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I just finished a book that fulfilled every fear I have of spiders, particularly the scene where the poisonous spider is about to jump off the shower curtain rod onto the person in the shower . . .

The Spider King, by Wayne Thomas Batson and Christopher Hopper should be read by anyone who loves Harrry Potter and any adult who likes good fantasy. It is a Christian fantasy in the vein of The Chronicles of Narnia only with a good dose of The Lord of the Rings thrown in. By the end of the month I will be posting an official book review of the second book in the series but I wanted to read the first book, well, uh, first. And, it is an excellent book. So, come back near the end of the month for my review of the second book, “Venom and Song”!

In the meantime, be wary of spiders on shower curtain rods!!!!

In the fifth grade, Brandon was the terror of my life. Although we were both ten, he was a foot taller than me and already had hair under his arms. His bright, mischievous eyes revealed his inherent meanness and his unquenchable desire to hurt me as much as possible. He would assail me at recess and punch me and push me down in the dirt and once tried to make me kiss his sneakers. He had around him a covey of feckless cold hearted bully wannabes who licked their lips in anticipation and balled their fists in anger and malice and tried to be the devil that was Brandon.

When I entered the sixth grade, Brandon’s family pulled him out of the public school and put him in a private school where desegregation had not “polluted” the waters. And so, I lost track of Brandon for a few years until one day he showed up in high school in my math class. We were both in the ninth grade by then and our new math teacher knew nothing about algebra or geometry or any subject requiring more than a sixth grade education. She had been moved to our high school to “balance” out the “inequality” in teachers. The only thing she could say consistently that made any sense whatsoever was “Close your mouths.” in a rolling somnolent tone that carried no weight of discipline or correction.

After the first nine weeks, she picked the four brightest students, of which I was a reluctant member, and we were placed in desks facing the rest of the class. It became out job to teach the class. And so, throughout the rest of the year, the four of us split up the lessons and taught algebra while our teacher lounged behind her desk and spouted, “Close your mouths.” over and over. Brandon showed up halfway through the year. His private academy had gone out of business and he was woefully behind on his math so he asked me to tutor him. Really? Tutor the guy who used to shove my face in the mud and call it chocolate?

But, I helped him mainly because his mother and my mother were good friends and I had the sneaking suspicion I would go to hell if I didn’t help a fellow brother in Christ. Brandon was surprisingly humble and not at all snarky. I wish I could say we became friends, but we didn’t. At best, we reached an uneasy impasse and he moved on to the field of sports while I hung back with the rest of the nerds who were not yet known as nerds since the word had yet to be invented.

Fast forward many years and I am now a radiologist in private practice. I met one of our new technologists and her last name was achingly familiar. Sure enough, at the first department party who should show up but her husband and his name was Brandon! Here he was a real estate agent and volunteer fireman and I was a doctor. Where did all the mud shoving get you, huh? I really wanted to rub it in his face, but I was afraid my lack of humility would send me to hell.

Over the years, Brandon and I grew to like each other and a casual friendship arose. He would call me for advise in teaching Sunday School or being a good deacon. It was an amazing growing friendship. And then, one day, we got to talking about scuba diving and he stared at me with horror. I told him we were going to Vortex Springs to dive the next week and I was really excited.

Brandon sat down and his face was as white as milk. This is what he told me.

My buddy and I have been diving in Vortex Springs many times. There’s a system of caves inside the mouth of the spring. It is amazing! You have to take your tank off and send it in first and then squeeze through the entrance but once you get inside the caves are unbelievable. They’re huge and the water is crystal clear. You can go on and on for hours through those caves. But, the problem is you can turned around very easily. And as your air is running out, you realize you don’t remember which cave you came in through. If you’re smart, you leave a rope trailing behind you to follow back to the entrance. But, if you stir up silt and sand and your hand gets off the rope for one second, you can drift away and never find it again. My best buddy and I went diving and I lost him. I made it out just as my air ran out. The firemen and medics got there and I told them he couldn’t have much air left. They said they were going to wait at least an hour. Wait an hour? He would be dead by then! They said that was the point. If they went down while he only had a few minutes of air left, he would panic and kill himself and his rescuer. Best to wait until you knew he had drowned before recovering his body.

I just looked at Brandon and I didn’t know what to say. Where was the mud shoving, bullying bravado now? Where was the mean, mischievous kid that poked me and pummeled me? Who was kissing whose shoes now? I couldn’t breath and my face was cold and clammy. Brandon stood up and headed for the door out of my office. He looked back at me once.

“I never went diving again. Don’t wind up with my friend. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

Chuck was gesturing toward the cave again and I glanced down once at the mouth to the killer caves. The cave Chuck was in front of had an opening you could drive a van through. So, I followed him into the cave. It was about the size of a two car garage. Chuck had pulled out his slate and written “eels” and motioned toward the back of the cage. We swam deeper and deeper into the dark and I looked up. Bubbles had gathered along the rock ceiling above me. Suddenly I realized I could not swim straight up if a problem occurred. I’ve never been claustrophobic but the fear gripped my heart and lungs and squeezed them tight. I couldn’t get any air! Chuck looked at me and I motioned to my mouthpiece. The regulator supplying air had frozen up on me! Chuck took his own mouthpiece out of his mouth and looked at it thinking I was talking about his mouthpiece. I grabbed it and shoved it into my mouth and sucked in wonderful, cold air. Chuck took my malfunctioning mouthpiece and couldn’t get it to work. We buddy breathed all the way back to the surface and I left that hideous cave behind. When I broke the surface, I took the regulator off my tank and threw out into the middle of the springs. I would never go scuba diving again.

A couple of years passed and I waited for the chance to tell Brandon my story. But, his growing real estate business was taking so much of his time, I never saw him again. Two years almost to the day I last saw him, he went to collect rent from one of his houses and the occupants, three drug addicts in their early twenties stabbed him to death just to watch a man die.

Perhaps there had been a time in my life when I would have welcomed such an end to a bully who made my life miserable. But, in reality, when we develop a victim mentality, we often invite such treatment. That doesn’t in anyway condone his actions or the actions of any of the myriad bullies who tried to subjugate me over the years. But, it does say a lot about our character and our ability to stand up for ourselves. One of the myths I bought into about Christianity was that Jesus was a coward. After all, He said to turn the other cheek. But, a psychiatrist friend of mine in medical school cleared up the myth for me. What Jesus was advocating was not cowardice, was not don’t fight back, it was to do the unexpected. To turn the tables on the assailant and respond in a way that totally blew their mind. Don’t react, respond, he would tell me. It was a revelation that changed my life and turned me from a risk avoider to a risk taker. Thus, the brief journey into scuba diving.

Brandon did not deserve the way in which he died. Neither did his friend who drowned in the deep, dark loneliness of a water filled cave. We are all sojourners on a long, arduous trek through a world that is not our own. We belong to another world, a far country where the air is clearer than clear and the water is sweeter than honey and the sun never sets and Brandon and his friend are waiting to greet me with open arms and true love. It is in this world we should make each moment count, whether it is to reach out in friendship to the bully who tries to harm us or to pause and reflect on the beauty of a sunny day and the momentary lightness of laughter and love. I have discovered that vengeance poison one’s soul. Like the cave and its alluring attraction, we get pulled into its dark, heady embrace until all of life and all of air and all of connection with God are squeezed out of us and we gasp for relief now so far away from the loving light of God. I’ve learned to put all of that aside and to try and look at the assailants and bullies in my life with the eyes of Jesus. They deserve love and understanding, too. They deserve a response, not a reaction.

Another thing happened at the Atlantic Spartan store. It was the deformed early twin to today’s Wal-Mart or Target. It was seedy and dirty and consisted of tables and racks thrown haphazard across a huge bare concrete floor with a high metal ceiling filled with glaring fluorescent lights. In the back right hand corner was the toy section. Only in my adult years did I realize the toys carried by this store were cheap third world country ripoffs or, what we today elegantly call “overstock” or “outlet mall” merchandise.

My mother made her own clothes. She was a very good seamstress and we often went to S/A (this will serve to represent the name of that store from now on) to get felt, sequins, cotton, and sachet. In this circumstance, sachet was a noun, not a verb. A verb, as in, “Well, honey, let’s sachet on down to the bayou for some crawfish.” or a noun as in “I’m going to put some sachet in my draw to make my socks smell better.” gives you some idea of the difference. My mother made hands. Little blue and pink and pale green and white hands. They were about the size of the hand of a seven year old and not as small as the hands on that weird singing sister from the parody of the Lawrence Welk show that pops up every now and then on Saturday Night Live. My mother would take felt and cut out the shape of a hand. Then, she would stitch the fingers and upper hand together, leaving the end where the arm should be wide open. During the stitching, she would place a sequin end to end along the upper side of the hand. Then, she would take this plastic netting available at the time in a matching color and gather a wad of it into the rough approximation of a flower. She would stitch this flower to the hand with a few sequins.

Once, when my mother was the president of TOPS (Take of Pounds Sensibly) she discovered if you purchased green netting and cut it up in your salad, it would have the consistency of lettuce, look like lettuce and you could eat it and it would pass right through you. She also borrowed my Instamatic camera with the flashbulbs in the little cube that turned with each shot so she could do before and after pictures of the women who were ingesting the green netting salad in hopes of taking off their pounds, albeit, in my opinion, NOT sensibly. When we developed the pictures, she had taken 24 pictures of her nose. When I pointed out she had put the camera up to her face backwards, her only reply was, “That’s why that flashy light thing kept going off in my face!”

But, back to the hands. Once they were sewed up, my mother would stuff the little fingers with cotton until they were as stiff as a corpse with rigor mortis. Then, she would place a sachet tablet that looked like the smooth, larger cousin to an Alka Seltzer tablet into the palm of the hand and finish stuffing the cotton in. One day I came home from school and there were two dozen hands laid out on the kitchen table. I thought my mother had hacked off the hands of the Osmond brothers! I had to pack up the hands in a plastic bag, take them to school, and pass them off to my teachers as gifts. When they asked what the hands were for, I told them EXACTLY what my mother said they were for.

“They’re to put in your drawers to make your panties smell fresh.”

On this one particular day I followed my mother into the A/S to get some more severed hand material. She walked by a table and an errant nail snagged the corner of her double knit polyester blouse she had made herself. The nail ripped a hole in her blouse and my mother became the hatchet baring hacker of hands! She started yelling for a manager and attendants came running. I was embarrassed to death, as any thirteen year old would be by even a normal behaving mother. So, I rushed back to the toy section and tried to lose myself in the dusty, grimy ripoff robots from Taiwan.

I guess as a child, you rarely notice things as they really are. You see them and your fantasy mind fills in the gaps with fantastical thinking. On this day, at the age of thirteen I saw something with new eyes. Perhaps it was because I had written a short story. Perhaps it was because now, when I looked at my mother’s little hand project, I had thoughts no six year old would have about their origin. I’m not sure. This was, after all, 1968 when nothing was certain anymore and everything steady and sure had blurred and become swirled in the psychedelic world of blossoming post modernism. You see, I went to the water fountain. And, I noticed, for the first time, there were two water fountains. One was bright and polished and clean. The other was a bit rusty and scratched. Above the older looking fountain there was a sign, I swear, I had never noticed.

“For colored.”

Above the shiny one.

“For whites only.”

I stood there blinking in dismay. Something tickled at the back of my mind. I walked between the water fountains down a short hallway to the restrooms. On the right, two doors. One labeled “Women”, one labeled “Men”. On the opposite side, one doorway labeled “Colored”. My world tilted. It slanted and I started sliding on that slippery slope that had always been there but I had never realized I was standing on. I looked down the short hallway back into the bright, nasty world of that store where “colored” people were swirling around my mother like dark moons around a raging planet. What had just happened? How had everything changed so quickly?

I felt like my breath wouldn’t come. I saw my friend Paul and I realized for the first time he was “colored”. Before that moment he had been just “Paul”. In fact, Paul and I had shown up at National Junior Honor Society induction in the same striped suit Mother had bought here at the A/S store. I was so proud we had made the same choice in “groovy” clothes. People smiled and pointed at us. I thought it was because we were “far out”. Now, I realized with a sickening lurch it was because Paul was “colored” and I was “white” and a “white” boy should never have worn the same clothes as a “colored” boy.

I grabbed the wall for support and managed to stumble out of the shadows of that hallway back out into the harsh light. My mother was finished berating the “colored” help and they were offering her a new blouse. She was smiling and she saw me and motioned me to come on. We had to get home.

I looked around me then at the people in that store. They were different now, no longer one homogenous creation of God, no longer flesh and bone deprived of community with the Creator of the universe because we were fallen, no longer hand in hand and eye to eye equal in the iniquity of our sins or the depth of Jesus’ salvation. I grew nauseous and my chest hurt. Mother led me out of the store into the bright sunlight. As I passed the radios blaring on the shelves at the front of the store, I heard something a bit of news. It was strident and harsh and it became a wave that passed over me down the aisles through the hanging clothes and over the attendants in that store. With one groaning moan of anguish, the world changed with that radio announcement. Martin Luther King had been assassinated.

I made my way across the parking lot in the cool air trying to keep up with my mother, trying to digest the sudden and abrupt conversion I had just undergone, trying to feel the same as I had when I walked in when Paul and I were brothers and there was no color and there was no difference.

“Mother, did you hear that? Martin Luther King was assassinated.”

My mother never missed a beat. She thew the blouse over her shoulder and unlocked the car. “Good riddance, I say. He was nothing but a trouble maker.”

I sat numbly in the car as we drove out of that parking lot. And, I realized that I had written a story. Martin Luther King was the gwibble. He had been taken in by those who were friendly. But, he had reached my house and disassembled my world in order to remake it and reshape it into a world where we all could safely go home. Where we could live as Jesus intended, loving brothers and sisters with blind eyes to our flesh and our differences. But, in my story, the gwibble was not shot by a lone gunmen filled with hate.

The world was never the same again.

Rosie – Of Death and Roses

My father was 41 years old on the very day I was born. My two sisters and one brother were almost grown by then and my mother thought she was going through “the change”! Neither of my parents was prepared for the arrival of a new baby so late in their lives. Perhaps my father had forgotten how to play with a child or perhaps he was following in his father’s footsteps to be stoic and unemotional around your child. Whatever the reason, my mother’s instruction to me each and every day was not to “bother” your father when he “gets home from work.” I looked up to the thin, balding man in black rimmed glasses with some trepidation. In fact, there were times I feared him. And so it was on one particular day at the age of eight I had an odd connection with my father.

We were spending the weekend in the countryside of central Louisiana. There, the rolling hills of red clay were carpeted with towering pine trees and kudzu vines. The journey from Blanchard in the northwestern corner of the state to Saline near the center of the state took two lifetimes it seemed. At age eight, one and half hours easily passed for such an epoch. The winding roads always left me carsick and I had to avoid my cherished M&M’s and Pepsi cola until we arrived. But, when we turned right at the stop sign in Lucky just five miles from Saline and I gazed out the rearview window into the distance and saw the towering peak of Mount Driskill, I knew snack time was near.

I often daydreamed of what lived on Mount Driskill. It was the highest point in the state of Louisiana and the state’s only mountain. To my mind, it was Mount Doom with marching hordes of goblins and trolls and the tentacled sea monsters that populated my favorite television show, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I would crane my neck around and rise up on my bare knees in the back seat of our Rambler to watch the mountain disappear in the pine trees behind us. I vowed that one day, I would climb that mountain. One day, I would beat the beasts of hell to the pinnacle and save the world from certain doom! But for now, I had to settle for gingerly turning around in my seat to avoid getting sick and breathing in the fresh air that came in through the open window.

We often stayed with my grandparents in a towering and crumbling ruin of a house filled with darkness and shadows and the smell of ancient sweat. The eaves sagged and sloped down from the huge tin roof. The stairs swayed in the middle as if beaten down by a thousand footsteps. The ceilings inside the house stretched a half a mile into the darkness and one bare bulb hung from this distant roof by a black wire in each room. If you bumped it, the light and stumbling shadows would fill the air with dizzying, swooping stuff of nightmares. I would run out of the room when these creatures descended and hide in my grandfather’s outhouse.

To this day, I have no idea what possessed my father to ask me to accompany him. He never invited me to go with him anywhere unless it was a family affair. But this Saturday morning was different. I was playing in my grandfather’s front yard avoiding the shifting shadow monsters in the house when my daddy came down the stairs and stopped to stare at me. He seldom stared at me. I was only a chance distraction from his piddling and guitar playing and jogging from one end of the house to the other or his jury-rigging of a broken air conditioner or a henhouse wall. Don’t get me wrong. I knew my father loved me. He sang to me and laughed at me and always kissed me once in the middle of my forehead every morning before he walked out the door. But, he never really looked at me. It was not until I was twenty years old at his brother’s funeral that he told me he loved me. But, I knew he loved me as well as I knew the sun would wallow up from its covers each morning and Sootie, my dog, would slobber all over my face when I sat on the back steps and werewolves were real just kept away from our house by my mother’s prayers and her bush of switches that could leave red welts on the skin of dinosaurs.

But, to look at me deep in thought? This was new. I stopped in my tracks and let the three headed monster I was chasing escape somewhere in the distant bluriness of my imagination and stared back. We stood like that in the stillness and the sound of cicadas buzzing and the trees creaking in the wind. A pine cone bounced beside me and I jumped.

“What is it, Daddy?” I whispered.

“Do you remember Mrs. Rosie?” He said.

I blinked. Mrs. Rosie was unforgettable. When we ventured to Saline, my parents always went to church on Sunday. The church was right behind me, across the street from my grandparents’ house. It was white washed and made of clapboard with a short steeple and a bell tower. It was not air conditioned and when we went to church, mother always made sure we sat next to a window to catch the breeze. Mrs. Rosie would appear out of nowhere. She was a short, thin woman with wild yellow hair and bright blue eyes. She always wore a purple hat with netting. But, she never pulled down the netting around her face and it flew up over her head like Peter casting his net for the fish Jesus brought to the Sea of Galilee. Mrs. Rosie would hurry over to our pew and descend on me like one of those funny birds that bends at the waist and dips its beak in a glass of water then bobs back up and tilts back and forth. Mrs. Rosie was like that only her nose wasn’t covered in felt.

“You are too pretty to be a boy! Isn’t he, Lena?” Rosie said to my mother. She would pat me on the head and then reach into her purse. I knew what was coming. It was the only reason I did not hide in my mother’s armpit. She pulled out two pieces of Juicy Fruit gum.

“Here you go, young man. You are a miracle from God. Don’t you forget it.” She would pat me on the head again and then bob up and down and hurry away to her favorite pew.

“Yes, Daddy. I remember Mrs. Rosie. She gives me gum.” I said.

My daddy just looked at me some more and nodded. “Well, she has died.”

I knew what it meant when something died. I lived on a farm. Animals died all the time. I didn’t like it. When my parakeet Cappy died, I cried for two days. When my horned toad died, I didn’t know it until it started stinking up the aquarium. When I picked him up he practically crumbled like one of those old mummies.

I didn’t know what to say to my daddy. It was sad that Mrs. Rosie had died. I would miss the gum. But, she was just one of the many people in my life. Back home, we had 45 cats and 26 dogs and it was sad when one of them died, but there was another one to take its place. Someone else would give me gum.

My daddy looked away then and wiped his face. He seemed to be coming to some kind of decision. He was sweating in the summer heat and beads of water dripped down his bare head into his eyebrows. At home, he would wear a cap with a handkerchief rolled up in the front to catch the sweat. “I’ve got to go see her family. You should go with me.”

I drew in a deep breath. “Go where, daddy?”

“To her house. To console her family.” He looked at me. “To tell them how sorry we are Mrs. Rosie has died. It would mean a lot to them if you came. Mrs. Rosie always loved you so much.”

“Okay.” I said. “I’ll go.”

Daddy nodded and led the way across the yard to the car. I started to open the back door and he shook his head. “You can sit up front with me.”

Sit up front? My face burned with excitement. I never got to sit Up Front. I ran around to the passenger door and hopped up onto the seat. In those days, seat belts were accessories and not required by law. So, I ended up tucking my knees under me with my hands on the dashboard so I could see. It was so different Up Front. As my daddy pulled out of the driveway and into the street, I almost got dizzy! I could see the gray road piling toward us and growing wider as the car ran over it and shoved it behind us. The dashed lines in the center of the road hurtled toward us and each time the car passed over one, I cringed waiting for the crash or the sound of laser fire as if they were energy beams shot at us by aliens.

Daddy was silent as we headed out away from the small town of Saline into the rolling hills covered by the pale green heads of thousands of watermelons. Saline was famous for its watermelons and they were everywhere covering every bare piece of land. They seemed kind of sad to me. It was as if the hills had a million green eyes all gazing to heaven pleading with God to rescue them from the hot, sandy earth; to spare them from being split open with their red meat exposed to the hungry mouths of people.

Daddy pulled the car off the road and down a dirt driveway to a small, dark gray house. The exterior had never been painted and the wood was gray streaked with green lichen and the dead husks of cicadas. The small front porch was dotted with men and women in their Sunday best. As we climbed out of the car, I began to feel a tremble of fear and anxiety. The people fell silent and their heads turned toward us with terrible swiftness. Some of the women’s faces were marred with dark streaks of tears. Some of the men wore frowns and blew smoke into the air. I froze in terror. I didn’t know why. These were the same men and women that sat around us in church. But, here on this gray porch in this hot, fetid afternoon they seemed like the very demons of the devil filled with a terrible knowledge, too terrible to share, too terrible to bear.

Then, the moment passed and as one, the people began to move again and speak in hushed whispers and their eyes drew away from me and I was no longer important to them. My daddy spoke to a young woman who glanced at me frequently and nodded as she whispered. Daddy took my hand and led me up the rickety stairs onto the porch. That is the first time I recall my Daddy taking my hand. His hand was dry and rough from working his garden and scaly with dead skin. But, his grip was intense as if he wanted to hold on to me to keep me from being swept away by the people who milled and swayed around us; as if some dark current from some rising river would wash me away.

We stepped into the living room of the small house. The air was thick with the fragrance of roses and six women sat in chairs and on a couch. Their faces glowed with an unearthly sheen. Their eyes bore a deep sorrow and hurt I had only seen in the face of my Sootie the day he climbed up under the house to die. I tried to reach him. But, the timbers that held up the floor of my house were too close to the ground. I could see Sootie’s black eyes glittering far in the darkness. He had gone there to die. Alone. Why had he done this? Why would he have to die in the first place? And, why did he have to die away from me? I lay there in the dirt and dust under the house and cried until my sister found me and coaxed back out into the light. Two days later, my Daddy retrieved Sootie’s body and we buried him in an old basket out by the pond.

“You must be the little boy Rosie loved so much.” One of the women said. It broke the spell of quiet and I swallowed.

“She gives me Juicy Fruit.” I said.

“Do you know why she loved you so?” The lady’s eyes glittered with tears.

I shook my head.

“She had a dream that your mother’s life was not over and that she would have a child. God told her you would be born. You’re a miracle. You were born so late in your parents’ lives. She always said you were a gift from God.” The woman wiped at her tear streaked face with a lace handkerchief.

Daddy’s grip tightened on my hand and I tried to breath. I was a gift from God? Me? This fat little clumsy boy who got sick riding in the back of a car? I looked up at Daddy and tried to loosen his grip. His teeth were gritted so tightly I thought they would shatter. He looked down at me and sighed. His hand relaxed. He squatted down in front of me and studied me from behind his dark rimmed glasses. “I guess I never told you. You are a gift from God, son. Do you want to see Mrs. Rosie?”

I raised an eyebrow in confusion. “You said she was dead.”

My daddy nodded. “She is. She’s right over there.”

I turned and for the first time saw the roses. They were in vases and on stands and on shelves at the other side of the living room around a long, black box sitting on a table. The box was long and shallow and my heart raced. I knew what the black box was. I had seen the same box on television when Dracula had opened the lid to his coffin and climbed out to bring death and destruction to mankind. I took a step back and felt my daddy’s hand on my back.

“You don’t have to see her, if you don’t want to.” Daddy said.

I will forever be transfixed in that moment. Eight years old and caught between the world of fantasy and reality, on the cusp of the great opening of my mind to the true world around me, poised on the knife edge of childhood. I could turn and run back out to the car. I could climb back into the back seat and turn my face through the rear window and long to see Mount Driskill. But, a growing sense of inevitability gripped me as if a tight rope was threaded through my navel and slowly, oh so slowly growing taut with anticipation pulling my mind, my soul, my body, my childishness out of the thing it was into the thing it had to become. I took my first step away from childish things, away from the mirror darkly, away from the rain streaked window where Mount Driskill became nothing more than a big hill and the three headed monsters disappeared into simple shadows and the smell of roses became the aroma of death.

I shook my daddy’s hand off my back and walked across the room to the box. I was just tall enough to look over the edge. Rosie was asleep in the dark box. Her hair was perfectly combed beneath the purple hat and the netting. Her lips were red with lipstick and rouge burst forth in crimson from her cheeks and her boney hands were crossed over her stomach. I wanted to feel sad. I wanted to cry like I had when I had seen Sootie. But, instead I was fascinated. So, this is what death looks like? Not some dark phantom of the creaking night with taloned hands and foul breath. It looked like sleep. Like a nap.

I reached out and before anyone could stop me, I touched her hand. These fingers had dug through her purse for the gum. This hand had patted my head. But, the flesh was as cold as an iced watermelon rind. And, I knew there was no life here. Rosie was not here in this room with doting friends and crumbling roses. She was in heaven. She was with God. He would warm her flesh and open her eyes and He would hold her hand as he led her down the streets of gold that we sang about in church.

My daddy took my hand then and pulled me gently away from Rosie. I studied her still features until the edge of the black box eclipsed her from my view and the hot sun greeted my backturned gaze and my father lifted me bodily and put me in the front seat of the car. I do not remember the drive back to the house. I do not remember the road rising up to meet us or the monster emerging from the bushes in the front yard of my granddaddy’s house to play with me.

I only remember one thing. The door to my side of the car opened. And, my father reached in with open arms and gathered my stunned body into his grasp and held me close to his warm chest and his beating heart and his firm shoulder as he carried me, crying, up the stairs into the house.

What?

I’m going to the first, hopefully annual, Hutchmoot.

You’re going to Hooterville?

Will you listen! It started with The Rabbit Room. Go check out www.rabbitroom.com. It’s a website organized by singer and songwriter Andrew Peterson and his companions in art. It’s like the original Rabbit Room back in the day of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (Gotta love those initials!). This online community has thrived for years and they decided to get everyone together in a real, live gathering of authors and storytellers and songwriters and imaginators. And, they called it Hutchmoot. Go the website to find out why.

So, what’s it all about?

My son, Sean and I showed up at Redeemer Church in Nashville, Tennessee tonight at 5 P.M. for the official “Welcome and Dinner”. The Church is obviously very old and quaint. Sort of reminded me of a huge rabbit hutch, hole, room sort of theme. Fits the community of people who showed up. Out of around 100 people I was one of the very few who looked to be over 50. The rest looked like they belonged in Sean and Jennifer’s Sunday School class.

Andrew Peterson (if you don’t know who this guy is, shame, shame on you!) welcomed everyone by saying that Wendell Berry, the author, once said a community is comprised of someone who has either gotten your ox out of a ditch or spanked one of your children. In other words, this community of Hutchmoot is a connection between people live and in person.

I met two people already. Brannon McAllister is an illustrator our of New York (www.brannonmcallister.com) and check out his website for some of his outstanding designs. He has designed the covers for Andrew Peterson’s albums, including my favorite cover for “The Far Country”.

I also met Andrew MacKay, a professional consultant for authors to help them with website design, Web 2.0 kind of stuff. We hit if off really fast when he heard about my journey from independent publishing (self publishing) to gaining a really good agent to signing a book contract with a major publisher.

And, all of this happened in the first hour! Now, we’re headed to Andrew Peterson’s concert to introduce his newest album, “Counting Stars” and then back to Redeemer Church Living Room for a fireside (in this heat, the fireplace will remain cold!) chinwag. Andrew said that was a real word so look it up to see what we’ll be doing down at the Rabbit Hole!

Recently, there was an article on the Internet about the increase in “thumping” testicles. This seems to be a new game among teenage and college age males. The idea is to kick or hit someone in the testicles, sometimes while other guys hold a guy still. It is seen as a playful thing. But, the statistics are alarming. There has been a huge increase in young males appearing in emergency rooms with ruptured testicles, scrotal hematomas(large blood clots), and torsion of the testicles (twisting that cuts off blood flow leading to a dead testicle). The reason is this new “game” in town.

Now, I trace this back to two influences. First, the new era of Disney movies in the late 80s and early 90s under Michael Eisner (mostly live action, but in some animated minor Disney movies) depicted to children how hilarious it was when a guy gets hit in the groin. I would sit in theaters and cringe. After all, I have testicles and I go out of my way to protect them. Getting hit in the nuts is very, very painful! And, it is NOT a laughing matter!

Also, as a radiologist, I read ultrasounds of the testicles EVERY day and I see these ruptures and blood clots and bruises. I know what happens when you get kicked in the groin. It is called TRAUMA, not humor. Go back and watch some of these “family friendly” movies and their spawn at Dreamworks Animation. But, that was just the beginning of the phenomenon.

Second, America’s Funniest Home Videos makes getting hit in the groin the highest form of slapstick comedy.The other day, there was a sixty second clip that showed 23 different guys getting hit in the groin, mostly by their own children! I rest my case. You see, kids have now been trained to bullseye the groin if they want a good laugh.

When I was in high school back in the seventies, kicking a guy in the groin was reserved for the girl who wanted to escape an undesired advance or possible rape. It was NOT funny. It was the LAST thing one guy would to to another. But, by watching this action over and over and putting it over a laugh track, we have become DESENSITIZED to the horror of the groin kick. Now, it is commonplace.

I think the same principle is true for video games, books, movies, television shows, you name it. When you are immersed in something the inevitable message and worldview creep in, NO MATTER how vigilant you are. I know that when I read a book and a man gets angry with his wife or a woman in the book, I can feel vestiges of anger in my mind when I talk to my wife. I think, where did that feeling come from? I have no reason to be angry! It is because of the immersion in some form of media inevitably spills over into my mind.

So, yeah, I think this article’s message is right on spot. Video games are art! Any creative storytelling coming from the human mind is art, even pornography. And art ALWAYS carries a message that comes directly from the artist’s worldview. Did you get that? Art is just another way to convey a message. It is a vehicle of expression for a person’s point of view, or worldview. ALWAYS.

So, what to do about it? Stay away from it? It is increasingly impossible in today’s pluralistic, secularized culture to “sanitize” art because it is viewed as “censorship” not common sense. You might as well go live in a cave. We could just totally cut ourselves off from the world, but that is no answer. Somehow, we have to become engaged in the process. Maybe it is that we have to write better books, make better movies, and come out with better games. Maybe we have to somehow make the message of the Gospel a part of everything we think and touch and do. Jesus did this with his parables. Everyone loves a good story. His stories were not filled with images of God and angels and heaven and hell. They were told in a culturally relevant style with a message. It is the message that is the king. I once heard the children’s minister at a large church use this adage: “Use what is timely to tell what is timeless.”

What if you’re not the creative type? What if you are only a consumer of this kind of “art”? What should you do. A scripture comes to mind:

We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:5 (ESV)

Okay, so we take every thought captive. This implies that thoughts are fleeting, free, running away from the authority that should restrain them. Sounds a lot like what goes on in mind all the time. My wife, Sherry, tells me constantly that I make her tired because “you think too much”. I can’t help it. And, neither, I bet can you. But there is something that we should consider about this verse. It is preceded by this verse:

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

Now, that sounds like something you’d see in a video game. We are at war. We have weapons and these weapons have special powers. We must realize in this conversation there is a battle for our very souls that is outside of the realm of the real world. This battle is taking place on the level of our minds. It is the ultimate video game. There are several levels filled with powers that the player must develop by studying the User’s manual. It takes time, in fact, an entire lifetime to master this game. The only problem is there is only one life for the player. Once it is gone, there is no reboot. You can’t just flip the switch and start the game over. You’ve got one chance to get it right.

How then should we guard our thoughts? We must be ever careful and wary. We must have discernment. We must realize there is ALWAYS a message in our game play and that message seeps into our minds and steeps our neurons and our thoughts. The Enemy is crafty and deceptive. He is the ultimate virtual reality player and he wants our souls. He can get to our souls through our minds.

I would take my children to movies that were borderline in their messages. But, I always engaged them in conversation before and after. What did this movie tell you about God? What did it have to say about right and wrong? Did the movie get it right or wrong? What can you LEARN from this?

Maybe this needs to be applied to video games. When you finish a game session, ask yourself these questions. Notice if the gameplay has spilled over into your thought life. If you want to kick your best friend in the groin after watching AFV, you’ve got a problem. If you realize what they’re doing in AFV and the message they’re sending, you can fight against the desire to emulate what you’ve seen. It’s not an easy task. It is one that takes ever present vigilance. The same is true for video games, and for any art. Be wary. Be vigilant. Remember:

Control yourselves and be careful! The devil, your enemy, goes around like a roaring lion looking for someone to eat. 1 Peter 5:8 (NCV)

Link to article:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28878/Opinion_Reviewing_Games_With_Values_in_Mind.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29

I recalled a time years earlier when my best friend’s sister was dying of hepatitis and the chapel with only about twenty small pews was filled with friends and relatives petitioning on the young woman’s behalf. She died anyway, leaving behind two small children to be raised by her mother. Maybe that is why people fell away from the praying. They always expected the answer to be “yes”.

On this particular day, I stood in the foyer of the chapel trying to find some respite from the chaos of my practice. My partners had found a new pastime, that of questioning me unendingly about my belief in God. Their questions were delivered rapid fire, back to back, with no pause and no chance to answer. They did not want answers. They only wanted to break me; to make me question my faith; to make me wonder why I believed what I believed. They did. I retreated to this tiny corner of faith in a world filled with cold, blind science.

Hanging inside the foyer was a painting. It was a montage of images of a doctor. He stood in the center of the painting in his white coat with short, blondish hair and a very reassuring face. Around his head, barely visible in the background, were other poses of his face. Some of them showed him being humorous or stern or sad or perplexed. They showed the range of emotions every doctor goes through with the challenge of taking care of total strangers who have placed their lives in his hands.

Dr. Howell was the physician after whom the chapel had been named. But, try as I might in the weeks that followed, I could not find anyone who remembered the man. If a chapel was built and named after him then he must have been special. The space in the corner of the hospital was too vital to the growth of modern medicine to be spared the renovator’s hands.

Months later after I had overcome the ceaseless questioning and started my journey into apologetics (the defense of the Christian faith) and found an increasingly strong foundation for my beliefs, I ran across an elderly retired physician. Dr. Sam Gill showed up on a Sunday afternoon. I was on call and was reading through the day’s pile of Xrays when he popped into my reading room. Dr. Gill was a legend at my hospital and I discovered his wife was in the hospital with pneumonia. Something tickled at the back of my mind as we discussed her improving condition. Did he possibly know who this Dr. Howell was?

When I asked him, his face whitened and he slid back into a chair. His eyes focused far away and he finally smiled.

“He was my partner.” He said. And then, he told me Dr. Howell’s story.

Dr. Howell was a devout Christian, a doting father, and a loving husband. But, his primary and unrelenting devotion was to his patients. In the early 1960s, Dr. Gill told me there was a new idea crossing the country. Hospitals were adding what they called “Intensive Care Units” and Dr. Howell was determined that this hospital would have one. But, as is often the case, hospitals are more concerned about the funding than the advantages to patients. So, Dr. Howell took two abandoned hospital rooms in the building and made an intensive care unit. Problem was, there were no nurses with that kind of training. But, that didn’t stop Dr. Howell. He became the nurse and the doctor.

Dr. Gill recalled one patient with terrible lung disease admitted to Dr. Howell’s “ICU”. Dr. Howell had read about this thing called a mechanical ventilator with a nebulizer in one of his articles. But, the hospital couldn’t afford such an experimental device. So, Dr. Howell went home and confiscated his wife’s favorite percolator and converted it into the nebulizer. Then, he stayed by the patient’s bedside pumping a bag to keep the patient breathing the nebulized air throughout the long night. He stayed by the patient’s bedside for two entire days, never leaving, totally devoted to his patient.

When the hospital saw his determination and care, they purchased the equipment and started one of the first dedicated ICU’s in Louisiana. All because Dr. Howell focused his total attention on the most important person in the universe — his patient. That was the kind of man he was. Sadly, Dr. Gill shared with me that before Dr. Howell reached the age of forty, he started having difficulty with his balance and discovered he had an inoperable brain tumor. This was long before the days of CAT scans and MRIs and computerized surgical planning.

Dr. Gill sat quietly in the shadows of that reading room, tears running down his cheeks as he told me the rest of the story. Dr. Howell refused all treatment. He was now the patient and he knew there was no cure for his brain tumor. He had spent his life taking care of patients and now he would die as one. So, he walked away from the hospital and spent his last months with his family in his house by the lake.

Dr. Gill shared this moving story with me. He said there had never been a doctor as dedicated and loving as Dr. Howell and there would never be such a man again. Within a year of that visit, Dr. Gill would pass away and with him a way of life that we shall never know again.

For, today, the world of medicine is changing. The relationship between the doctor and the patient is no longer sacred. Rules, regulations, insurance requirements, and government meddling have insinuated themselves between the doctor and the patient. When I reflect on the statement made by a Harvard trained attorney on the floor of the Louisiana legislature, I tremble in fear.

“The doctor’s number one priority is to society, not the patient.” He said. My friends, we shall never see the likes of Dr. Howell again. We will never see a chapel built in the honor of a physician. Instead, we will see the cold, stony altar of expediency and social justice place the needs of society above the needs of the individual. In the eyes of God, we are special because He has made us in His image. In the eyes of society, we are but the sum of our parts and those parts can be taken away to serve the good of society.

Let us be very careful. There was once a physician who believed in this way. He saw the good of the social order as being far more important than the good of the individual. He followed his leader, Adolf Hitler, in experimenting on, dissecting, and killing the lame, the deformed, the handicapped of his day until those lines became so blurred, the deformity of the body morphed into the deformity of the worldview and six million Jews died in the furnaces of Nazi Germany. His name was Dr. Mengele.

Ravi Zacharias once said, “the only thing worse than nostalgia is amnesia”. We can sometimes get caught up in reflecting on the men of the past like Dr. Howell. Is this dangerous? I do not think so. Rather, we should not suffer from amnesia. We should recall the best of what we have been and the best of what we have done and try to recapture that compassion and dedication again. If not, then one day, we may find ourselves on the dissecting table of the new social order!

So, for this week, I want to share a disturbing revelation from one of my colleagues in the medical field. We will call him Dr. What since I did not get his permission to share the details of his story. Dr. What is a practicing physician who is heavily involved in medical ethics and the ever changing face of medicine thanks to our new health care bill. He constantly testifies before legislative bodies and he recently shared with me a disturbing story. I will try my best to make the language simplified for the medicolegalese is quite daunting.

Traditionally, patients wishing to donate their organs have had to be declared “brain dead” by two attending physicians before the harvesting of these organs can begin. Recently, a new category of death has been devised. Basically, it is cardiac death. If the heart is so damaged it cannot pump sufficient blood to keep the brain alive, then a patient can be declared dead from cardiac failure. Again, the exact language here is very convoluted but there are two very disturbing facts here. One, the declaration of cardiac death can be made by only one physician. There is no system of check and balances when only one doctor can make this distinction.

Second, and this is very disturbing, the patient can be taken to surgery, put to sleep so his brain is no longer alert and then the life support withdrawn to allow him to “die” from cardiac death and subsequent brain death and then his organs harvested in a “more timely manner”. Now, stop and think about this. Your brain is still alive. Granted, the blood flow to sustain it cannot be provided by the damaged heart but what is basically “you” is still alive and you are put to sleep and then killed on the operating table to take your organs.

One can argue that since the brain is going to die anyway, what is the difference? But, my friend shared with me that one such case took place and the organs were harvested, including the heart which was then given to another patient! Wait a minute! This patient was “sacrificed” and declared dead by “cardiac death” so his heart could be given to someone else? Does anyone see a huge contradiction here? Take my heart which is supposed to be “dead” and give it to someone else? And, my question is, if the patient’s brain is fine then why can’t the patient whose organs are being harvested not be the recipient of a heart transplant to keep him alive?

The moral and ethical lines here are decidedly blurred and we are indeed going down a slippery slope. When my friend fought for the law to at least make two doctors necessary to declare “cardiac death” a new amendment was placed on a transportation bill as an “end run”. A transportation bill, you ask? Yes, the amendment declared that anyone carried from an accident scene can be declared dead by only one doctor whether the cause is brain or cardiac. And, the intention was to be able to extend this law to a broader interpretation applying to all transplants to get around the two doctor requirement.

Now, I asked my friend, “What or who is behind this movement?” He frowned and said it is called utilitariansim. In other words, as humans we are but the sum of our parts. We are not the sum of the whole. As humans we are nothing more than biological machines. We have no intrinsic value. This comes from the denial of a Creator and the application of a purely naturalistic worldview. As the government increasingly encroaches into the realm of health care, look for these kinds of changes to accelerate.

As a physician, my number priority over any devotion to family, God, or self is to my patient. That relationship is sacred and there is nothing more important in the universe than the well being of my patient. This is how it has been for eons. This is how it should be. My friend shared something very disturbing. In his debate over this entire issue, he faced off against a Harvard trained attorney who made the startling proclamation, “A doctor’s number one priority is to society, not the patient.”

My friends, we are indeed in dangerous times. There is no God, the world is telling us. But, I am here to tell you a new god has arisen. It is the state, society, government, Big Brother, whatever you want to call him. A time will come, mark my word, writers, when Christians will be asked to renounce their allegiance to a God who does not exist or suffer “cardiac death” so their organs can be passed on more deserving members of Society!

It just hit me that my father, age 96, is exactly 70 years older than my son, 26. Wow! How did that happen? Most grandfathers are maybe 45 or 50 years older than their grandchildren. But, 70? That means when my son was born, my father was 70 years old. What a huge difference in age. What a huge generational difference.

We had my father’s birthday party a week ago today and there is a picture of five generations. Five! That means he is a great, great grandfather. What an accomplishment although my father surveyed the general mayhem swirling around him and commented, “I don’t know any of these little ones.” Maybe we should get them all name tags!

Father’s Day has always been an odd holiday for me. My birthday, identical to my father’s, always occurs within a week of Father’s Day so it seems like a tiny footnote to a larger celebration. I’ve never really felt any meaning to the day. It just comes with a card and a gift and an expression of love from my children. But, think about it. Three men standing in a room. One 96, one 55, one 26. I never thought I’d see such a day. I never conceived of it.

My grandfather was always so much older and distant much like my father is so much older than my son. I marveled at his stories of overseeing a sharecropping plantation and hunting down Bonnie and Clyde when he was a deputy sheriff. But, I never really saw him as a person. By the time I was old enough to appreciate him, he was withered and demented and frail sitting on his back porch with his rocker positioned just right so he could see my grandmother’s tombstone across the street in the church graveyard. He never seemed to have much life left in him except for the few times he would talk about the days leading up and going into the Depression.

I wonder sometimes what legacy we leave for our children. My father was older by the time I was a young child and rarely played with me. He spent endless hours around the house and farm “piddling” as he called it. Yet, I loved him dearly and he often amazed me with his ability to play the guitar and sing wonderful, powerful hymns like Tennessee Ernie Ford and silly little ditties he made up.

Her form was a like a toothpick.
Her head was like a tack, tack, tack.
She climbed into the bathtub
And turned on the hose.
Oh, my goodness, oh, my soul
There goes Alice down that hole.
Alice, where art thou going?
Down . . . that . . . hole.

When Sean was almost two years old, we went down to the lake house in Saline where my mother and father had retired. There is an old, grainy video of Sean listening to my father play the guitar and singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Over and over, Sean would dance and grin and shout, “Sing Old MacDonald”. My father never faltered. He smiled and plucked and strummed and sang that song over and over and over to my son’s delight. It is these joyful moments that are tentpoles in my memory holding up a dark swath of smothering fabric from the sorrows and crises of life.

I guess that is what I think on as I sit here. Not the years and the separation of the generations. Not the losses and the inevitable downturn of my father’s health. It is the pleasant moments of high laughter and the sound of giggling and singing that help me make it through this most horrible of moments facing me today.

Now married and living in Austin, Sean recently told us how much it meant to go on vacation to Disney World as he was growing up. It wasn’t just a vacation. It was a special time together as a family. It was the creation of wonderful and lasting memories. I cling to those memories and I hope my son will, too. In the end, after my father is gone and after I am gone it is those memories that will light the fires of joy in the hearts of those who press on after us. And, then, after the woes and terrors of this present age are gone, those of us who have passed on to the Lord’s realms will find the joy and the happiness that often seems to elude us here on Earth. And, I hope, we will still have all of our wonderful precious memories.

Happy Father’s Day to all.