Blah, blah, blah...hiccup! (Part 3a)

Things were not so nice. Jesse had gone crazy. He wrote words and drew pictures with blue ball point pens all over his arms. He thought they looked like tattoos, but they just made him look crazy. He would walk naked in the night around campus. He would sit for hours outside her house. He would smoke and smoke and smoke cigarettes.

He was crazy. He was crazy for her. He remembered the time they sat behind the building on the ground and smoked cigarettes. He had said that he wanted to be with her. She has said she wanted to be with him too. She wanted him to be her boyfriend. Things were nice then, but now they were not so nice.

He bit her on the neck and wrote strange, twisted love poems that didn't make any sense but to him. He knew he was in trouble. He tried to find help, but it was too late. He was a house already doused with gasoline just waiting for a match to set him off.

The match came one late October night.

Blah, blah, blah....hiccup! (part 2b)

Jesse was waiting in vain. She was all the way on the other side of the campus walking with a friend.

"So I just told him to fuck off."

"You had to."

"I didn't have to, but he was being such an ass."

"Right."

"He could've had everything. He did have everything, but he was just too scared or weak or too much of a loser to hold all the pieces together."

"A total loser."

"God, I miss him."

Having no reply, her friend silently kicked some loose gravel which just happened to be within striking distance as they sauntered slowly across the School's parking lot.

"Well, I'm done with pastors and pastor's kids and minister's sons and ministers."

Her friend began to nod slowly, but then turned to look sideways at Riley, "Yeah, but what about Jesse?"

"Jesse! Oh shit! I was supposed to meet him in the Squish."

"Tell him 'Hi' for me!" Sheryl called out after her friend who had already begun fleeing in the opposite direction. Riley didn't turn around but just continued to take herself swiftly back across campus. Sheryl just shrugged and kept walking. "Jesse..." she giggled under her breath.

Used To

used to be fun
used to be done
used to be more
used to be sore

used to laugh
used to cry
used to eat
boysenberry pie

used to make my bed in the morning
change the sheets every other day
vacuum the floor, sweep out the closets
work hard before I'd play

used to dream about the future
used to plan and schedule and scheme
used to greet the sunrise excited
used to believe in the dream

sometimes it worked
sometimes it didn't
sometimes i'd push through
sometimes i was finished

but all those things i
used to be and do and say
never really faded away
they became part of who I am
so I will do them all today
and tomorrow do them again

Proof that Facebook is actually a Neo-Nazi Plot to Take Over The World!

It just dawned on me this morning as I was renewing my FB status update: All the time that I have been getting innocently addicted to FB I have been unknowingly forced to use self-referencing 3rd person!

I started to point out this amazing fact in my status update, but I noticed I was spelling 'referencing' wrong. (FB conveniently told me this by the squiggly red line under the word.) So I turned to Google to get a corrected spelling for the word. (And yes, I am that anal that the words of my fb status update must be spelled correctly.) That is when the whole plot was revealed. Don't just take my word for it. Do this: Go to www.google.com. Type in 'self-referencing 3rd person' and click 'I'm feeling lucky'. The whole truth will be revealed right before your eyes.

If you're too lazy to do that all typing and clicking just click here to see what I am raving about this time.

I Figured Something Out About Facebook!

fb Tip #1

Utilize the power of Friend Lists!

So I just realized that you can filter your news feed by your friend list. So I made a friend list of just my family, and then in my news feed I could see only what family members were doing on fb by clicking on the family list in the filter column on the left of the news feed page.

You can make a friend list of anyone. Maybe you want to make a friend list of only the hot girls you have as friends or just the cool people who are your friends. When you have over 500 friends, this becomes particularly helpful.

What I Said At My Grandpa's Funeral

Remembering the Things He'll Keep

Wallace Edward Wilson was my grandpa. My father’s father died when I was only 1 yrs old. So Ed Wilson, as he was known, was the only grandpa I really ever knew.

Unfortunately, my grandpa was devastatingly flawed. The poignancy of his evil and the depth of his sin are such that it would be safe to say that none of us can really understand or justify his motivations. It is no secret that he hurt everyone who knew him. And whether you are willing to admit it or not the closer in relationship you were to him, the greater his offense.

But he was still my grandpa and all of the pain and hurt that he caused me and my family still does not overcome the vast number of memories of times when he really was a wonderful grandpa. I don’t know if that is merely the grace of God in my life or if that is somehow connected to the simple truth that light shines in the darkness, and the darkness, no matter how vast, does not overcome even the smallest of flames.

For whatever reason, I find that without being in denial of all the pain his choices wrought, I can still choose to remember those parts of his being that he will keep in Eternity. There is a day coming when as believers each one of us will receive a new body. And all the traces of our sin, our pain, our humiliation as children of Adam and Eve will be wiped away. We will only be left with the good gifts God intended for us to have from the beginning. It’s those gifts that he gave my grandpa that I want to choose to remember.

One memory that I will always have is the memory of the last time I saw him. Four months ago, we had received the call that he was in vigil and the expectation was that he could die at any moment. We got in the car and drove up to the State Prison where he was incarcerated. We arrived in the prison in the middle of the night. Being in vigil though, he was allowed visitors and the guards ushered us through the quiet halls of the sleeping prison into the hospice wing where he was kept.
I will never forget that first look as I saw my grandpa for the first time in 11 years. I simply did not recognize him. In fact, the only reason I was assured that it was him was because he was the only person in the room.

He lay in a bed in the corner of that room, curled up under a blanket. His hair, which when I knew him was kept meticulously, every morning he would spray nearly entire can of hairspray to keep every hair in the exact place, was now disheveled and messy, draped long around his shoulders. His moustache, which was again his pride and always well groomed, was overgrown and unkempt and his chin which was religiously cleanly shaven every morning was covered in a scraggly beard of fine white snow. He had been a big man, large and round in my memory. But the man lying in that bed, my grandpa, was just a little over a hundred pounds, shrunken, shriveled, completely emaciated. He was forced to remain in a curled up, almost fetal position because of the pain in his abdomen and he had not eaten in days. He was dying. And he was not in a peaceful, painless way. But he was dying alone, in prison, in a tremendous of amount of pain and suffering.

We visited him for two days and he could only open his eyes a handful of times during our entire visit. We could tell that his mind was still sharp and his brain was alert, but he lacked the strength to speak to us and could barely get out the briefest of words in a whisper and even these were often unintelligible.

He wore a cross around his neck. It was made of metal and crudely cut. And I asked him about it. “Chaplaincy Cross,” he huffed out in a hoarse, labored whisper. I discovered later that during his 11 years of incarceration he had ministered extensively as a chaplain’s assistant in the various prisons he had been in. He had led Bible studies and church services. He had counseled younger men who finding themselves in circumstances beyond their control needed to find Jesus. And he had led them to him. He had completed all the educational requirements to become a minister through correspondence courses while in prison, had applied for credentials, and had become an ordained minister.

Another prisoner came to visit him while we were there. He was a tall, black man and he spoke with my grandpa about problems he was having in the prison. He was trying to stay clean, but they had moved him to a section of the prison where drugs were readily available. “I’m trying to keep my stuff together and keep my eyes on Jesus, but it’s hard sometimes,” he said to my grandpa, who, with his eyes still closed, nodded his head up and down. He understood.

We left to get some sleep and came back the next morning to find a prison that was teeming with inmates. With our armed escort we walked down the halls to the hospice ward, past hundreds of men, every shape and size one could imagine dressed in prison attire. And I for one, exchanged furtive nervous glances with them, unsure whether to look them in the eye or not, and ashamed to find myself very afraid of that place. In the course of that visit, I began to get a picture of what my grandpa’s life had been like for the last 11 years.

As this new image of my grandpa emerged in my mind, I began to see what may be one of his greatest gifts. And that was simply his ability to survive. My grandpa used to have a favorite saying, “Where there’s a Wilson, there’s a way.” He had found a way. A way to experience the grace of God in his life, a way to survive (and in many ways thrive) in without doubt one of the most awful places I have ever visited and, despite a very painful, horrible disease that was killing him, he had even found a way to stay alive for one last visit with his oldest daughter and grandson, before he passed into Eternity.

There are other gifts that I could talk about. I think in heaven he will be a gardener, maybe an orchard farmer. One of the few things he was able to tell us while we were there was about something he had learned recently about apples.

Again, in that soft, husky whisper, he spoke, “You know you can’t bury a red delicious seed and get an apple tree that bares red delicious apples. Each variety of apple is made from a mixture of different apples. To get a red delicious apple tree you have to know the recipe and graft into the tree and cross-pollinate correctly to get your red delicious apples. There is even a man,” he continued getting even more excited as he spoke, “A man who has bred a green apple the size of a watermelon. He named it, ‘The Big Green.’”

It was the strangest experience, he lay there dying in prison with hardly the strength to talk and I was seeing him for the first time in 11 years, but his eyes were bright. And I could only think that there must be apples in his future in heaven.

I’m not going to get preachy. I’m not going to tell you what to do, think, say, remember about my grandpa. But if you have any desire at all to recognize the Wallace Edward Wilson who made it to heaven, who’s there now and who you will undoubtedly meet when you get there. If you want to recognize my grandpa, then, like me, don’t ignore, forget, minimize his flaws, but choose, in your own time, to focus on those things he will keep in Eternity.

I love you, Grandpa. And with God’s inexplicable grace, I forgive you.

Blah, blah, blah....hiccup! (part 2a)

~3 Months earlier~

"Okay, Class. Time to start. Where's Jesse?"

Someone snickers, "He has a girlfriend." The Class laughs conjointly.

"Funny how that happens," says the Professor, "You get a girlfriend and your life falls apart." The Class roars in unison.

Across campus, Jesse had no idea he was the brief topic of discussion. He was smoking in the Squish and had other things on his mind. He was waiting for her.