We’re a year or so into reading a story from The Complete Illustrated Children’s Bible each night to launch into bedtime (which we’ve then followed with Narnia, A Series of Unfortunate Events, My Side of the Mountain, Little Princess, Peter Pan, Howl’s Moving Castle – it’s all I can do not to push the boys too quickly into more complex stories – this is one of the great joys of parenting). 

I’ve been caught off guard by the depth of our discussions and how much more our nightly, child-focused theology sits with me throughout the week — often more than our grown-up Sunday sermons or even my own quiet times in prayer.

As an adult, it’s so easy to read about the rich young ruler and look for Biblical justification to hold onto wealth or glaze over the passage entirely – Zacchaeus was saved and he only gave away half his wealth! Isn't this somewhat dishonest though? Jesus is explicit – any devotion to money stands in the way of full surrender. Give to everyone who begs from you. It's hard to read these stories to children and maintain my own self-deception.

We read through the parable of the workers in the vineyard a few nights ago; the simple insights are the ones that linger.  The first workers would’ve been thrilled with their wages if they hadn’t seen other workers being blessed – am I not the same?  Every time I log into LinkedIn I find some career envy – why invite comparison at all instead of rejoicing in what I’ve been given?  Yes, we took your brothers for ice cream while you were at math class — but haven’t you received your good things from us too?

I started summer break a couple of weeks ago – after resigning from Meta I was afforded the fantastic opportunity to take a sabbatical before diving into my next role at the end of July. 

I haven’t had an extended period of rest like this since my school days, really – I took paternity leave for each of my three children, but months with a newborn aren’t really known for their restorative qualities.  Two months, more-or-less, that I’ve already started filling with plans.  I’ll do more writing, get back to the gym regularly, clean out our closets, prioritize prayer.  I’ll start lego robotics with the older kids, we’ll master potty training with the youngest, we’ll ride our bikes regularly and we’ll redo the boys’ room with desks and dressers better befitting young elementary students. 

The timing of my break overlapped with one blessed week where all three boys were still in school – I could do whatever I wanted for myself without the demands and feelings and fights that young children bring with them – such luxury!  I had spent weeks daydreaming and living in this stretch, eeking out a preemptive delight just in imagining such freedom from responsibility – something I really craved after the last several operationally intense and politically charged months at Meta. 

—

The Sunday before my solo week started our youngest came down with a stomach flu.  Another son caught the flu on Tuesday; my wife and I caught it later that evening.  We spent the entire week cleaning various fluids, washing a mountain of laundry, lying in bed feeling miserable along with our sons.  I passed a parenting rite-of-passage I’d been dreading, vomiting alongside my son and then cleaning up after both of us.  

My solo (ha!) week ended, I accomplished none of the things I hoped for – I exited this time of rest even more exhausted, frustrated that my vacation had been snatched away from me in such miserable fashion.

—

C.S. Lewis, writing as Uncle Screwtape, addresses this notion – that my time was stolen from me, that my solo week belonged to me and that I’ve suffered a grievous injustice by way of this illness.  

“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.... Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.  It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-a -tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear.  

[...]  They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.”

Thinking and praying about this time I keep feeling like the Holy Spirit is teaching me something here – a small reminder that there’s no such thing as my time.  That finding real comfort in some unmaterialized future is folly – “You fool!”, cries the Lord in the parable – “This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”.  

Maybe this is a warning – do I store other treasure in the future, absent God?

My experience with tech compensation has followed this pattern.  Meta, for instance, pays mostly in equity that vests quarterly – I would regularly look months down the road and fantasize about stability that will come one day when enough vests clear.  My new role has a cliff – I’m already starting to worry about “surviving” until the cliff hits, allowing my anxiety to build until some imagined security where I’ll finally have enough financially.

Our youngest son will be three in the fall – my wife and I like to wax romantic about how close we are to being normal people again, that we’re maybe months away from exiting the intense demands of early childhood and ready to reemerge back into adult society.  Once the kids are more self-sufficient we’ll be able to play tennis together, go on regular dates, rekindle fading friendships, take on more adventurous travel – things that have naturally fallen off as we navigate the all-encompassing logistics and emotional energy of early childhood parenting.  We’re treading water right now, but I can find escape from the grinding down by losing myself into pictures of a time where all the lost joys of adulthood will be restored to us.

Then there’s ministry – it’s so easy to imagine a distant version of myself that’s capable, well-spoken and well-read, that’s mastered a life of prayer and is fully qualified to speak the truth into peoples’ lives, that’s empowered by some future holiness to work mercies and justice that I can’t imagine right now.  I don’t need to evangelize now – I can do it when I’ve matured more, when I’ve clarified my testimony and I have something to say that will move people to God.  I’m not ready yet, but deep in my own head I can savor victories that haven’t yet happened – sometimes daydreaming of my own righteousness is enough to sate any nascent hunger for real righteousness that God might have been stirring in me.  

There’s clearly danger in these kinds of fantasies – I think some part of this week was meant as a warning that life doesn’t happen in the future, that my own plans are not to be idolized.  The future is God’s domain and not a bank I can draw on for my own delight. Vomit week made this crystal clear in microcosm, taking freedom that I’d already emotionally withdrawn and melting it away before my eyes.  My duty is to take each day as it comes and live it to the best of my ability, finding hope and comfort in God and not the uncertainty of the future.  

Planning and hoping aren’t bad things, but they must not be mistaken for real joy and real peace. Christ advises us not to worry about tomorrow.  C.S. Lewis puts it poetically – “Never, in peace or in war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future... Happy work is best done by those who take their long-term plans somewhat lightly and work from moment to moment 'as to the Lord.' It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

Finding my security in some unpromised future is foolishness – maybe reinforcing this during this liminal season was, in reality, the best use of my solo week, and God delivered this sickness as a mercy.  The experience was certainly visceral – I hope that, when my mind starts drifting and worrying and planning – I’ll remember lying on the couch next to my son trapped excruciatingly in the present, with no hopes or plans or goals beyond the next few moments, submitting my entire self to desperate prayer and dependence on God. 

Every morning my son races ahead of me down foggy Kirkham St. on his three-wheeled scooter, speeding to the limits of his rising independence (he’s allowed to wait patiently at each road crossing).  Occasionally we’ll switch things up – we’ll share hot cocoa and coffee together before scooting off to preschool.  Other days we’ll race out the door early, aiming to rope drop into Blue Class, winning prime fort-construction territory before circle time starts.  Eventually his little brother joined the commute – the three of us worked hard together learning the route to school, watching out for garage doors, throwing wary eyes to neighbor dogs, and, eventually, expertly weaving through trash cans and sidewalk lips on flashy new scooters while (less) expertly braking and swerving before the momentum carries us too far. 

My son is a man of routine and loves the things he loves – he’s asked for the same lullaby his entire life, every bedtime book is a retread of the same set of dinosaur reference manuals.  On our morning walk, without exception, he pauses in front of a neighbor’s lavender plant – he’ll brush the lavender with his fingers, breathe in its scent, look back and wave to me before jetting off again. 

Today is the last day that I get the privilege of walking him to his neighborhood forest school – next year will be Kindergarten, with a car commute, extracurriculars, extended care and homework.  Yesterday, the penultimate day –  overwhelmed by gratitude and bittersweet – I continued my morning in the Botanical Garden, meditating and praying in the last echoes of morning still before the tourists and school groups awakened to life. 

– 

There’s something about finiteness that’s magical and holy.  We get to experience the rises and crashes of ephemerality, riding the waves of God’s pleasure to new joys and sitting in the tension and longing when those waves recede.

When things draw to a close we get a unique opportunity to reflect and understand the depth of their impact on us.  As Christians these feelings point us towards our true home – melancholy for childhood’s dwindling hours rings with a strong echo of homesickness.  It’s an awareness of a profound love and peace and joy that we had, that we lost, that we yearn to return to someday.  My kids are young, but I can see the shape of how things are going to progress and have known some of the sadnesses – my life will be marked by celebration seasoned with mourning, both emotions building in ever-mounting intensity by the permanency of childhood – there’s no reopening any of these doors and once they’re closed they’re closed forever. 

As a wedding gift my wife and I received a beautiful video chronicling our upbringing and our early years of dating.  At our rehearsal dinner we relived crawfish boils in Golden Gate Park and fancy dress-up speakeasies, but this time with new wisdom, knowing now how God had designed these moments with the intention that they’d eventually lead to our marriage.  

We rewatch this video each anniversary and every additional year adds new gravity to these memories.  Tiny seeds of our marriage’s personality were present in those clips in ways that are only just now starting to reach maturity.  Silly voice-dub videos during a study break are echoed back in the way we read to our children at bedtime. My wife’s eyes sparkle in our wedding photos with a resurgent glitter now that I’ve seen those eyes shine on our son’s first wobbling strides on his pedal bike. God’s work reaches backward in time – even though I’ve long mourned our honeymoon season God has gifted a deeper joy that rises out of that passing away.  Just because something is over doesn’t mean it’s over – God can and does enjoy redeeming, calling back, connecting and reminding us of how masterful his plan has been all along – what artist wouldn’t take similar delight?

This kind of thing must happen when we join Christ in the New Kingdom.  Days like today, drenched in welling gratitude will regain life with us in our resurrection.  If I can discern these things in my current, broken body, how much more potent the revelation when I see my King face to face?  God designed my son, our route, one particular lavender bush, one final day of preschool and infused it with holy emotion.  If God reaches backwards now to show me his love, why not in our resurrection?  

I’m sure the Reality is beyond imagining, but I like to imagine nonetheless – that somewhere in the new Jerusalem there’s a lavender bush, that I’ll meet my son there one day in the midst of eternity, that the scent of Real lavender will awaken this long forgotten memory.   

That we’ll both be overwhelmed by a God who loved us even then, who knew how our lives would unfold and how we’d rebel, that nonetheless gave us this foretaste of holy sweetness to awaken our longings.  

That the waves and crests of childhood were meant for this kind of crescendo – where the reason for such bittersweetness will suddenly clarify and we’ll awaken to new depths of amazement and worship for a God who could compose such a beautiful creation. 

I've procrastinated long enough starting this blog (mostly by wasting time on an endless rat's nest of self-hosting optimization – which is more fun than writing, right?)

However, as I get ready to depart Meta next week I've been afforded the tremendous opportunity to sabbatical before I start my next role at the end of the summer – I would be be extremely disappointed with myself if I spent all of that time fiddling with server configs instead of actually cultivating a writing practice – so I bit the bullet and paid for a ghost droplet so that I'm not tempted by further finagling :)

My hope is to use this space to shape my thoughts around my own testimony and how God has transformed my life. I attended a sermon once of a late-in-life convert to Christianity who expressed her deep frustration that she had no visibility into why some people seemed so joyful and peaceful and put together. It was only after she met Christ later on that she realized these people were Christians – but they weren't "out" with their faith and hadn't shared the Good News with her (God, of course, wasn't waylaid but her path to faith could've been easier if He had been glorified more visibly in her colleagues' lives).

C.S. Lewis puts it more poetically – "woe to you if you do not evangelize". Relatedly – "I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning."

My hope is that this blog would accomplish both – as a trickle (that will God-willing become a flood) of evangelization and as a way to translate and understand my own thoughts around why I believe what I believe and how God has changed my life.