Author: danefowlkes

My grandchildren are convinced that I test drive rental cars for a living, and that may not be as far from the truth as I’d like to argue. I travel extensively as a major part of my work in university advancement, so I’ve learned how to maximize my time on the road. As a general rule I stop by the public library the day before hitting the road and check-out an audio book on CD, as I learned early on in my rambling profession that listening helps keep me awake while I drive, just so long as the book is a page turner, so to speak. Last week I was preparing for another development trip but failed to make time to go by the library, so I countered with a contingency plan. On my way out of town I stopped by Cracker Barrel at the corner of Interstate 35 and Lakeshore Drive because they boast an audio book rental program in which you pay full price for the set of CDs and receive all but $3.95 upon its return. I’m admittedly cheap, so this is not my default approach.

I loaded the first CD and settled back in the driver’s seat to listen to “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak on my journey eastbound on Highway 31, but was thwarted because disk two was damaged. Frustrated and wanting to fill the silence with something beneficial, I tuned in the Dallas classical music FM station, and it just so happened that the morning’s broadcast of “Performance Today” centered around the story of Leo Fleisher. In 1964, Leon Fleisher’s career as a concert pianist was thriving. He had an exclusive recording contract with Columbia Masterworks and was particularly well known for his interpretations of the piano concerti of Brahms and Beethoven, which he recorded with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. But then, the unthinkable happened. A seemingly minor accident – a cut on his right thumb – led to a condition called focal dystonia, the involuntary curling of his right hand’s ring and little fingers. In despair he refused to shave or cut his hair, and because he couldn’t afford a motorcycle, he drove around town with no particular purpose on a used Vespa. He saw the end of his marriage along with a promising career, until he began conducting, teaching, and playing compositions for the left hand. About ten years ago, Fleisher was able to ameliorate his focal dystonia symptoms after therapy call Rolfing and experimental Botox injections to the point where he could play with both hands again. In 2004, Vanguard Classics released Leon Fleisher’s first “two-handed” recording since the 1960s, entitled “Two Hands”, to critical acclaim. Fleisher received the 2007 Kennedy Center Honors.

As I sat on the edge of the driver’s seat enthralled by the dramatic story with a powerful ending and listened to a moving recent two-handed performance by Fleisher at age seventy, I couldn’t stop thinking about the years during which an award winning concert pianist was confined to playing with only one hand, and I could not help but see a parallel with much of my own life. While full of grace and empowered by God’s Spirit, I have too often allowed spiritual paper cuts to sideline and render my testimony impotent. An unkind word, unthinking rebuke, a failed attempt, a disillusioning relationship; with relative ease I decline to being a ‘Left-hand only’ Christian, an army of one waiting to be unleashed, self-immobilized by pride and disappointment. It is high time to lower myself and surrender both hands and my whole heart, to do whatever is required to live the “two-handed” disciple’s life. Perhaps you’re like me, tired of living with one hand tied behind your back. Accept God’s grace, forgive yourself and anyone else who has inflicted a cut, and play on with both hands.

Although no expert on the Book of Revelation, I am currently preaching a series of sermons on the seven messages given by Christ to seven historic churches in chapters two and three. Near the end of the statements offered to the church in Pergamum, there is a curious statement about Christ giving “hidden manna” to those believers who refuse compromise and persevere in their faith despite difficult times. I shared with the small flock I shepherd that my best take on this is that God assures us he will provide what we need when we need it for as long as we need it. As I spoke, I looked into pairs of hurting eyes, a few blank stares, and more than a few sets searching to see if I knew by experience what in heaven’s name I was talking about.

One thing I’ve learned is to resist the tendency to define God by what I need. While “God is all I need” sounds pious, the truth is that God is far more than what I need and what you need and what the whole world ever has needed or ever will need. When I self-prescribe blinders so that all I see is my need or hurt or wish, and then err by understanding God only according to the light of my own experience, I reduce Him to a shadow of myself. Does God care? Absolutely! Is God the solution? Without a doubt! But the Creator and Redeemer and Sustainer cannot be contained by my imagination or confined by my despair. Instead of asking God to act the way I want at any given moment in order to meet any given need, I must bow before Him, surrender unconditionally to Him, then allow Him to reveal His glory and plan in my circumstance.

Although I’m uncertain as to when writing isn’t creative, my first serious attempt at it took place in Miss Walden’s third grade classroom at G. M. Sims Elementary. The building still stands, but the school no longer exists, having gone the same way as the Dodo Bird and my high school. In fact, the only one of the schools I attended in Port Arthur that is still in use is the junior high that I loathed, although it’s now named ‘middle’ rather than ‘junior.’ Call it progress, poetic justice, or just plain luck of the draw, the fact that the formative educational spaces of my childhood and youth are long since obsolete makes me feel rather ancient. But I digress. Back in third grade I wrote a pathetic piece of science fiction that so impressed Miss Walden that she made an appointment to come to my home and speak to my parents about her promising student, their son. Sandi Walden was beautiful (she still is), and had captured my heart by about day two of the school year, so the thought of her coming to our home was equally exhilarating and terrifying. I played out possible scenarios like chess moves in my head, each of them ending with her in my arms despite the perceived “minor” differences in our ages. The infamous evening arrived. My parents greeted Miss Walden at our door and ushered her in. They exchanged pleasantries and at some point in the conversation, my mother came looking for me. I was hiding in my bedroom and not easily found because I had wedged my nine year old body as far under my bed as I could possibly fit. Innate timidity trumped romantic love, and I refused to come out from under until my teacher was ready to leave. My grand opportunity to make a positive impression did not go according to plan, with no one to blame but myself. I received an A+ for the writing, but failed my social test. The science fiction I wrote is memorable not because of its quality, but because it was undoubtedly my first time to write without constraint. It may prove to be the most truly creative piece I ever compose.

My next concerted effort in explaining myself on paper that I remember came in Miss Goldman’s high school English class. We met on the second floor of the now defunct Thomas Jefferson Senior High School on Stadium Drive, and I’ll never forget her entrance on the first day of class my junior year. She strode in, her diminutive five foot frame stretched erect as a general, and marched silently but swiftly to the blackboard and wrote in white chalk, “Before the high gates of heaven, the gods placed sweat.” She turned and glowered at us, daring anyone to speak and give themselves away as spineless, lazy, or a combination of the two. We were in for it. She demanded perfection from each of us and refused to be what she termed “our crutch;” we were to figure things out for ourselves. Involuntarily at first, I eventually learned from her the enormous power of words and a well crafted sentence. I promptly went out and purchased my first dictionary and thesaurus from the money I earned mowing lawns.

This thing of writing is madness. To think the world needs one more clamoring voice, much less cares about its motive, is lunacy. Why, then, must I write? What force compels expression? In base manner it comes forth as narcissistic Facebook posts or mundane quips. Higher forms we customarily term ‘literature.’ In between is every manner of utilitarian utterance and philosophic postulating, and somewhere in the rainforest of words I wield my own, like an African panga that cuts a pathway through strangling undergrowth. In final analysis writing is the heart’s desperate attempt to shout, “I was here. I mattered. At least for a little while.”

I’m in the final stages of preparing to publish a new book entitled, “Ordinary Glory: Finding grace in the commonplace.” I hope you’ll choose to secure a copy and in so doing, discover a comfortable companion for the journey, or a memory you didn’t know was yours but that you share with others. I’d love to hear your thoughts on my title, my writing, or your own experience of finding grace in the commonplace.

“When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. Is it not so, Godric? . . . It’s the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead.”

~ Frederick Buechner

How do you find your way home again? It’s easier if you ever had a home to begin with. As a boy growing up in Port Arthur, home meant private time in my own bedroom, family meal time around the kitchen table (with the exception of Dad, who ate in his recliner with plate balanced on belly and paper napkin tucked under his chin), baseball with friends in the backyard, the independence of riding my bike to school, summers playing in Groves American Little League, and, much later, sitting in our high school football stadium stands awaiting my turn to walk across the makeshift stage and bring closure to the previous 12 years of public education. Home was my first car (1965 Rambler Classic), my first date, first job, my first anything and anywhere. One dictionary defines it as a place where something flourishes, is most typically found, or from which it originates. In a very real way, home is whatever convinces that you belong. People are the best at doing that–mom, dad, sister, best buddy, favorite teacher, childhood nemesis, pastor, coach, next door neighbor–a human mosaic that sounds, looks, and feels like home.

What’s really odd is that the young spend their time trying to leave home while the old occupy their twilight years trying to find their way back. My favorite song as a teenager was the Haggard classic “Ramblin’ Fever,” but my favorite tune these days sounds a lot like “There’s No Place Like Home.” What we’re all searching for is a center, a fulcrum on which to fix our equilibrium, but we do not know this. We try to match the emotional attachments of our childhood with things that were never meant to satisfy our God-given longing. It is good theology to insert here that Christ is our Center, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Magnetic north is something you can’t see; instead, what you observe is the needle that points that direction. In a similar way, home is our earthly needle – a person or persons that help orientate us toward the Center. This explains why familial conflict is so destructive — we lose our bearings because we lose the very thing God intended to point us toward him. Some never find it again. Some think they do only to discover that what they thought was home is in reality a place where they don’t belong or an experience that savagely disappoints. Blessed is the man or woman who experiences the grace of loving and being loved by someone who moves them back toward the Center. Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again. When you find your way back, you will discover that home is a person pointing you still further back to Christ.

My church is growing on me, and not like an unwanted mole that rouses suspicion for cancer. My wife turned to me on the way home from worship yesterday and said, “You’re a good fit for this church.” She meant it as a compliment and I took it as the same, but must confess that I was not so sure from the outset of our sojourn here. We are an eclectic blend. I cannot remember knowing and counting myself a part of a more disparate collection of individuals, but our differences provide a clear view of grace in relief. Highly educated and largely uneducated recite the Lord’s Prayer with one voice, cowboys and city slickers kneel near one another on the same maroon velvet altar, women and men stand on equal footing before the Lord and the church, and young children pass the collection plates to the elderly each Sunday. One of my favorite moments in worship comes just after the offering as we stand to sing the Doxology and I choke back emotion while the nine-year-old usher to my right, who comes from a less-than-ideal environment, sings out at the top of his voice, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!” I love this menagerie, and what’s truly amazing is that they love me in return.

Grace is immanently practical. One example of its relevance in ordinary circumstance is how grace instructs and empowers me to deal with “irregular people” (my wife’s clever phrasing). Yes, there are some who grind on my nerves like grating Parmesan cheese, and I imagine that the feeling is mutual. I find it entirely possible on the basis of God’s grace to fully forgive, refuse bitterness, refrain from criticizing, even though I may still not like someone or want to be around them. Not quite as easily, grace empowers me to forgive myself, even though at times I’d prefer to be anyone but me. Whether I am learning to forgive someone else or to pardon myself, God’s grace is the touch point that changes everything. Such self-awareness may not be politically correct, but is essential to getting at the meaning of grace. Until I honestly ‘fess up to who am –thinning hairline, thickening stubbornness, depraved nature, et al — I will never move beyond intellectual assent and dive deep into relishing and reveling in God’s unimaginable mercy. Whether or not I can answer this question largely determines what I do with grace: “Who am I?” I’m talking deep contemplation here, soul searching, mind boggling honesty. The kind of self-disclosure I’m advocating cuts and heals all in the same stroke. Honesty is generally painful, perhaps even brutal, but sincere contrition ushers in reparation. The moment I become honest enough to admit to myself the full extent of my own depravity, I am able to gain a glimpse of God’s glory and the wonder of grace. Only those who stumble in the dark fully appreciate the miracle of light.

“And yet, and yet. Who knows what treasure life may hold for even such children as those, or what treasures even such children as those may grow up to become? To bear a child even under the best of circumstances, or to abort a child even under the worst — the risks are hair-raising either way and the results incalculable.”
~ Frederick Buechner

It’s easy to be dogmatic until the dog barks at you. Sunday morning began much the same as any other: two cups of coffee, a blueberry bagel slathered with lite cream cheese, numerous read-throughs of the morning’s soon-to-be-delivered sermon, and intermittent prayer. Like clockwork we traveled down Rock Creek Road to our little white frame church where nothing memorable happened during the worship service that followed, especially my preaching. We returned home just like we do most Sundays after church, I changed into jeans and an old college sweatshirt, and set about to do nothing in particular-one of the reasons I love Sunday afternoons. During the interlude leading up to lunch I received a text message from my high school senior daughter. Text messages are common occurrences these days and notoriously void of emotion, but this one conjured up plenty on my part: “Dad, I need to talk to you. Please call when you can.” Without knowing what she meant, I did what she asked and placed the call. She answered and said, “Dad, I don’t want to tell you. Can’t you just guess and I’ll let you know when you get it right?” All I could think to say was what I honestly believe: “No matter what you have to tell me, nothing will change the fact that you’re my daughter and I will always love you.” Interminable silence followed, broken finally by what I somehow already knew, “I’m pregnant.” Two simple words, but profound enough to change the world.

I appreciate anyone’s honest struggle with what to do with those two words, but must confess a vested interest in every human outcome of the debate. I was born to an unwed mother in 1960 and would have had a damning designation on my birth certificate were it not for the tireless efforts of Edna Gladney on behalf of children like me some twenty years before. As bad as it would have been to have a prejudiced label on my birth certificate, the good news is that I had a birth certificate. The even better news is that my birth mother had the courage to enter the Sellers Baptist Home in New Orleans and gift me to Henry and Lois, a couple with hearts large enough to allow a child to flourish in the arms of great nourishing love. I would never denigrate that poor young woman’s angst over yielding her child, and, in fact, attempt consciously to live in such a way as to validate the outcome of her own soul debate. Two things get lost in the debate over choice versus life: the enduring turmoil of the mother-in-waiting and the enduring destiny of the child-in-waiting.

For those who uphold the individual’s choice as superior to the unborn child, you will, no doubt, abhor my opposition to your position. For those who vilify the individual in support of a moral dilemma, you must excuse my sensitivity to the turmoil of the woman. I have been and continue to be profoundly altered by the courage of my daughter who followed the first two words with four others, “I’m having this baby.” The bottom-line is this: I write not on this critical issue as a physician or a scientist or a theologian or a liberal or a conservative; I speak as a survivor and write as a father.

He had stopped by our home in order to share some of his struggles; he needed a pastor and I was the most geographically accessible. What he told was one part confession, another part philosophy, and a final part conjecture; he closed with a declaration of toxic pessimism, “I can see the handwriting on the wall.” Grief and regret are siblings, if not identical twins; they combined to make it impossible for my acquaintance to see the forest of God’s mercy for the trees of his own iniquity.

There are two biblical concepts with which I identify most naturally and fully. The first is that we are all fatally flawed creatures. The second is that the only thing that distinguishes the believer from the unbeliever is that she or he recognizes and embraces God’s grace as the only remedy for her or his flaws. Without even trying, I am a walking, talking, daily illustration of the first truth. If you watch me closely or listen to me long enough you will readily observe my flawed character. I will exhibit the negative attributes of every biblical character you read about with horror or disdain. Given enough rope to hang myself, I take the fall every time. In fact, there seems to be no bottom to the depths to which I can and do fall; there is no limit to the disappointment I evoke in those who know me and expect more from me. More profoundly, I am adept at disappointing myself.

Fortunately for me, and for you, the second truth is made more clear when you see God’s grace in relief. I’ve overheard myself at times thinking, “Apart from the grace of God, there go I,” when the truth is that I am every bit as guilty as every guilty person who has or ever will live. Scripture shouts my story when it declares “There is nothing good in me” (Romans 7:18) and “My righteousness is as filthy rags in the sight of God” (Isaiah 64:6). But praise God in the same breath it sings my song, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” My struggle is not in finding God’s pardon, it is in accepting God’s forgiveness and moving on. Guilt binds my heart and gags my mouth, but grace explodes the chains.

The man was correct, there is handwriting on the wall. In divine script we can detect what Brennan Manning called the “signature of Jesus,” that grace transforms flawed human beings into trophies of God’s power and love. If God can love and save me, there is hope for anyone.

(The following is an abridged and much edited version of the funeral message I delivered on Saturday to honor the passing of my wife’s mother.)

We have gathered on this brutally cold afternoon to praise God and witness to our faith as we celebrate the life of Anna Kathryn Armand. We come together in grief, acknowledging our human loss. May God grant us grace, that in pain we may find comfort, in sorrow hope, in death resurrection.

There’s a lot that could be said at a time like this, but really, very little needs to be said. What we end up saying in death depends on what we believe about life. Buechner writes that funerals are important because they state “something precious and irreplaceable has come to an end and something in you has come to an end with it. Funerals put a period after the sentence’s last word.” Services like this do far more than commemorate the dead, they remind us that you and I are still alive. There’s still time, time to remember or discover for the first time that this life is enormously important, and that life consists of days, and days are comprised of moments. We abide best in our Heavenly Father when we extoll his grace that benefits this breath, and when we embrace the exhilaration of not living in the wake of what we once were. What happened or didn’t happen yesterday pales in significance with what I do right now; life does count, and this very moment matters enormously. Mercy is at hand in abundance when I allow myself to detect the weight of God in the mundane and ordinary. Grace is always present tense; grace in present tense means release from remorse over the past, and freedom from fear of failing to have tomorrow.

I enjoy waking early, but rarely do much more with the stillness than accompany morning coffee with prayerful meditation. These are not moments for doing so much as being; reflection fuels the later doing. This winter morning I shoved aside the sermon that insisted on intruding and allowed myself to settle on daydreaming about heaven. It feels somehow natural to think about death while peering through glazed windows at weighted skies and naked trees. A grey and barren horizon makes it suddenly a strain to remember warmth and light and green and hope, as recent as yesterday. What complicates such mornings for me is that considering the endlessness of days causes honest turmoil initiated by a barbed question– will life end with death? Although years ago as a youthful pastor I meticulously recorded funerals officiated in a massive blank-lined volume printed for such a purpose (perhaps thinking that by writing names in a book I might grant them immortality), I’ve long since lost count of how many times I’ve stood behind podiums and near coffins pronouncing hope that we are presiding not over an ending but endless beginning. Reciting dog-eared scriptures for the comfort of those lagging behind in the run to see Jesus, I deliver discourses on the eternal sincerely but always with a twinge of wonder. Can such platinum hope prove true? Will I one day blink my eyes in darkest death only to find myself transfigured? Is it possible that my own grey horizon might yield to light grander than anything I’ve read about or imagined? Don’t consider me a skeptic. Instead, number me in the company of those who cannot honestly declare we have no questions but journey with confidence that we are embraced by the Answer.

None of us will fully understand death until we die and then it will be too late to do anything about it, but what we can say is that what matters most is what we do before the end comes. Who did we love? How did we love? What difference did it make? Who will continue to tell our tale and what will its color be? For better or worse, our story never ends with us.

On Monday afternoon, Jo and Brenda and I were standing just over there, deciding on burial plots and working out the logistics of being buried; I was thinking about all the last business — funerals and where do you want to be buried — and I thought if anything were to be inscribed on my tombstone other than “He finished well,” let it be that, “Our story never ends with us.”

“Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees.”
~Annie Dillard

The weather on Saturday was ideal for a great number of things; unfortunately for me, that included raking leaves. We live with trees, and in the spring, summer and early autumn I enjoy them. Our home is surrounded by a panorama of Elms, Red Oaks, Pecans, Chinese Tallows, and one spindly Magnolia. A gangly Sweet Gum and stocky Fruitless Mulberry, both useless in my opinion, are also part of the mix. When the afore mentioned begin to shed their shade, our yard looks like an ocean of leaves, and every stiff breeze conjures up still another amber, gold and purple wave. Trees may be our friends, but the bottom line is that they leave a major mess for me to clean, and Saturday turned into a day of reckoning. Multicolored leaves covered every inch of ground like stippling in a Van Gogh painting; my grandson and I raked, shoveled, hauled, and burned for hours. Exhausted and game called on account of darkness, it seemed like we could work for days and be no closer to the goal. There is an end, we just can’t see it for the leaves.

Life resembles raking. We exert great effort at doing good; kind words, gracious gestures, helping hands, sacrificial service, ad infinitum. Then one day we look up and everything looks the same, so we ask no one in particular under our breath, What’s the point? The bad get ahead and the good are left behind; injustice spreads through the world like an incurable rash. Will the madness never end? The answer is, of course, that it will, for each of us. I cannot speak with certainty on what lies beyond if anything, but I can speak about what remains. Reputation lingers. Acts of grace and mercy outlive us. Buechner writes that love is the frame through which we see our neighbors; I would add that love is a fitting frame for any life. In the end, we are a lasting impression that we leave on the ones we love.

“People observe the colors of a day only at its beginning and end, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors.”
~Markus Zusak

The color was all too familiar. Eleven months ago we stood near the bed of a different family member, in a different room, under different circumstances, but with the same result. We had learned the evening before that my wife’s mother had taken a turn for the worse and was not expected to live through another week, so we made our way Saturday morning to the Bluebonnet Trails wing on the third floor of St. Catherine’s. We pushed aside the curtain that served as a door and entered the grey dimly lit room. As expected, Anne was non-responsive, so we spoke gentle words in muted tones with oxygen gurgling in the background, the only other sounds those of a Bingo game from down the hall; life comes and goes, but Bingo marches on. My wife’s sister arrived shortly thereafter, and while she updated us on Anne’s condition I took a moment to consider the sterile surroundings. An outdated television held center stage on one wall, flanked on the left by a metal rod supporting twelve items of clothing suspended by assorted plastic and thin metal hangers, and on the right by a tall narrow closet. A window ledge and small chest near the bed held an assortment of children’s toys and one crayon drawing, evidence of great grandchildren. A few old photographs on one wall told the essentials of her story: a black and white image of a young woman in nursing uniform conveyed her vocation; a sepia snapshot of three children provided a glimpse into her childhood; the subject matter of still another was her uniformed father holding her as an infant, the only evidence of parental involvement. Absence of a husband in any of her photos reinforced that she had divorced many years ago and never remarried. The opposite wall held a family tree that her sister had meticulously prepared, conspicuous against the whitewashed surface and even more so in the presence of a life near its end; an artistic reminder of who she had come from and who she was a part of still, confluence and influence. That was all.

It’s hard to rejoice when colors darken, except when such is an answer to prayer. All I could think to ask as we concluded our vigil was that God would honor himself and her by being gracious in the end. He was. None of us will fully understand death until we die and then it will be too late to do anything about it, but what we can say is that what matters most is what we do before the end comes. Who did we love? How did we love? What difference did it make? Who will continue to tell our tale and what will its color be? For better or worse, our story never ends with us.