yet married to Renee, but we were  talking about wedding dates. And I was making about $1,000 a month doing this homeless ministry thing I did, and had a 30cc scooter to drive around on instead of a car. I ate a lot of meals at the soup kitchen as a necessity, in addition to whatever outreach opportunities it afforded me.

Renee needed to go to see her heart doctor as part of a routine checkup. Her car was broken down, and I said I would take her on my scooter. It was a good 7 miles away. Uphill. And it started to sleet on our way there. My face was literally blue when I arrived. Her teeth were chattering.

“This is bullshit”, I said. I was fully convinced I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Had been called to do, in the language I would have used at the time. I could barely house myself, or feed myself, and my disabled fiancé was depending on me and my tiny scooter to take her to the doctor in the snow. I was so discouraged. I felt defeated.

That night, I stomped around my apartment, pissed. About 9PM, I called Renee and told her.

“I’m quitting. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I can’t keep doing this. I feel like God wants me to do this work, but if so, God can damn well come up with a car for me to do it in, or I am out of here.”

The next morning, I was in a coffee shop, doing some freelance writing I occasionally did in those days to bring in extra money, when a guy I know stopped at my table.

Let’s call him Chip. He was in his mid-50’s and was part of a church that had donated hygiene supplies to my organization the year before. He was very Charismatic – believed in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and the whole thing. Chip was… annoying. He was a close talker – you had to lean in to hear him –  and he called me “Brother” all the time, and was a little handsy – he had to touch your arm or shoulder when he talked to you.

“Hey, Brother. The Lord told me I would find you here. I really need to talk to you.”

I was too kind to mention that he had met me there for at least three different meetings in the previous three months, and I had mentioned each time that I often worked there in the mornings. Whatever. We will let the Lord get the credit for this one.

It seems that his ex-roommate had moved away and left a car in his garage, where it had sat for a while. Eventually the roommate signed the title over to Chip, who now had this car he didn’t want. Or need.

“So anyway, last night I was praying and asked God to tell me what I was supposed to do with this car, and God told me I was supposed to give it to you – that you couldn’t be expected to do this work without a car, especially as bad as the weather’s been lately.”

“God told you this?” I asked, somewhat skeptically.  “When?”

“Last night after I got home from church. About 9PM.”

Well, crap.

I want to state, for the record, that I don’t have that sort of theology. I mean, I knew literally dozens of people in worse shape than I was. Why would God single me out, out of everyone that could possibly need this car? I debated explaining this to Chip, but I shut up and we took the car, and drove it for three years, including to the beach for our honeymoon that fall.

I was telling my friend Brian this story several years later, and reiterated that this wasn’t my theology. Brian agreed, and said it wasn’t his either. And then he said, “Don’t you hate it when your experience of God contradicts your theology?”

Well, crap.

Spoiler: I did not quit. That car was a turning point for us – one of maybe three things that happened around then that let me keep going, and that set the path for me and would change my life.

These days, we own two cars, both older, but safe and reliable. Both are paid off. And while I’m tremendously grateful for their being in our driveway, I think a lot about the debt I owe to a charismatic close-talker who talked to God like it was real, and to whom God told to give me a car when I really, really needed one.

 

 

For our neighborhood grocery stores.

On the 29th day, I’m grateful we live near great grocery stores, and I’m able to afford to buy the food we need.

In 1958, when my dad was 7 years old, his dad died, leaving my grandmother, a 47-year-old woman who had outlived two husbands, in charge of a house, 40 acres, a 7-year-old boy, and with no skills that were deemed valuable by the marketplace. She couldn’t even drive a car when he died.

She went to work at the small grocery store a mile from her house, and from the land I grew up on. She would walk to work every day and would work many, many hours for a dollar an hour so she could afford to provide for her and her boy.

The store owners went to our church, and so they were accommodating, within reason. Dad would hang out at the store after he got home from school. He was pretty much raised in the aisles of that corner store.

My earliest memory of commerce was in that store, of Dad picking me up so I could reach the counter, and putting sweaty pennies on the counter and being given brilliantly colored penny candy from the jar on the counter in exchange.

Another memory was after my grandmother had died. Mom was buying groceries there, and I must have been 6 or so, because my brother who is five years younger than me was there, and she was carrying him on her hip. I remember we bought some bologna, because the store owner sliced us some out of the deli case, and watching him do that was always my favorite part of the trip.

Mom put her pile of groceries on the counter. He rang it up. I don’t know exactly what happened next – somehow, she didn’t have any money. I am unsure if we were out of money (totally believable at that point in our lives) or she had just forgotten her wallet, but she asked him if she could put it on credit and Dad would settle up with him later. Either way, he said yes, and Mom signed the receipt, and we loaded the groceries in the car. Of course, I was watching everything.

When we got in the car, I said, “When I grow up, I’m always going to buy my groceries on credit!”

“Why?” Mom asked.

“Because then you get the groceries and don’t have to give them any money!”

That was when they explained debt to me, and that it was a thing to be avoided.

Anyway, that corner was the closest groceries to our house when I was growing up, and the store there closed at 7PM every night.

The next step beyond that was “in town”, – town having 800 people and a Big Star grocery store in it. The Big Star closed at 8PM during the week, at 9PM on Friday and Saturday, and 6PM on Sunday. If you wanted groceries after that, it was 30 minutes away and across the state line in Tennessee.

In other words, buying groceries for us required some planning.

I will never forget my first apartment in Memphis, where I lived a block away from a 24-hour grocery store. It spoilt me. Just imagine: Waking up at 4AM craving ice cream, and you can have a carton of ice cream in your hands in 10 minutes, including putting on pants.

Professionally, a lot of my work these days is around working to make sure that people have access to healthy, nutritious food in a way they can afford. Having access to good food you can afford is critical to being able to thrive in all sorts of ways.

We are incredibly fortunate on the side of town where we live. I am within walking distance of both a Whole Foods and a locally owned grocery store the size of the Big Star of my childhood, and there is a 24 hour Kroger just a little bit further. For large purchases, there is a Costco and a Walmart Supercenter in the suburbs, within easy reach.

We are also fortunate that we can afford the groceries we need. We are simple people with simple tastes, but we have never went hungry and have a pantry full of food, and plenty of friends to share it with. And I have never in my life had to buy groceries on credit.

Friends from other religions

On the 19th day, I am grateful for friends who practice other religions and traditions, and what I have learned from them.

The main street of our small town was called Church Street, and on it were the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Methodist Church. Literally everyone I knew growing up fit into one of those three categories, and the churches coordinated things like revivals and potlucks so they did not conflict on the calendar. Most of us kids would go to Vacation Bible School at at least two of the three churches each summer. When I was in high school, there was a Pentecostal church that opened up on the town square in the old hardware store. We thought them nice but strange.

Once, in the spirit of ecumenism, our youth group invited someone from the Pentecostal church to come and talk to us, to explain their ways to us, so we could know them better. They sent a man who had to be 70 years old, in a jet black suit and steel grey hair done in a pompadour with a lot of product in it, to talk to us. His large print King James Bible was the size of a small briefcase, and to his credit, he seemed as uncomfortable with the whole setup as we did. That said, it went well until he told us that speaking in tongues in his church was mandatory, as it was THE evidence of the Holy Spirit being in your life.

A heavily made up 17-year-old girl we will call Laura interrupted him.

“What do you mean,” she asked. “You mean, if we don’t speak in tongues, we are going to hell?”

He hemmed and hawed and finally, admitted that, yes, his understanding was that if she died having never spoken in tongues, she would go to hell forever.

She laughed out loud.

“All I’m saying is, given the things I’ve done, if that is what I end up in Hell for, I’m gonna be really disappointed.”

It went South after that.

In any event, my religious world was small. The first Catholic and the first Jew I ever met was when I was in the Marines. Oh, I had read heavily about other religions, but that was very different from knowing people who practiced them. And like so many of the gifts in my life, the real value came in the relationships.

In college I hung out with the Judaic Studies folks, and briefly dated a Jewish woman until she ended up with the Jews for Jesus crowd and her father blamed me for it. (I was blameless, but it was no use). I lived for a while down the street from a Buddhist temple, and my friends and I would walk over some nights after work and hang out with the monks.

Like many people in the twenties do, I began to explore other religions. Zen Buddhism was pretty attractive to me, and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t influenced initially by the movie The Highlander. But being me, I read heavily and found and met Buddhists and went to Dharma talks. Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of Engaged Buddhism made a lot of sense to me: The world is filled with suffering, AND we should work to reduce that suffering.

I was convinced I should be a Buddhist, but a Buddhist told me that everything I was looking for was already in Christianity, and it was my native tongue, so to speak.

“If you convert, you will always be trying to translate what you know as a Christian into Buddhism. But you don’t need to convert – the path is already there for you in Christianity.”

He then gave me a reading list of Christian authors I should read – Thomas Merton and Allan Watts figured heavily on the list, as did Martin Luther King and Walker Percy. So, I’m still a Christian because of the Buddhists.

As a Christian, I grew up thinking we were right and everyone else was wrong. But these days, I am the first to tell you that we have, over the years, gotten a lot of things wrong. I think that would be pretty hard to argue with. So I don’t understand Christians who don’t approach things like other religions with humility.

The more I study other traditions and meet people who practice them, the more I am convinced that Buddhist knew what he was talking about when he called Christianity my native tongue. I grew up to working class parents in rural Mississippi – of course I would be Methodist, or at least low-church Protestant. Had I grown up in Rome, Italy, I would have been Catholic. Had I been born in India, I would have been Hindu, and in Greece, Eastern Orthodox. So much of it was and is cultural.

All religions seek to answer questions its adherents have. As an Evangelical youth, my question was, “How do I make God not be mad at me?”

Our entire salvation theology made perfect sense if the goal was to make God forgive you.

But that’s no longer my question, because I don’t think God is angry at me.

My main questions these days are things like, “How can I find healing for the ways in which I am broken? How can I help heal the world?”

Those are not explicitly Christian questions. And they do not need explicitly Christian answers.

These days, I have close friends who are witches. Jews. Druids. Atheists. Agnostics. Neopagans. Roman Catholics. Every flavor of Protestantism. Greek Orthodox. Muslim. Sikh. And I learn from them all, and am in awe of the ways in which they make the world more beautiful by their practice of their tradition.

I won’t pretend we all have the same answers, and I won’t pretend there are not areas of disagreement on various points of both practice and doctrine. But in my quest to build a good life and a better world they have been invaluable, and I am grateful for them and the ways they have shaped my life, my thinking, and my world.

Moving back to Mississippi.

On the 18th day, I’m grateful I got the chance to move back to Mississippi.

I’m the one who left. That’s how I once overheard my parents describe me to someone – of their three kids, I’m the one who left.  I graduated high school, joined the Marines, and then after that moved to Memphis, one hour and a million miles away from home. After a dozen years there, I moved 12 hours away to Raleigh, NC. And I lived there another 12 years.

My youngest brother lives next door to Mom. My middle brother lives perhaps 15 minutes away from her. See? I’m the one who left.

I blame the books. At an early age, I hunted a murderer in the alleys of Paris with Dupin, outwitted blackmailers in London with Sherlock Holmes, stole from pirates with Travis McGee in Florida, hunted whales with Ishmael in Nantucket, boxed with Spenser in Boston, sailed the Nile with Hercule Poirot, and cracked wise in LA with Phillip Marlowe. It was a big, bold world out there, and the 800-person town we lived 10 miles away from seemed isolated and provincial by comparison.

In those books, I was exposed to not just different geography, but different ideas and different kinds of people. People who knew what wine to drink with what food. People who liked art, and understood it. People who were shameless womanizers, and people who were feminists. People who hated the church, people who were witches, who were Muslim, who were Catholic.

I dreamed big, and yes, there were even more things in heaven and earth, it turns out, than were dreamt of on my philosophy. I left home in June, a few weeks after High School graduation. Over the next 28 years, I would be, at various times, a Marine, a college student, a warehouse worker, a salesperson, a husband, a financial advisor, an ex-husband, a bookstore owner, a resident of North Carolina, a husband again, a pastor, director of two different nonprofits, a homeowner, and, lastly, someone who came to miss his people.

It didn’t happen all at once. In my twenties and thirties, I built an identity of being “from” Mississippi, and even famously said Mississippi was the sort of place it was good to be from. I would say things like I was in exile from Mississippi, happy to portray myself as the enlightened one who left – implying, even if I did not outright state – my intellectual superiority.

I traveled to amazing places, and I met amazing people. I befriended bestselling authors, Hollywood directors, rappers, bluegrass musicians, chefs, jewelers, politicians, lobbyists, preachers, monks, surgeons, and collectors of everything from 15th century prayer books to classic Corvettes.

The first shift was in 2010. I came home for my 20th High School reunion, but it wasn’t the reunion that did it. It was the cemetery. The small church we attended when I was a child had a cemetery across the road from the church itself. The Saturday morning after the reunion I got up early and went to the cemetery. I walked up and down the rows of granite, seeing names I knew as well as my own, along with several generations of my name, too.

I had a thought, walking through that cemetery I had never before contemplated: If I had children, they would never know any place in the same way I knew that place. I had far more in common with every single person buried in that field than I did any person I had met in my travels.

The next step was in October of 2015. It was our anniversary, and just three months before, Renee had been the recipient of a heart transplant, which should, all things being equal, give her a normal life expectancy and a huge quality of life increase. Suddenly, our options for the future seemed wide open. And for the first time in more than two decades, I considered what it would be like to move back home.

In the winter of 2016/2017, the fractures in our nation came to a head following the Presidential election. After a decade of working to teach Christians how to love their homeless neighbor, I was feeling more and more that the hardest person for people to love was not the homeless man at the intersection, but the person from a different political party. Discourse seemed impossible, and white supremacy seemed unleashed.  It all felt very familiar.

White supremacy was not some novel idea I learned about after my book club read Ta-Nehisi Coates. No, I was “borned to it”, as Huck Finn liked to say about his sinful nature. It was the water in which I was raised, and to all appearances, the natural order of things. And one of the reasons I left. Going back would mean confronting that, and fighting that.

In the spring of 2017, I was in my backyard, planting flowers under my Japanese maple when Mom called to tell me Dad had had a “cardiac event” earlier that week.  He was fine, and more than a little pissed she called to tell me. After I got off the phone, I sat on the porch, looking out over our front yard and thinking how, if something bad happened, I was 12 hours away. I went inside to talk to Renee.

We had a couple of problems: I needed to do meaningful work; Renee needed quality transplant aftercare; neither of us had any desire to live a rural life and every bit of ministry experience I had was urban.

A few minutes with Google told us that Jackson had a world class transplant center with transplant aftercare for people like her. There was a small multi-racial Mennonite church that had been born in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement that wanted to make an impact beyond their building. Gentrification had driven the value of our house in North Carolina upward, and the cost of living was such in Jackson that we could buy a house there that was much nicer than we were used to.

In June we came to Jackson for a week to look around. I met with some people here to learn about what needed doing. And we began to make plans.

Three years ago, I moved home to Mississippi. Because, as James Baldwin told us, not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. And it was time for me to face up to the forces and people who shaped me.

Things being raised evangelical gave me

On the 17th day, I’m really grateful for some of the gifts that being raised as an Evangelical gave me, even if I no longer find myself in that camp.

I want to be real clear here – the evangelical church has harmed people. Heck, it has harmed me. But I’m still grateful for some things I got there that I have held on to.

The evangelical church taught me to study and revere the Bible. In Vacation Bible School as a young child, we would do Bible drills – where we all stood in a row with our Bibles in our hands, and then a verse would be called out – “Isaiah 53:5!” and there would be a mad rush to be the first person to find the scripture in question, and then to shout it out at the top of your lungs.

“BUT HE WAS WOUNDED FOR OUR TRANSGRESSIONS, HE WAS BRUISED FOR OUR INIQUITIES: THE CHASTISEMENT OF OUR PEACE WAS UPON HIM; AND WITH HIS STRIPES WE ARE HEALED!”

And if it was you that called out the verse first. you got a point, and whoever had the most points won. I won a lot. I memorized all the books of the Bible in first grade. I learned to memorize scripture. I can still recall vast portions of the New Testament and Psalms in the King James English of my childhood.

They taught me to take the Bible literally, and I no longer do that. But I do take it very seriously, and they taught me to savor its stories, to embrace its rhythms, to believe that the will of God could be discerned through stories, and to turn to memorized stories and poems for comfort. I’m grateful for all of that.

And they taught me to pray. Prayer was a real thing to them – not a meditative retreat, but an actual conversation with God. Sometimes it was pleading, sometimes it was devotion, and sometimes it was anger and even screaming. But the real presence of God in hearing our prayers was never in doubt.

We distrusted “written prayers”, as prayer was to be a spontaneous outpouring of our hearts, with never a doubt that God wanted our raw emotions and pleadings. There was a sense in which we believed we could change God’s mind – that “the fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” – and that prayer, as they say, changed things.

While I no longer hold that same view of prayer, I learned intimacy with God in that setting, grew up believing I could talk to God as a parent, and that what I wanted mattered to God. I’m grateful for all of that, too.

But the main gift Evangelicalism gave me was the belief that people can change, and that I not only can, but should play a role in their changing.

Changing people was all we talked about, and we took it very seriously. We learned how to tell our friends about what we believed. We learned what objections they would have and how to overcome them. We went to camps, retreats, and lectures to learn how to do it. We prayed hard for people to change. We raised money to fund programs to get people to change. We would work hard to get into situations where we would be the only people who believed what we believed, full of the confidence that God would use us to accomplish God’s purpose.

While what I want people to believe has changed, and what I believe has changed, my belief that others can be changed has not diminished. Nor has my belief that I can be part of that change.

I work hard to tell my friends what I believe – any 3-day search of my Facebook timeline would make that abundantly clear. I’m not hiding my beliefs under a bushel, no sir-ee. And I’m always ready to “give an answer to everyone who asks” me to explain the reason for the hope that I have, and to do it with gentleness and respect.

I no longer believe that people will go to Hell if they do not accept Jesus as their savior. But I do believe that if the racist, the greedy, the powerful, the ego driven and the rest do not change, they will bring hell down upon themselves and others, including more vulnerable people. And I believe that the God who heard the cry of the oppressed in Egypt and raised Moses up to liberate them still hears the cry of the oppressed, and still lifts up people to liberate them.

I fight hard to be in rooms with people who disagree with me – not out of some mealy-mouthed idea of tolerance, as I refuse to tolerate hate, homophobia, or racism –  but because I want to convert people who are racist, homophobic, hateful, and bigoted into people who are not those things.

I pray fervently for people who disagree with me on climate change, vaccine science, LGBT issues, and more, to change just as we used to pray for people to come to church. I study the positions of the anti-vaxers and the homophobic so I can counter them, in much the same way I used to study other religions so I could convert their adherents to our side.

I believe people can change. I believe we can help them change. I believe nobody is beyond saving, is worth giving up on. I believe we can change the world.

I learned that in the Evangelical church. And I’m grateful for that.

Confidence and Curiosity

On the 16th day, I ‘m grateful for confidence and curiosity.

Let me explain.

As I said on day 12, my dad could do anything. Build a house, wire a lamp, fix an air conditioner, network your printer, rebuild an engine.

I inherited none of those skills.

At least, that is what everyone said when I was growing up.

I had poor hand to eye coordination, for one thing. And I would have much rather been alone in my room with a book than outside building something – mostly because I was uncoordinated and I hated being bad at a thing he was good at, and I was very good at reading books.

My younger brothers both loved working outside with him, and loved the tools and the dirt and the grime and all of it. I did not. So the story developed that I was the nerdy son and my brothers were the useful sons.

I want to be really clear that I was never put down or chastised for not being into what he was into – I was given a lot of room to be me, and I was accepted for being me. If I was the nerdy bookworm kid, he was OK with that. Which is its own sort of gift.

But over time, my hand to eye coordination got better. And my interests changed. And I became responsible for the maintenance of cars, and then a house, and because I had grown up watching Dad fix the alternator when it went out, I knew it was the sort of thing that could be done in your driveway with not many tools. So you look it up on YouTube and you buy the tools and Hey Presto, you just changed an alternator.

I think the biggest gift was not learning how to do things from him – because I didn’t – but learning that a lot of the things other people pay people to do are actually doable by a normal person. A lot of what passes for DIY skill is actually just confidence. I’m not always confident in my skills, but I’m confident that I can do it, or learn how to do it.

Because I learned that most things are not specialties that require arcane knowledge. Most things are learnable skills, and in fact, most things are actually just a discrete series of steps, and when people say they don’t know how to do a thing, what the really mean is, they don’t know the steps.

For example, if you have never replaced a toilet, it can seem overwhelming. But really, it’s super simple. It’s actually less about knowing how and more about being confident you can figure it out. Because nobody is born with toilet replacement knowledge. But if you believe  you can learn how to do it, you just need to find out what steps are involved.

And most common tasks can be done with about 20 tools. Then you just fill in around the edges as you need them.

And so, because I came to believe I too could be handy, could fix things, could build things, I did. Over the years I have built several different kinds of fences, put a metal roof on a house, gutted and remodeled a kitchen, put down multiple types of flooring, sanded hardwood floors, painted, wired outlets and circuits, built tons of bookshelves, built 5 different chicken coops, built a hell of a workshop, rebuilt a transmission, built walls, torn down walls, hung doors and windows, replaced alternators and radiators and water pumps and built decks and sheds and lots, lots more. Not because I knew how, but because I believed I could learn how.

I really wish I could have had stories about learning those things from Dad. It was a part of out life we did not share, and a way I was unlike him, this man I resemble in so many ways. But he did give me confidence and curiosity, and those were by far the bigger gift, and they led to all the rest.