Broken Bones over Broken Hearts

Thirty-three weeks ago I broke my oldest daughter’s arm.

I double bounced her on the trampoline and shot her straight into the cosmos with all of my weight, launching her into the crisp blue sky. When she came down, I heard a little pop noise and then she started to cry.

At first glance, there was nothing wrong with her arm. And it wasn’t until I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her towards me to say, “What are you belly-aching about?” that I noticed her bone to be shaped like a crescent. Which is to say, her forearm had a very unnatural drape to it.

She was put in a cast for several months until we finally got it sawed off, exposing her healed, albeit pale and slightly atrophied, new arm.

And then you think to yourself, you kind of play the odds, because this is what we do – not as parents but as people. We kind of think like, “She broke her arm. Cool. Now that’s out of the way.”

Now that’s out of the way.

There’s this idea that, for some reason, statistically speaking, it probably won’t happen again, right? We see this kind of reasoning in Vegas all the time. “It landed on red three times in a row. It must land on black soon!” We’re all endowed with this logic that events of the past somehow affect the possibilities of these things recurring. We like to think that bad news somehow gives us a pass from more bad news for the foreseeable future.

And even as you read this and comprehend the reality of that statement, you still believe it to be true. There is this hope in us that continues to fight the hopelessness of everything going wrong always.

And it is in this state of mind that I’m sitting on my porch at sunset, sipping hot coffee and trading tales with a friend of mine. His daughter and my two oldest are both on the trampoline. Bouncing. Being kids. Being stupid. Being stupid kids. I watch as Quinn crawls outside of the protective netting, squats down and then jumps into the grass. Perfect execution. I give it a 10. Or I would have.

Her palms hit the ground as she tries to land in some kind of cat pose – her big thing is pretending that she’s a cheetah. She likes to run around on her hands and feet, actually galloping through the house. She cleans herself by licking the back of her hands and she drinks milk from a saucer. I could realistically spend an entire separate essay speaking about whatever that is but I don’t want to get off topic.

The next 30 minutes all happen very fast.

I watch as Quinn’s head pops up. She starts to cry. Something in my stomach feels wrong but I don’t move. Jade says, “Please don’t tell me you broke your arm.” Quinn stands up and starts running to the porch – not on her hands and feet but just on her feet, her left arm sort of dangling at her side and looking a little funky. Not bad. Not weird. Well, sort of weird. But mostly just funky. I’m looking at it while she runs and I’m thinking, “This is not looking good,” and then my second thought is this. “Thankfully it’s not a broken arm because she just broke her other arm a few months ago.”

That’s my thought. That’s my logic. It couldn’t be a broken arm. Her other arm was just broken. These things don’t happen twice. That survivalist hope is flickering in me. Not it!

Quinn runs up the porch step and heads to Jade, who says, “Which one hurts?” Quinn signals with her head – sort of nods towards her left arm. “This one,” and sticks her shoulder towards Jade.

I look at Curtis, sitting next to me, and raise one eyebrow that I’m sure he reads as, “Kids, man. They’re always falling into pits and getting hurt, ruining my nice coffee.”

Jade begins to roll up Quinn’s sleeve, one, two, three times. She rolls it all the way to the elbow and I breathe a little sigh of relief because her arm actually is fine and I kind of was starting to worry that this was going to– Jade moves Quinn’s arm slightly and my angle changes.

It’s funny how a new perspective on reality can shift your world.

Her arm is not all right. Nobody would ever describe that arm as all right. There is something fundamentally wrong with that arm. It is shaped like the letter U.

It’s broken. This thing has been snapped like a dried twig.

I put my coffee down and stand up. “Thanks for bringing over pizza, guys. I really wish we could eat more but it looks like we need to mosey towards the hospital.”

I grab the car keys, throw Quinn in the front seat with Jade and back out of the driveway and, insurance and the American healthcare system being what it is, instead of driving to the hospital four blocks from our house, we floor the silver bullet to ninety and gun the twenty minutes on the freeway to the closest Kaiser Permenente.

As I glide the mini-van back and forth between lanes, Quinn whimpers softly next to me. “Are they going to give me a shot?” I look over and see her forearm bent at ninety degrees and shiver. “Yeah, Quinn. They’re probably going to give you a shot but you know what? It’s going to make you feel a lot better. It will take the pain away from your arm.”

She sniffles a couple times and then gets quiet. Jade asks her what she’s thinking about. Quinn takes a moment to collect her thoughts and then yawns like she’s bored. Super lackadaisically she says, “You know what? My arm is actually feeling pretty good. I don’t think it’s broken anymore. We can probably just go home. We don’t have to go to the hospital.”

I look over and see that ragged skin bag holding the broken fragments of bone. “You know what, Quinn? Maybe it would be best to just let a doctor take a look. You’re probably right – it’s probably fine. But just in case, yeah?”

She sighs, resigned, and then falls to sleep, probably in a state of shock.

My heart breaks for her. There is a feeling of mad urgency to our movements. Urgency that must be thought through and defined. Every move must happen quickly. But we must be smart about it. Cooler heads will prevail. I can do nothing. I can just drive. I can just tell her it will be okay. I can take her to the hospital. I can do my part.

At the hospital we enter Urgent Care and find a line of eight people waiting to speak with the receptionist. Quinn is whimpering. Everyone turns around. A man with an eye patch at the front of the line says, “Is she, uh, okay?” and Jade says, “No. Her arm is broken,” and the man says, “Come on up here, lady. You can come on up here,” and everyone in line nods his or her head.

Thank you, humans. May good things come back to you.

A receptionist named Flora says, “Next,” and we approach. She takes our name and information and tells us there is about an hour’s wait. Jade says, “This five year old has a broken arm and she has to just sit with it for an hour?” The woman shrugs. “I just work here.”

I ask, “Can we take her to the Emergency Room?”

Flora, “Yes.”

Me, “How much will it cost?”

Flora, “I don’t know.”

Me, “Will the wait be under an hour?”

Flora, “I don’t know.”

Me, “Do you have any pain medication she can take if we wait?”

Flora, “I’m not a doctor.”

Me, “Yes, I can see that. But can I speak with someone about some Advil or Tylenol or just a hammer we can bash her in the face with to knock her out?”

Flora, “You can speak to a nurse in about an hour.”

There is nothing I can do. There is only logic. Cooler heads prevail. Make the best decision with the circumstances provided.

We walk into the waiting room and I say, “Jade, do you have any cash on you?” and she says, “No. Why?” and I say, “Because I’ll just pay the person whose first in line. I’ll slip em a hundred bucks – that’s someone’s co-pay – we’ll slide in first.”

Jade says, “I don’t have any cash,” and I say, “Me neither. Plan B.”

We sit down and stare at Survivor on the tube.

Forty minutes later they call our name. I stand up and fireman carry Quinn through the door. In Room 9 I set her down on the bed, careful not to disturb the broken 2×2 that is her arm.

Everything goes fuzzy for me – we’ve been back from Africa for less than 48 hours and my brain is still eleven hours ahead. I can feel myself falling in and out of reality – my vision keeps going black – someone is standing in the room with us. “Time for an IV.”

A thin woman with straight black hair tells us to lay Quinn on her back. Quinn says, “What’s an IV?” and I say, “It’s one shot that they give you so that they don’t have to give you anymore. Does that sound like a good thing?” and Quinn quickly does the math in her head. “I guess so.”

The woman says, “Okay, so let’s have you say your ABCs and by the time you’re done, I’ll be done too. Sound good?” and Quinn nods as a tear rolls down her cheek. Jade takes her face in her hands and begins to run her thumbs along the corners of her mouth. I put my hand on Quinn’s chest and my other hand on her elbow, readying myself to restrain her when she kicks against the IV.

I would take your place if I could.

The nurse asks, “Are you ready?” and Quinn says, “A. B. C. D. E. F. Gee…”

I watch the needle slide in and I watch Quinn’s eyes turn into glass plates and I listen to her voice rise several octaves and I listen to the alphabet begin to tumble out of her mouth as she races to the end, knowing that it will all be over once she hits Z. “HIJKLMNOP!”

“Slow down, Quinn. Slow down.” I hate needles and I hate IVs and my stomach is running and rolling and my mind is wheezing and my hands are sweating. Just being this close to needles sends me into this very anxiety filled place. Be cool. Be cool. Show no fear. Stare at Quinn. Be cool. Be strong. You are a source of courage. Mother and Father are the name of God on the lips of children.

“QRSTUVWXYZ! Take it out! Take it out! Take it out! It’s done! Take it out!” Tears are racing down her face as she stares at the ceiling without blinking. “Take it out!”

I look at the needle and see the nurse pushing and pulling it, sliding it left and right, fishing around inside her arm. “The, uh, the vein keeps moving on me – keeps trying to get away. Try the alphabet one more time…”

“ABCDEFGHIJ-J-J-J-J–”

“Okay–nope.” Still fishing. The needle is making me sick. I hate needles. I can’t even look at them sitting on a table without feeling like my soul is twisting up inside. Tears are streaming down Quinn’s face and her mouth is stuck in a grimace of letters, “XYZ! XYZ! XYZ!”

“We almost got it. You’re doing really good. Could you give me the alphabet just one more time?”

“AYEbeeCEEdeeEEefGEEEEEEEEEEE!”

“Alright, I have it.” The nurse pulls out the needle and tapes it and stands up as Quinn says, “Zeeeeeeeee. Zeeeeeeee. Zeeeeeee,” and then falls asleep before the nurse has left the room.

I ask someone if there is a coffee station around and they say, “No.”

I slap myself around a little and pet Quinn’s hand while she sleeps. A doctor enters and says that he’s sorry about the wait but he’s ready if we are. We nod and a nurse inserts morphine into the IV while Quinn sleeps. Halfway through the syringe Quinn wakes up and sees a woman with a thing that looks like a shot poised at her arm and lashes back, “NO MORE SHOTS!”

“Sure, sure. Right. No more shots. There is no needle here.”

The nurse leaves and the doctor steps up. He’s a good looking Ken-doll type. Rippling muscles, beautiful face. Blond hair. A doctor. Lots of money. Has probably never broken his daughter’s arm double bouncing her on a trampoline. I look over at Jade just as she finishes scribbling her number onto some scrap paper. She hands it to him and mouths, “Call me,” and then winks.

Doctor Ken says, “Alright, dad. Let’s get her sitting on your lap and then you’re going to… I don’t want to say restrain… but it’s what I mean. You’re gonna want to make sure she doesn’t run anywhere.”

Jade says, “Is the morphine going to help?” and Doctor Ken says, “Uh… a little.”

I would take your place if I could. I wouldn’t want to. But I would do it.

He gently picks up Quinn’s mangled wing in his massive hands and feels it gently – touches it here and there. Tests it. Finds the sour spots. He says, “Do you know any songs?” and Quinn says, “I know uh, My Favorite Things,” and the doctor says, “I’d love to hear you sing it to me.”

And next is the moment wherein I realize two things. The first is that not much has changed in the last 100 years of medical science as far as bone-setting goes. The second is that I will never hear My Favorite Things the same again.

Quinn starts singing in a perfect voice, “Whiskers on kittens and warm woolen mittens!” and then Doctor Ken pushes the heel of one hand against the top of the break and the heel of his other hand against the back side of the break and I watch as his muscles strain under his shirt and his face distorts into a knot that looks like he’s trying to either pick up a heavy weight or fire out a huge turd.

Quinn begins to scream.

I’m sorry.

She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t shout. She doesn’t holler. She screams. And the worst part is that she does it while she continues to sing.

“Bright colored packages! Wrapped up in AAAAHHHH!!! Wrapped up in AHHH ribbons! AAAAAAAHHHHHH! AAAAHHH!! STOP! STOP! THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS! AAAAHHHH! IT HURTS! IT HURTS! WHEN THE DOG BITES! WHEN THE BEE STINGS! PLEASE STOP! YOU’RE HURTING ME! IT HURTS A LOT! WHEN I’M FEELING SAD! PLEASE STOP! I WILL SIMPLY REMEMBER AHHHHHHH! MY FAVORITE THINGS! AHHHHHH! AND THEN I DON’T FEEL AAAHHHHHHH! SO BAD!

The doctor releases his pressure and the assistant steps in and wraps her arms in gauze that hardens into a plaster cast.

“Is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Pick up some medicine from the pharmacy. Get rid of your trampoline.”

We go home and eat the cold leftover pizza. We go home and I pick up my old coffee, a fly drowned and floating on the surface. I carry Quinn to bed and set her down between Jade and I.

She says, “Sing me a song.”

And without looking at each other, Jade and I both begin to sing an off-key duet of My Favorite Things as she drifts to sleep.

But I know this is not the end. I know this is not the last time. I know that she will spend her life being hurt and hurting. I know she will fall down and scratch her knee and cut her arm and maybe even break more bones. And I know Jade and I will be there to kiss them and bandage them and even take them to the hospital when it is necessary.

But it is the wounds that I can’t help heal that scare me. It is the broken hearts and the tumors of the soul that form when no one is watching. It is the wounds that cannot be healed with medicine. It is the day-to-day hopelessness that creeps into people that I fear for my daughter.

Someday she’ll come to me with a broken heart and what will I say? Someday she’ll come to me and say that she doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life and what will I say? Someday she’ll come to me and ask me hurting questions that I don’t have the answers to. Why did this happen? Why did that happen? It hurts me and I don’t know what to do. Why did my husband get cancer? Why did my child die?

I don’t know, Quinn. Life isn’t always fair.

But I’ll take broken bones over broken hearts everyday.

TEARING OFF THE GIANT HOLY PENIS OF GOD

 Do we put God in a box?

 

The word God is a very heavy one and so let’s break it down a little before we move on. If I say the word dad to someone, they may get fuzzy feelings because their dad was amazing. The word dad has very positive emotional baggage for them.

 

Now, same word, different person. Dad can mean something vicious and upsetting to an individual that was sexually assaulted or abandoned by their father.

 

Let’s simplify this even further.

 

Wine Glass means something positive to an individual who enjoys the intricate tastes and aromas of the drink. However, I have a personal friend who sliced his hand so severely while cleaning a wine glass that he had to undergo extensive surgery and physical therapy before regaining the use of his tendons. He can’t hear the word without shivers running up his spine.

 

We each apply personal emotional baggage, whether that be good or bad, to every word.

 

For someone that received his or her first kiss in a movie theater, it’s a very pleasant thing. For someone who survived a mass shooting inside of one, the word elicits a very different emotional experience.

 

These are all very simple concepts that bring forward very complicated emotions.

 

Let’s try another word.

 

God.

 

Oooh, that’s complex. There are quite a lot of feelings coming to our minds right now and based upon the context of the last few paragraphs, you understand that someone else reading these same words is having a very different thought than you are. We are each experiencing God, in this moment, in very different ways.

 

Let’s mix it up a bit more.

 

Let’s take that idea you have in your head of God, whatever that is, whether it makes you feel nurtured or abandoned, and let’s add another layer onto it.

 

Bible.

 

I’ve written a couple paragraphs here that have made you, with your unique experiences, feel certain things. Just through a simple handful of words you and I have each come to different conclusions and emotional reactions. Now let’s look at a book that is filled with thousands and thousands of words. Some of them are poetic. Some of them are literal. Some of them are parables. Some of them are historical.

 

Now let’s apply each of our personal understandings to those words and you can see how this idea of God quickly spirals insanely out of control.

 

Should we complicate it further?

 

How about a multitude of holy scriptures? The Holy Bible. The Book of Mormon. The Apocrypha. The Gnostic Gospels. The Dead Sea Scrolls. The Torah. The Qur’an. This is to say nothing of the hundreds of scripture that exist outside of the Christian / Jewish / Islamic faiths.

 

Layers upon layers and words upon words written by people in different cultures in different eras that were influenced by different elements and then translated to other languages.

 

In fact, scholars believe that the pronoun Jesus used to describe the Holy Spirit in the original Aramaic was feminine. SHE. And then it was lost in the Latin translation.

 

The image that I have in my mind right now is the world’s largest ball of yarn that has been knotted up to such a degree that it can never be untangled.

 

And perhaps that is exactly what God is. Something that can never be neatly laid out in front of us, dissected and examined.

 

How do we reconcile ourselves to this and find the true meaning behind anything? If I don’t know what you mean or feel when you say wine glass, how am I to know what you mean and feel when you talk about God?

 

The words of the Bible, even if you believe that they were inspired by the perfect hand of God, are still limited based entirely off of our unique interpretation of them.

 

Let that thought linger for a moment.

 

Even if the Bible is without flaw, our own unique flaws create problems where none existed because each of us interpret the words differently.

 

BIBLICAL MIC DROP.

 

So how do we come to know The Truth of God? How do we get to the pure emotion at the center of the words? An emotion carries so much weight. Explain love or fear in simple words. Use those grunts that tumble stupidly from your mouth to tell me what love does to your soul.

 

Perhaps we start this process by removing our labels. When we call God HE, we are applying thought and feeling to God based on our understanding of the word HE. Do we really believe that God is a male? That He has a giant holy penis? I mean, I’m being serious. Let’s talk this out. When we use the word HE, we are talking about a he / she scenario and we’re not ONLY saying that God is a HE but we are ALSO saying that God is NOT a SHE.

 

We have now placed a box around God. We have created parameters for God to exist within. Rather than God being big enough to exist outside of human sexuality, we have placed Him in a box that is human sexuality and then put Him over on the baby blue half. If we call God HIM then HE cannot, by nature of sex, be HER. We have now limited God.

 

Holy sausage party, Batman.

 

By doing this, we limit God through our label. And labels form expectations. When we call God HE we expect a certain type of individual. If nothing else, we immediately picture God as more of a father figure than a mother figure. That alone sends us spiraling into, what may be, a completely inaccurate understanding of The Immortal.

 

Just by the word HE.

 

Just by two simple letters pressed against one another.

 

Now let’s apply that understanding to something slightly more complex. Let’s try to understand The Holy Trinity. This idea that God The Father (male), Jesus The Son (male) and The Holy Spirit (once female, now neutered) are all single but different units. All separate but all together.

 

If that is our understanding of God, what word do we apply to it in our language? How do we describe that idea of three-in-one? A word must be attributed to it.

 

“Alright guys, we are monks and we need a word to describe our understanding of God. God is all knowing and all powerful. God is within everything, dipped in our very existence. God is inside you and me and the air and our food and our thoughts and God has seeped into every nuance of our existence. God is both mortal and divine. God is both physical and spiritual. God is above and beyond our comprehension. God is outside of time. God is beyond form. God does not exist in many forms. God is above and beyond form. What word do we use to convey this sophisticated understanding? How do we convey a being that is above our understanding of shape? We need a word that means both all form and no form simultaneously.”

 

Trinity.

 

You can see how that word sort of works to convey that complex thought. You can see that they were trying to boil this very deep and sophisticated understanding of God down into this simple label. And you can also see that it’s a very bland word used to describe a very impressive idea. You can also see that the word Trinity is never found in the Bible and the concept was not created until well after the death of Jesus.

 

Another idea that was pitched and followed by the Christian church for a while was something called Adoptionism. This was the idea that Jesus was born a man, just like you and me. Absolutely no different. This is the belief that he was NOT born as the Son of God and that he didn’t become “divine” until his baptism later in life. An actual promotion from regular human to a God-figure.

 

And right now all the Christians are gasping at the heresy of… the Christian church’s early belief in the interpretation of the bible. This is our heritage.

 

These are just a few of the real beliefs that real Christians really followed based upon their very real personal interpretation of words. My, oh my, how we can pull so many conclusions from simple letters that have been mashed together to form words that are trying to explain emotions.

 

Words.

 

And so we start labeling God.

 

Even the word God is somehow limiting as to what we actually feel GOD to be. We see time and again in the Bible where it is clear that the authors were trying their absolute best to explain how massive this idea of God is while their words fail them miserably.

 

God is the Alpha and the Omega. Beginning and End. This guy is trying to say that God exists beyond and outside of time. He’s saying that God is not bound by our watches and calendars. Time has no bearing on God and means nothing to God. Time is a unit of simple measurement that creatures of this dimension are bound to. The way we can hold a film strip at arms length and examine both beginning and end simultaneously, God is not bound by our moments.

 

Whoa.

 

When Moses asks God what his name is and God responds with “I AM,” the author is NOT saying that God’s actual name is I AM. He’s saying that God cannot be bound by a name. God cannot be limited by a label. He’s saying that God IS. God is not a singularity with a face. God IS the breath of existence. The fabric of reality.

 

And perhaps through this understanding we also realize that even words like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Catholicism, etc, etc, are all just more labels that we use to further ourselves from The Truth that is The Truth. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran. Just more splinter cells that are drifting further and further away as we carefully craft more and more labels to dissect God, placing him inside smaller and smaller boxes.

 

By our labeling of God, we are limiting our own understanding of God. We come to the wineglass and we apply ourselves to it. We decide whether it is good or bad based upon our personal experiences but not upon a truth.

 

We come to God and we limit the absolute magnitude that is The Eternal. And by doing so, we choose to live in a muted world where we intentionally sell ourselves short.

 

We must remove the labels and forget the simple grunting words. God is more a piece of art than a diagrammed sentence. Or, as Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet ponders, “Silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation.”

 

If we put God in a box, we are putting God in a coffin and eventually He will become so sterilized and clinical that we’ll kill Him, bury Him and then kneel at the graveside and continue to mumble our empty prayers which are just words without emotion.

 

It is our overly simplistic, two dimensional understanding of God that destroys Him.

 

But maybe our understanding of HIM should die. Perhaps that spineless understanding of The Ever Present Always should be both castrated and killed. It is not until we tear off the giant holy penis of God that we stop picturing The Nameless Infinite as He. Perhaps The Real Truth is waiting for us to turn away from this mannequin we’ve been worshipping and come to understand that we will never understand.

 

Accept that the search is the answer because The Timeless Conscious has no end. God is not a math equation meant to be solved or a ball of yarn that is meant to be unknotted. We are meant to expand ourselves and mature our existence by experiencing God in our very lives.

 

We find God in kindness and compassion. We find God in empathy and sympathy. We find God in friendship and giving. We find God in a phone call or a smile to a stranger. We find God in holding a door for someone. We find God in helping a charity or doing dishes at a friend’s house.

 

That tingly sensation under our skin when we help an individual? That sorrow we experience when we see someone hurting? A high-five. An orgasm. Laughter at a birthday party. Tears at a funeral. Holding a new baby. Hugging your child. Laying in grass. A day off from work. A day at a job you love. A job well done. The smell of coffee beans.

 

This is God.

 

God does not exist in a box.

 

God does not belong in a coffin.

 

God is not a word. God is a poem.

 

God is the very beating of our hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

Sex Brain

There was a point in time, not that long ago, when our ancestors stood on the same ground that we stand on today, and they looked towards the sky and they pointed and they said, “There is the sun. It circles around us.” Today we know this to not only be false, but to be foolish. Today we understand that the Earth along with all of her buddies circle around the sun in a great big dosey-doe.

The sun sits at the center of our universe and burns bright. The sun does not set. The sun does not rise. The Earth spins, both on its axis and rotation. The sun rising and setting is an illusion. This is not news to either you nor I. I am not breaking new ground here. We were all raised in a world where we understand this to be true. We are operating out of fact.

And yet, at one point, not long ago, the whole of our planetary culture would have told you differently and some of them might have even used the bible as a resource to back their argument since Ecclesiastes says The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

The sun hurries through the sky.

No, it doesn’t.

Everyone would have stood against you, hand in hand, and told you how absolutely ludicrous you were for believing in what I am suggesting above. There was a planetary belief held by almost every inhabitant of Earth that the sun spun around us in orbit.

Don’t just brush over that. Think about it. We did not understand how our universe worked and then we made very basic assumptions about the principles of it. We jumped to conclusions based off of pre-conceived notions. Those notions were that god created us and so we were at the center of the universe and everything revolved around us because we were the most important things.

This, for a person of that culture, of that era, made sense. And in some regard, I can appreciate their logic. Airplanes, televisions and calculators were not invented yet, let alone to say anything of space travel, quantum physics and DNA.

That’s very heavy. Their worldview was crafted more by what they did NOT know than by what they did. In other words, they were not operating off of a provable scientific platform. They observed with their eyes and then made a call without further research.

You can take this back a little further to discuss how the Earth used to be flat. Human beings, not that much different from you and I, believed that the Earth was flat and that you could fall off into some kind of dark oblivion if you got too close to the edge. Again, these are people speaking from a place of the unknown. This wasn’t based on any kind of proof but was rather based upon a kind of UNproof. A table is flat. If you push a bowl to the edge of the table, it falls off. This makes sense. The Earth is a great big table.

You can appreciate their viewpoint. You can say to yourself, yeah, I can see how they thought that. I don’t agree with it because I am smarter than that, but I can see why they would believe this with their limited view of knowledge.

So then, let’s turn the camera around and point it back at ourselves. What is it that we see in our culture that future civilizations will raise an eyebrow at? What will future generations give us the sympathy sigh for? Ah, simple people of the twenty-first century.

Right now we believe that beyond our galaxy is just more galaxies and that space continues on forever and I guess this makes sense. But maybe not.

Right now we believe that time travel is a near impossibility and that it’s something out of science fiction movies. But maybe not.

Perhaps the next level of science we’ll push into is not the cosmos nor time hopping. Perhaps the next level of science we’ll push into is the human brain. There’s this gray mass living inside of our skulls and we don’t fully understand how it works.

I want to reiterate that last line. We do not fully understand how our own brain works.

That thing inside your head that secretes chemicals that makes you happy and that thing that holds all your memories and controls your breathing. We have no idea how it works. It may as well be alien technology.

Just like the Earth circling the sun. Just like people falling off the edge of the planet. We do not fully understand how it works.

And sometimes we jump to conclusions based upon what we believe to be true over what is yet to be proven to be true. Even today we are not so different than the people of hundreds and thousands of years ago. We still make the same, short-sighted mistakes.

What does it mean to be a homosexual? Do you know? If someone asked you to describe why an individual aligns themselves with homosexuality, would you be able to answer in a way wherein you would not sound like a “Flat Earth” person? Would you be able to answer at all? Could you speak with a sense of truth that is provable – like the Earth revolving around the sun – or would you speak with a sense of belief?

We look at the world around us and we see male and female. We see the majority of people on Earth operating in a very specific fashion. Male paired with female. But because a majority of people do a thing, does that make it so? Does that make it the only way to experience life? Because most people do something, does that mean that the minority are not only marginalized, but cut out completely?

Perhaps science will one day dissect the human brain and it will understand how it fully works. Perhaps one day we will understand the homosexual brain and the asexual brain and the transgender brain and the unisexual brain. But until then, how can we speak with knowledge on these things without understanding the truth of them?

How can we, as people, make judgment calls, moral or otherwise, on a people group that we do not understand? This is to say nothing of understanding them emotionally or having empathy for their pain in a world that tends to shun them, but to speak strictly of the neurological ramifications of what it means to have a brain.

We do not understand the human brain. To make definitive statements about a person’s genetic make-up without understanding their brain is like making definitive statements about someone on trial without listening to their court case.

At one point in my life, not that long ago, I was a staunch opponent of gay marriage, gay people and the lifestyle that they represented. It was a sin against God and it was damaging our traditional sense of marriage. In the simplest sense, these people were wrong. About everything. Gay people either made a choice (probably subconscious) or were raised to be gay by either a lack of a parental figure (probably a father) or some kind of molestation event.

Maybe you think this. There are, after all, a considerable group of people that do.

But what if… (ah, two of my favorite words) what if someday we do understand how the human brain fully works and functions? What if someday we do learn that gender binaries (strictly male / female), are not the absolute end of the line in regards to sexuality? What if science expands our minds and our culture and we understand that people are born with a very specific bend and to go against that is to go against all that is natural for them.

What if we learn that your belief does not matter because it is definitively wrong? Imagine the mobs that must have occurred when the philosophers said, “We are not the center of the universe. God did not put us in the middle. We are circling around the sun and the sun is not god. We are just drifting in space.” BOOM. Their faith has been not only questioned, but crushed. They could still believe in god but they had to go back to the drawing board to figure out what the new model looked like.

Whoa.

They had to re-define how they saw and experienced god.

God had to change.

That’s a scary thing.

It’s scary to question our belief of how god relates to us, especially when we think we are in proper standing with god. Justice and justification are very dangerous things when we wield them ourselves. When we believe that god is on our side and that we are doing his work, they can become lethal.

Let’s each of us remember that the KKK is a Christian organization.

Let’s each of us remember that the Westboro Baptist Church, those fine folks that picket at soldier’s funerals and hold up the God Hates Fags signs, are a Christian organization.

Let’s each of us remember that ISIS, who is beheading children and raping infants, are an organization dedicated to doing god’s work.

You are probably not like any of these things. These are big picture problems. And I’m not suggesting that Christianity or other religious groups are all like this. They aren’t. People of all faiths do absolutely amazing works of humanitarian service. But remember that each of us are capable of being blinded by our own passion for justice by the almighty hand of god. And what we think that god thinks is right, is not always so. And we must question our own motives. It is imperative.

It is easy for me, for you, for all of us, to point at a minority and say, “They aren’t doing it right.”

But it isn’t very easy to sit in the quiet – to intentionally, literally, go into a room by yourself in the absolute quiet – and to think about our own shortcomings. It is very difficult to pick apart ourselves and accept how fucked up we actually are as individuals.

I’ll end with this. God is a tool. Like a hammer. And that hammer can be used for good things and it can be used for bad things.

In 1994 a hammer was used to build an orphanage in Kampala, Uganda that has housed over 3,000 abandoned children that would otherwise be dead.

In 2002 a man bashed his wife’s skull in with a hammer after he caught her having sex with one of his friends.

And keep in mind that the Bible condones this behavior. It doesn’t call it out with a hammer but it condones stoning your wife to death if you catch her in the act of infidelity (Leviticus 20:10). And guys, that one goes for you too. If you’ve ever cheated on your wife, the old testament god calls for your blood. You can make the argument that Jesus came (new testament) and all of those laws are now moot but once they did matter. Once god told a group of people to bury a woman up to her neck and smash her face with rocks. Once that is how people viewed god. God was on their side and their acts were just.

We can say “That doesn’t count anymore.” But it did. To someone who was placed in a pit and buried, screaming for help, screaming out to god to help, screaming at her husband to please forgive her before he splattered her brains all over the ground, it did matter. Because it happened a long time ago, does not negate its reality.

Even the holocaust is in the past.

But that shit matters.

Remember that our perception of god has changed more than once in the course of human history. Remember that the way you view god today is not the way people will view god in a thousand years. Remember that the way people viewed god in the past is not the way you do today. Remember that everything, including the unchanging god, does change. Or at the very least, our perception of god changes.

Remember that you are broken as well. And remember that you’ve done things that might require you to someday be buried up to your neck and have your face smashed in by rocks.

God is a hammer. Be sure you’re using it properly.

I hope your take away is this.

Our world changes (science, technology, war, peace, providential boundaries). Our moral code changes (as an adult I drink alcohol but don’t eat meat, the opposite of my childhood). Even our moral code in accordance to god changes (where it was once acceptable to kill someone for adultery, today we think it barbaric). Our science has changed. Our perception of the universe has changed. And even if you believe that god does not change, our perception of god does. And it is our perception that we act upon. It is our perception of god that gives ISIS their justification. It is our perception of god that gives us our bearing for right and wrong.

Everything changes. It is unstoppable.

And so let’s remember that human sexuality will also change. It will change. Or at least our perception of it will change. The reality is that it was probably always here, muffled and quiet and now we’re finally speaking about it. And the only thing that is in our control is how we handle it – how we perceive it. The LGBT community is a hurting and broken one.

I won’t touch on the current transgender bathroom topic because I believe it is one of simple logistics. There is a solution that will be enacted and then it will be over. This is not about the bathroom topic. This is about the heart in which we approach it. Our world is about the heart in which we approach it. God is about the heart in which we approach it.

This is our opportunity, as human beings, to pick up the hammer and repair or destroy.

How we use it is up to each of us.

 

Evidence to the Extraordinary

“Is sasquatch real?” Quinn asks, out of breath, as she runs up to me. I’m sitting at the table drawing faces on marshmallows we’re about to roast. Is sasquatch real?

 

There’s a part of me – that quick gut reaction part – that tries to quickly blurt out, “No,” just so I don’t get embroiled in an endless conversation of “Why? Why? Why?” with my five year old. But instead I bite. “Is sasqatch real? That is a very interesting question because it doesn’t have an answer. Have you ever heard of a question that doesn’t have an answer before?”

 

She shakes her head no. Quinn is very inquisitive and both her memory and ability to comprehend large concepts is sometimes frightening. She looks at me with wide eyes and crunched eyebrows. I can tell that she understands she’s breaking new ground.

 

“Well, Quinn. Some people believe in sasquatch and some people don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because there is no proof of him. Do you know what proof is?”

“No.”

“It’s something you can say is real. I have proof that this marshmallow is real because I’m holding it in my hand and I can touch it and I can see it and feel it. Another name for proof is evidence.”

“And you can tell that I am real because you can see me?

“That’s right! You’re very smart.”

“So sasquatch is not real because nobody can see him.”

 

This is where it gets tricky. How do you nurture a sense of awe and wonder in a child while still painting an accurate portrait that they will understand without drowning them in information? That’s a tall request. How do you explain how large the galaxy is to a child that doesn’t have true concept of what a mile looks like? It all needs to be boiled down to these very simple kernels of truth.

 

“Sasquatch might be real because nobody has ever seen him. I know that’s a big idea for you. Nobody has ever seen him so we cannot say with certainty that he is real or false.”

“Can you look it up on your phone?”

 

I appreciate that Quinn views my phone as a gateway to all knowledge and truth because, at its core, that is exactly what the internet is. The Great Digital Oracle.

 

“The answer is not on my phone. Nobody knows the true answer.”

“There are no pictures?”

“Yes, there are pictures but nobody knows if they’re real or faked.”

“Like a man in a suit?”

“Your astuteness frightens me sometimes.”

“Oh! Thanks, Dad. What is uh-stood-ness?”

“Lots of questions. Let’s not get side-tracked. You should also know that there are some people that say they’ve seen sasquatch and have touched him but most other people say that they just made it up.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. Publicity?”

“What is publicity?”

“It’s like when you do something so that a lot of people hear about you.”

“Why?”

“Because some people like to be the center of attention.”

“Why?”

“Alright, listen. Let’s focus on one thing. Ready? What did we learn? Sasquatch is . . .”

“Maybe real.”

“Because . . .”

“Nobody has seen him and we cannot prove it.”

“That’s right. It’s just a story until someone has . . .”

“Evidence.”

“Bingo.”

 

I pick up my marker and start coloring in the eyeballs on my marshmallow, creating life.

 

Quinn scratches her head with comically large actions. It’s like a very theatrical cartoon character taught her what it looks like when people “think”. Lots of head rubbing and going, “Ummmmm.”

 

“Yes, Quinn? Do you have another question?”

 

“Is God real?”

 

I set down my marshmallow and look into its flat, lifeless eyes and wonder if she intentionally sets me up.