BEC Recordings - Artist Blog - Bebo Norman

Bringing Crew Home

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:03:47 -0700

I speak on behalf of Compassion International almost every show that I play about what it means for the body of Christ to actually BE like Christ…about what it means to truly serve the “least of these.” I speak about our tendency here in the developed West to feel like the issues of poverty, injustice, and “serving orphans and widows” are too big for us to really tackle, too daunting for us to even really get our hearts around, much less do anything about. In light of that we tend to rely on the “powers that be” to push into those issues on our behalf. We tend to think that tackling governmental corruption in third world countries or governmental bureaucracy in developed nations would be really getting to the heart of the matter because that’s where the real power to change things really lies. And although those are indeed noble intentions, the sad truth is that we’ve bought into the idea that the real power on this earth lies in the hands of the governments of this world. Please don’t misunderstand me, there is an absolute need to dive into the issues of corruption and bureaucracy and do whatever we can to change our world through those political and ideological avenues; but we cannot, as followers of Christ, cling to the idea that real change, real power in this world lies in the hands of politicians and police forces. Is our God not the Author of this world? After all, it is not the job – it is not the CALLING – of the governments of this world to serve the least of these. It is the job and it is the calling of the Body of Christ. If you are a Believer reading this right now, it is not a question of IF we are serving the least of these, according to Jesus, that is an absolute…the question instead is HOW are we serving the least of these? There are so many beautiful ways to do this, from the local food bank around the corner to organizations like Compassion International. I have been so deeply inspired and moved by the friends in my life who have taken this calling personally, and PERSONALLY decided to dive in. Whether it’s my friends from the band Jars of Clay who just celebrated digging 1000 wells in Africa through their Blood:Water Mission, or friends like Stephan and Caitland Sharp who are in Rwanda as we speak processing through the adoption of their new son, who they’ve named Crew, so they can bring him home to meet his new big sister, Sadie. These are the people who’s hearts have been inclined to serve the least of these in very specific ways. The truth is, not all of us have the means or platform to dig 1000 wells in Africa. Not all of us are called to adoption. But we, every single one of us, can be a part of these specific callings in the ways that we chose to give. I’m asking you today, if this inspires you the way it inspires me, to help my friends Stephan and Caitland with the adoption of their new son, Crew. As it turns out, they don’t necessarily have the “means” either, but they do have hearts that were called and compelled to have one less orphan in this world…and one more child in their home. Please go to the link that I’ve posted below to a short video that the Sharps made just before they left for Rwanda 9 days ago. You will hear just a bit of their story and you will see how easy it is to give to their specific calling to bring Crew home.

EVERYTHING I HOPED YOU’D BE

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:03:48 -0700

Eugene Peterson writes in the preface of his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places that “writing about the Christian life is like trying to paint a bird in flight. The very nature of a subject in which everything is always in motion and the context is constantly changing – rhythm of wings, sun-tinted feathers, drift of clouds (and much more) – precludes precision. Which is why definitions and explanations for the most part miss the very thing that we are interested in.” Our perspective on life, on brokenness and beauty, on God, is constant only in the fact that it is never constant. The older I get the more I realize that being overcome by brokenness and being overcome by beauty are perhaps one in the same. At the very least they are akin. They are akin in the being overcome. Both have the potential to leave us breathless and prostrate before a God that is not only larger than life but longer than life, wider, deeper. It requires depth to know height. It requires darkness to know light. All that is broken in my life has faithfully uncovered the beauty of the single unbroken Thing in my life. All that is beautiful in my life, lifted out of all that is broken, has been the resurrection of the resurrection of Christ. Both bring me to the same place. Both offer me the same hope. It’s hard to imagine that I spent so much time loathing the one and loving the other when I see so clearly now that not only do they both speak to the same End but that each requires the other in order to even have a voice in the first place. From the highest mountain of glory or from the lowest depths of despair, “it’s here that I call out, it’s here that I fall down, it’s here that I find out that You are everything I hoped You’d be.”

Here’s a link to the first song on Ocean, ‘Everything I Hoped You’d Be’:

http://www.bebonorman.com/2010/09/27/everything-i-hoped-youd-be/

A PORTER’S CALL

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:09:21 -0700

I can pretty much say with confidence that I don’t think I would be married or still playing music right now if not for the ministry of Porter’s Call. Almost a decade ago, I was told by a dear friend that I needed to not only meet, but meet with, a man named Al Andrews. At the time I was reveling (or spiraling, depending on the day) pretty dramatically in a world of on-the-road-unfamiliar-faces that somehow always seemed to be “impressed” with me, my first legitimate radio “hit” in the form of a song called Great Light of the World, my second headlining tour with sold out shows almost every night, no real sense of home, community, accountability, or structure, and a heart that was depleted, lonely, and spiritless. My sort of wake-up call was a statement by my brother that was intended to be a compliment, but cut straight to the heart of me…he said, “Bebo, you’re the king of first impressions, people think you’re their best friend the first time they meet you.” The sad truth was that I couldn’t have told you what a best friend should look like, much less who my best friend might have been, at the time. I realized in that moment, that I had a lot of people in my world who “loved” me and required absolutely nothing of me. I could move in and out of any given town on any given night and play a game of touch and go…leaving a lasting first impression a mile wide and an inch deep. It was hard for me to understand how I could be in the midst of so many people every single night and feel so terribly alone. I called my manager one night after one of two sold out shows in Portland, OR and told him that I was done with music…that I would finish out the rest of the tour, but I was coming home for good after that. I had stood on the stage that night in front of an amazing crowd of people who knew all of the words to all of my songs and I had never felt more empty in my entire life.

All the while, there was a successful counselor in Nashville who had given up his thriving private practice for the sake of a non-profit vision that he called Porter’s Call…a counseling service that he wanted to provide absolutely free to any full-time musician/artist in Nashville, along with their families. He knocked on the front doors of all the major Christian Music Labels and helped them understand that while they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their artists to promote the healthy development of their songs, records, and careers, they weren’t spending a dime or a second promoting the healthy development of their hearts. Much to the credit of several of those major record labels, they allowed Al Andrews the privilege of beginning his vision for Porter’s Call.

Long story short, God used my friend Al Andrews and the ministry of Porter’s Call to open my eyes to the short-sited vision of the unintentionally self-absorbed. Sitting with Al, I never felt more vulnerable in my entire life, and I never felt more loved. I fell apart in tears and confession and humility in a way that I don’t know how to explain to you. My heart was laid bare for the first time in years in a way that wasn’t meant to be performed in a song or spoken through a microphone. And the ironic thing was that this renewal of my heart made me want to write new songs and sing them for people that might feel just the same way I had. Every effort I made to quit became a very clear vision of why I should not – made clear to me through the lens of this beautiful ministry called Porter’s Call. It was also clear to me that things had to be different…that I needed accountability and consistency, that God created us to draw life from community and good counsel rather than compliments and good opinions from even the most well intended stranger.

I had met a girl during this time who, in the most refreshing way, was not impressed with me…or rather, was not impressed with who I appeared to be on the surface, but was smitten with who I seemed to be underneath. She was different than anyone I had ever met. And even as I fell deeply in love with her, I inadvertently seemed to attempt to run and ruin the depth of our relationship…because I had grown accustomed to a mile wide and an inch deep, to arm’s distance, to touch and go. But Al Andrew’s wouldn’t allow it be easy for me…he wouldn’t allow it be simple. Because God doesn’t allow it to be easy and simple. The hidden hand of love is risk.

Here I am nearly a decade later, still writing songs and playing music…and that girl is now my wife of 7 years (Al Andrews co-performed our marriage ceremony). We have two beautiful little boys and I have tears in my eyes at this very moment thinking of what I nearly walked away from. But for the grace of God and his work through Porter’s Call I dare say that I would not now be experiencing the richness and the goodness of these two precious things…my family and my songs.

Nearly every Christian musician that I know here in Nashville has been deeply affected by the ministry of Porter’s Call. That’s seriously not an exaggeration…and the ministry has grown infinitely and has even broken into the realm of Country music. I wish I could name to you all the marriages that have been saved and hearts that have been healed but in the interest of discretion and privacy I will not. That’s why you most likely have never even heard of Porter’s Call…it is a private and safe place that rests by design outside of the spotlight for the benefit of those whose calling places them directly in the spotlight. Needless to say, I am thankful to God right now for such a safe place, a refuge really, not only for myself but for countless musicians like me that all to often find themselves lost and undone even in the middle of something they feel God has called and compelled them to do.

**The primary reason I’m writing about Porter’s Call on this specific day is to raise awareness of the PORTER’S CALL AUCTION fundraiser that is taking place RIGHT NOW and will run for the rest of this week, until it closes THIS SATURDAY (9/18). Dozens of artists and musicians like myself have donated instruments, memorabilia, and even private concerts to be auctioned off on eBay this week for the benefit of the non-profit ministry of Porter’s Call. I am personally auctioning one of the guitars from my private collection – this guitar was originally auctioned for Haiti Relief and sold for an incredible $51,100. AMAZINGLY, after the winner of the auction piad in FULL to the Compassion Haiti Relief Fund, they had only one request…that we keep the guitar and auction it again for another cause that was dear to our hearts. The time has come, and that cause is the ministry of Porter’s Call! For more info, click here:

http://www.bebonorman.com/news/guitarauction

IDOLS OF MISDIRECTION

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:09:02 -0700

I’m watching the sun rise over California through an airplane window this morning. I am on my way back home again. I don’t know why but there are random moments such as these when I really do understand with clarity the absolute goodness of God. I have struggled lately in a much longer story with feeling a certain separation from the real source of all that is good in my life, but today it is very clear to me. I have been given a life of such richness on so many levels. The irony is, the abundance of life in the form of so many gifts of relationship, and occupation, and love…that very abundance has of late become the source of this subtle distance and, in turn, a seeping emptiness. I am astounded how gifts of such goodness can, with constant and time, become idols of misdirection. Lord Jesus, I thank you this morning for my wife – for her clarity and resolve, her directness and compassion, her unwavering commitment to be who she really is, even as you are changing her heart so much of late, for how much I miss her when we’re apart, for how deeply you have allowed me to fall in love with her. But I thank you especially this morning that you are reminding me that she is not my Savior. She is not my lifeline. She is not you. I thank you also for my two boys…for their purity and curiosity, for their honesty and tears, for the overwhelming sense of security and fullness and drama they magically seem to fill our home to overflowing with, and the fact that they have no idea how beautifully they have wrecked the hearts of their mother and I. But I thank you especially that they are not my Savior. They are not my lifeline. They are not you. I thank you Jesus for this improbable career of writing songs and travelling the world to deliver them to eager listeners with hearts wide open. I thank you Father that you have built a community of believers so vast and rich that just last night I could sit at a table with a group of relative strangers – new friends – and share food that had never before crossed my lips and conversation full of laughter and goodness and quality and depth. From all angles, in distant and familiar places I have had life placed before me that is good and true. And none of it is my Savior. None of it is my lifeline. None of it is you.

Forgive me for my tending toward replacing the source of good things with the good things themselves. What a selfish game to play, to put that on the narrow shoulders of the people and things that I love. To put my joy, my rise and my fall, my very salvation – on the backs of the unequipped. To bind them so carelessly to a weight that they could never carry, to a weight that they were never meant to carry.

Father, this morning I am reminded of my complete and singular identity as a child of God. I am nothing more and I am nothing less. I am neither husband nor father, brother nor friend, living soul nor beating heart but for the grace and the goodness of you. Life lived and taken, love given and received, only at the hands of the goodness of God.

We are flying over the desert now. I am on my way back home again.

THE BRONCO

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:06:32 -0700

It’s 4:30AM and I’ve been up for about an hour. This seems to be my pattern lately for some reason…I usually wake up sometime around 3 with my mind running and I can’t go back to sleep for an hour or so. I’d love to be able to say when this happens that there are some profound “goings on” going on in my brain because it might make me seem deep and introspective so that I may perhaps impress you a bit, but the truth is I usually spend my middle of the night hours mulling over pretty normal everyday stuff like schedules or projects I need to do around the house. This time, for example, I woke up thinking about my garage. Deep. It’s probably because I spent the entirety of the last 3 days cleaning out my garage, so my nighttime brain is just continuing it’s daytime activities. Either way, what seemed initially to wake me up was thinking about my garage, but what’s keeping me up is thinking about what’s in my garage. My 1976 Ford Bronco. Yes, it’s older than my wife and has beautiful curves just like she does. Actually, if you’ve seen the early Broncos, they don’t really have much in the way of curves, but you always hear the real car buffs describing cars like they describe women so I thought I’d give it a try…another attempt at perhaps impressing you a bit. Sorry.
My first car ever was a 1985 Ford Bronco. My father had bought it several years earlier off an Army officer in Ft. Benning. I remember driving down with him and my brother to pick it up…I’m not sure how he found it since there was no internet back then…come to think of it, how did people buy used cars back then?…hmmm…oh yeah, this crazy thing called the classified ads in this other crazy thing called a newspaper…yeah, I’m pretty sure my dad found it in the classifieds of the Columbus Ledger Enquirer. At any rate, I remember we turned onto a really shady tree-lined street down in Ft. Benning and in one swift and life changing moment my love affair with the Ford Bronco was born. It was a dark metallic gray standard 3-speed with maroon vinyl seats and no air conditioning. I was in love. I drove that Bronco through thick and thin all the way through college. It seems insane now to think that I spent summers in Georgia with no air conditioning but I remember burning my legs on those vinyl seats like it was yesterday. When I would make the 5-hour drive back and forth to college in South Carolina, it was like a Sunday stroll in a wind tunnel – every window was down going 70 on the interstate and I would literally have to change clothes upon arrival because of the “seat sweat” as I called it. Sounds glorious, huh? It really was…even though I did vow to never EVER own another car without air conditioning. I honestly could write an entire book on the memories I have in that old Bronco from first dates to first wrecks (not much difference between the two in my experience), but I think any of us could probably say the same about our first car. The point is, after college I had to get more practical to drive myself around the country playing shows, so I bought a Subaru Outback station wagon that could fit all my gear and still get good gas mileage. I seriously think that Bronco probably got about 11 miles to the gallon, but I also remember being appalled when gas got above 99 cents back then. That thing had a MASSIVE gas tank (probably close to 30 gallons) and I remember being riled up if I had to put more than a 20 down to fill it up. Anyway, after I wore out my Subaru, I splurged on a 1997 Land Rover Discovery that I put 150,000 miles on in just over 2 years. I had a brief affair with a Toyota Tacoma pickup somewhere in there but the point is this: they all paled next to my Bronco. And even though my first one was of the 80’s OJ Simpson variety, I have especially always loved the early model Ford Broncos (1966-1977) because they were the originals built to compete with the Jeep CJ-5 and the old International Scouts – the 3 grandfathers of the modern SUV. So after briefly owning and totaling a ’74 Bronco (another story for another day), I found this 1976 about 6 years ago. It was in pretty bad shape when I bought it but I drove it for about 2 years with the idea that I would be it’s savior and friend and do all the work myself. I successfully completed a whole host of small jobs, but long story short, my first big rebuild project started one Saturday afternoon and my Bronco didn’t run again for 2 years (enter Toyota Tacoma). So after conceding the fact that I am not the man’s man I’d always hoped I’d be and that I would NOT in fact be my Bronco’s messiah (although we are still friends), I began the long search for someone to undo what I had done. Fast-forward another 2 years and the stone has finally been rolled away and my Bronco has emerged from its Bebo-induced cryogenic chamber.
The blessing (if you ask me) and the curse (if you ask my wife) is that when you own a restoration, the restoration is never complete…there is always more to restore. So as I often do on weekends or days off, I spent yesterday working on a few Bronco projects – installing rear seatbelts and building a pulley lift in my garage to hold the hardtop when I take it off on sunny days. I really do love that sort of thing. It’s hard to understand how little projects like that, mindless in so many ways, can also really give me life. But the reality is that something good happens in my spirit when I work with my hands to repair or rebuild something. As tempted as I may be to get all melodramatic and draw some comparison between a restored Bronco and restored soul, I shall not. Instead, I’ll just give you a few pictures I took this morning. And although her curves look nothing like my wife’s, she is indeed a beauty. And she (now) has air conditioning!

DAYBREAK

Fri, 14 May 2010 11:05:22 -0700

I woke up for the day at 4:30 this morning, certainly not according to plan. I can’t for the life of me think of a rational reason to intentionally wake up at 4:30 in the morning. Ever. The long and short of it is that I tend to not sleep as well in general when I’m in a season of writing…if I stir even slightly in the middle of the night, my brain tends to flip it’s switch and start running away with things. Add in the typical night-time interruptions of a 3-year old and an 8 month old and the trio makes for a lot of early mornings or late nights, depending on your perspective. This morning I woke up with a song idea in my head, and as with most song ideas if I don’t record them or write them down immediately, they will most often be lost forever. Some writers say that if you can’t remember an idea a few hours or even days later that it’s not worth remembering. I, on the other hand, like to think that most of my best songs ever are lost songs – forgotten somewhere between waking up and falling asleep again or driving down some interstate when I couldn’t reach my recorder packed away in my backpack in the trunk. Or at least that’s what I used to like to tell myself. A friend of mine once suggested that I keep my recorder next to my bed so that when I woke up with song ideas I could empty my mind of them right away and then roll over an go right back to sleep. Not a good idea. I’m already a pretty irrational sleeper – MAJOR sleep-talker, and when I was younger a sleep-walker (way to many stories to tell in one blog – but a good blog idea nonetheless…note to self). So, the reality of things, at least according to my brief experiment with the bedside recorder, was that when I woke up the next morning I usually didn’t even remember recording anything in the middle of the night. So it was rarely until weeks later that I happened to pick up my recorder in an actual middle-of-the-day conscious and rational hour and find myself thoroughly horrified at the imposter that must have stolen it at some point when I wasn’t looking and recorded some cruel joke of a song on it. Seriously, they were that bad. So the only thing that little experiment succeeded in was robbing me of my theory of lost songs. Now I’m content to let my “dream songs” just stay dream songs. But then there are the moments like this morning. This wasn’t a dream song, it was a real one. One that I’ve actually been working on for years (seriously) – but have never found the right chorus too. As my eyes opened and the melody started stirring, I realized quickly that all hope of sleep was lost. But on mornings like this one, it didn’t matter. It was still dark out, and rainy, and there was a beautiful melody playing in my mind that was still beautiful even after I was mildly coherent. I love writing songs. And this one felt like daybreak. Not so much a sunrise, but a grey and rainy and beautiful daybreak. I’ll let y’all hear it soon, if it stands the test of time.

BOJANGLE’S

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:04:48 -0700

I’m on I-40W right now heading from Nashville toward Memphis…in the middle of a two-week run of acoustic shows with Meredith Andrews. Gabe’s driving and it’s an absolutely beautiful day outside. Still cold, which I am WAY over this far into the winter season, but blue sky and beautiful nonetheless. This little batch of shows has really been a breath of fresh air on a few different levels. For one, playing acoustic shows – just me and Gabe – is the epitome of what I love about playing live. I tell people all the time that my hope is that these acoustic shows feel more like conversations than concerts…and that has seemed to be the case so far. We’re also intentionally playing much smaller venues for the same reason – mostly crowds of 400-600 or so. The intimacy that can happen in a smaller venue acoustic show is like no other, and in a lot of ways, is what I fell in love with about live music way back in college watching people like David Wilcox, John Gorka, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Shawn Colvin. That’s what really defined the direction that my own live shows went in years later, and I feel like I’m getting back to that now…back to the heart of the things I love about playing music. After all, my first love is writing songs, and I do that in very small rooms on an acoustic guitar. That’s how the songs are born, and in so many ways that’s how I feel they are best delivered. We’ve also been driving to all of these shows, another breath of fresh air, because we’re sort of forced to see the landscape and inevitably we end up deep in conversation rather than sleeping through the night drives on a bus or settling into our seats and into our headphones on a flight to somewhere. We tend to drive a good bit on acoustic fly-dates anyway – it’s sort of our M.O. to fly into a certain region of the country – me, Gabe, and a tour manager – rent a minivan at the airport that’ll hold all of our gear (mostly just all of Gabe’s dang instruments…good grief he plays a bunch of crap), and drive to a long weekend’s worth of shows routed fairly close together. This run of shows was originally intended to be two separate runs, one based around flying into Chicago, and the next weekend flying into Atlanta. But a few extra shows landed in the middle and it just made sense to drive in and out of Nashville. So here we are, driving on a beautiful day, having just wrapped up a good long talk about real life stuff, and now listening to Brooke Fraser. Meredith’s asleep now, in the seat next to me…she flew into Nashville this morning and we picked her up on the way out of town. She’s been another breath of fresh air. It’s always nice to have a female presence around anyway because I think they just soften things a bit relative to a bunch of guys travelling around together. But Meredith’s just a good soul in particular and her heart is genuine and good. And her voice is beautiful and her songs are true. And she likes Bojangle’s chicken and biscuits. She’s from the Carolinas and so is Bojangle’s… so we celebrated that together this morning. So now I have a very full belly, but still room enough to take in yet another breath of fresh air.

HAPPY TAILS TO YOU

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:02:16 -0800

Man, I sorta checked out here for the last week or so. Lots of really good time with family and friends, so I guess that’s a pretty reasonable excuse, but I pretty much bailed on keeping up with the blog so I’m really sorry for that. Roshare started taking a class from 5PM-10PM Monday thru Thursday, so my normal blog-writing time became a bit more occupied with diapers, dinner, baths, and bedtime. My parents came in town this last Thursday night and stayed through the weekend – Miller was baptized (dedicated really) on Sunday and we had a big “baptism party” (any excuse, right?) at our house after church with a WHOLE bunch of kids and even more Mexican food (pretty much a staple around here). Really, REALLY, fun, but it goes without saying that our house has been a bit mad for quite a while. Today is really the first day in a week or so that things feel somewhat normal again. I had a writing session this morning with my buddy Stephan Sharp (he wrote Chris Tomlin’s “Made to Worship” among many others) and now I’m back home to keep the boys while Roshare runs out to Target and the grocery store, just in time for her to get back and showered before she heads to her class tonight. Add onto that yet ANOTHER snow day here in Franklin (snowiest winter in my 10 years living in Tennessee) and you’ve got a good picture of what our world has looked like for the last little bit. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that our dog Otis has taken up the absolutely delightful habit of “cleaning” Smith’s baby toilet for us regardless of what might be in it. Seriously, you can’t turn your back for a SECON

GUITAR STANDS AND SIPPY CUPS

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:02:12 -0800

This is my son’s new favorite place to store his sippy cup. Add in a can of latex paint and everything in this picture pretty much sums up what my day has looked like today. Go figure, words like “sippy” are now a part of my vernacular…how exactly do you capture a word like that in a song?? Maybe I can start writing country music…hmmm.

FALL LIKE STARS

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:02:28 -0800

The song that my label is currently releasing to radio is one called “Never Saw You Coming,” and I received an email this morning from a radio station in Texas (KSBJ-Houston) asking for an explanation for one of the lyrics. I think they were really just examining the details of what the song actually means before they decided whether or not to put it out there for their listeners. First of all, let me just say that from a self-professed lyric-focused songwriter, I love that a radio station is willing to dig into the details of a song and wrestle with the responsibility of exactly what they play and what it means. It’s the same approach I take when I’m actually writing the songs…the pouring over the details is equally the most frustrating and inspiring thing about songwriting. Anyway, the line they were wondering about was the bridge – “Fall like stars on my shore/Still you are so much more.” The truth is, the bridge lyrics are definitely a little more abstract than the rest of the song. It’s really meant to break the song for a moment from the specific images of broken people rediscovering who God is into a more abstract image that represents how overwhelming and even supernatural our individual experiences with God can be. In other words, how do you describe what it might “physically” look like for God to overwhelm us with his Spirit, with his presence? For me, it was this image of falling stars – right in the middle of our deepest darkness, from what seems to be out of nowhere, something profoundly bigger than us has seen fit to enter into our world, into our space, to meet us exactly where we are in one breathtaking moment. And yet, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what an encounter with God really is – it is “so much more” than we can even take in.

AGGRESSIVE AFFECTION

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:01:47 -0800

I took Smith to school this morning. He’s my 2½-year-old. I had a chance to hang for a little while with his teachers because this morning was “Donuts with Daddy Day.” Clever alliteration, huh. KRISPY KREME Donuts with Daddy Day, to be specific. Except all the dumb little school kids ate every last one of the donuts before I had the chance to snag one! (Just kidding about the kids being dumb, by the way. I mean, they may be dumb, but I don’t know them well enough to know that for sure yet. Okay, so just kidding about the fact that they may be dumb as well. But not really). ANYWAY, I love my son. Like crazy. Partly because he’s crazy. He’s just all boy – climbs literally everything climbable (or not), loves to wrestle with me or our little white fluffy pansy dog, Otis…doesn’t make any difference to Smith as long as he gets to wrestle; he gets hurt ALL the time but he’s still really tough, shins always all bruised up, and he’s already been to the hospital twice for a busted lip and a busted chin. The thing is, we run our household with pretty much only three rules for our kids: 1. First time obedience, 2. Have a “Right Response”, 3. Be kind. And it’s a pretty beautiful thing to watch a kid as wild and as “all boy” as Smith is, respond to those things. There aren’t many things “off limits” in our house – jumping on the couch like a trampoline is one of our favorite pastimes – but the things that are off limits (mostly to prevent the loss of limbs or falling from egregious heights) REALLY ARE off limits. And we expect for those limits to be honored. And what’s really crazy is to see that a 2½-year-old can get that…I mean REALLY get it. Now don’t get me wrong, he’s still a 2½-year-old and there are, and always will be, LOTS of “teachable moments.” Our hope is to spend more time in our house training our children than disciplining them. So, for all Smith’s craziness and wildness, he’s also very obedient and has a sweet, sweet heart. I think the pull between those two poles inside of him will be the challenge of his life in a lot of ways. And hopefully he’ll understand one day that they are not mutually exclusive…that, in fact, they feed and perpetuate each other in a beautiful way. For now though, he still struggles to strike that balance and, as his teacher and I laughed about this morning, his hugs sometimes turn into tackles and his kisses sometimes look more like head butts. As she said, I’ve never seen a trace of anything malicious in those moments, but sometimes his excitement just manages to get the best of him in fits of what she sweetly defined as “aggressive affection.” I laughed and told her that she was being WAY to kind in her assessment. But then I thought, what a beautiful phrase. What a beautiful idea. And I found myself wishing all of the sudden that I could find that aggressive affection again, even as a grown man – that I could let loose my grown-up “guardedness” and self-protection to maybe go a little more overboard from time to time, a little too far even, in letting my affections be known.

365 DAYS…MINUS 12

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:01:33 -0800

So I’d like to make a commitment to you. 365 days minus 12. I’d like to sit down every single day for the rest of this year and find at least one thing in each of those days that might be worth writing about. Hopefully not in some self-righteous, can’t get enough of himself, he really like the sound of his own voice, sort of way; but rather just to sort of be forced, if nothing else, to look at each day with a little bit of purpose. I’m certain that there will be many days that I will struggle to find anything of significance to record. After all, this life that we live is nothing if not rote and mundane much of the time. But I think that’s why I want to do this. Because I want to believe, I DO believe somewhere deep inside of me, that there is no day that is really insignificant. That there is no day that is not ordered in some way to remind us of beauty somehow. That there is no day that is not a specific part of a specific story that is being told. Please know that I may fail. I might not come through. I’m good at that. But I really want to do this…I want to be committed. I want to share the story, not because I think it will have some profound impact, but because I think that’s what we’re meant to do, what we were created for.

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