We Fancy Ourselves Explorers

I fancy myself an explorer. Granted, I am exploring from a dirty airplane window that measures about 1 foot by 1 foot.  And, I am exploring behind layers of plexi glass from the safety of a seat that comes with a three course dinner and free wine.

It is the trapped person’s version of exploring.

Still, I explore like I am Christopher Columbus looking for a land called plentiful. I explore like a botanist scouring the hillside for all things yellow; like a paleontologist devours the land for bones; like an astrologist scans the heavens for stars that shine brighter than the average ball of fire blazing in the loneliness of space.

Where else can you see winter’s first powder on the top of the highest mountains? Where else can you trace the tiny blood vessels, streaks of red, pulsing through the Great Salt Lake? Where else can you see a quilt of land, square by square, and name it after every childhood friend that you had? Where else can you count the clouds and follow a river that cuts through a valley far away from any road or house or alley? Where else can you look and see nothing but baby blue for hundreds- thousands- millions of miles in front of you?

In a world where gravity ties my feet to a dirty ground and my eyes don’t often have the time or vantage point to scour the earth for treasures, I take my job as explorer of the heavens from seat 3E, American Airlines, Seattle to Dallas, very seriously.

From where I sit, every beautiful thing in the world belongs to me. Every mountain peak covered in snow. Every billowing cloud. Every city grid. Every river weaving through a land of plenty. Every plot of earth measured into perfection. First brown. Then green. Then the color of fall. Not quite dead. But not fully alive.

***

When I was a little girl you could almost always win a trip to NASA space camp in Huntsville, Alabama by being on some sort of game show on Nickelodeon.

I considered it the biggest failure of fourth grade that I did not secure myself a spot on the kid’s game show, Double Dare. Gone were my hopes of winning a trip to space camp. Gone were the visions that I would shoot into outer space with my sleeping bag, New Kids on the Block slap bracelets, and Lisa Frank notebook in hand, where I would faithfully document all my findings on the moon.

I had this dream of what it must be like to circle the earth and stare at the stars. To sink my feet into moon boots and feel the powder kick up around me as I went on my exploration for moon rocks and small critters that I would most certainly sneak back down to earth and give to my sisters as pets.

My dreams of exploring were not just moon based.

I found myself rummaging through my Mamaw and Papaw’s attic for lost family heirlooms (and I found them, the complete original series of Nancy Drew books), roaming through the woods in search of snake skins and dead animals (what explorer doesn’t poke around a dead carcass to figure out the precise cause of death?), and I desperately longed to explore my dad’s underwear drawer (keep reading, otherwise I’ve crossed over into creepy).

My mom was chaotic, unorganized, and disheveled. I followed in her footsteps, stuffing- and ultimately forgetting about- dirty clothes and plates of food under my bed in order to pass the “clean room” test.

My dad however was methodical, organized, and not nearly as lost in the world as my mom was.

And that made him a mystery.

Mom could never find scissors and scotch tape when it was time to wrap a present. But dad always could. He always knew where they were. So one day I followed him and I saw him sneak it out of his top dresser drawer where I knew he kept his whitey tighties.

From that moment on, I knew my dad was brilliant in a way that my mom and I would never be. And this made me curious. What other resourceful utensils does he have in his underwear arsenal?

Though I was terribly afraid of being caught and punished, the explorer got the best of me; I needed to discover the inner workings of my dad’s dresser drawers.

***

As I got older, the exploration changed.

I was on a quest to figure out life. I needed to explore love and lust and passion.  Meaning and purpose. Pain and suffering. And I needed to know once and for all what God had to do with any of it. Whether believing in Jesus or Buddha or the Dalai Lama, really made a difference.

Moon rocks were so much easier to explore.

So was my dad’s underwear drawer.

Life was so much less complicated then. When the thrust of my explorations were secret attics, the woods behind my house, and imaginary trips to the far side of the ocean where treasure troves awaited me.

Somedays I long to be that little girl again.

And somedays I am...

Sitting in seat 3E.

Naming the mountains.

Counting the clouds.

Discovering a marbled lake that I am sure no other human has ever seen with the naked eye.

***

I choose to be an explorer in moments like these because I need to explore beautiful things in the midst of a life that is often laced with dark caverns I never planned on falling into.

Forced exploration is the worst.

I bet the people on the ground during Apollo 13 would agree with me.  Or maybe the team coming up with the escape plan for the recently freed Chilean miners know what I am talking about.

Exploring under duress is no exploration at all; it is forced survival.

Cancer. Chemo. Death. Dying. Pain. Betrayal. Longing. Unmet desires. Unfulfilled dreams. Questions of faith that sometimes seem to have no solid answers. Money. Guilt. Wearily raising children. Fighting for your marriage. A world that runs off of the constant ticking of a clock (did you know that Americans can give you the time, within ten minutes, whether they have looked at a clock in the past two hours or not? That’s how attuned we are to the seconds ticking away).

In the midst of this life, with our feet on the dirty ground, there are many times we find ourselves simply surviving.

So when we get the chance to be more than survivors...

when we get the chance to explore...

the laugh of someone we love. the smile on a child’s face. the way the new mattress cradles our body. the sound of our mother’s laugh. the way our dad pillages scotch tape away.  the way it feels to hold someone’s hand. the smell of fall. the touch of grass on the bottoms of our feet. the giddiness of playing in the leaves. the excitement of a new book. the easiness of a day spent on the couch watching football. a warm bath. a few minutes to sit on a bench and study the ants marching by. or taking 118 pictures of the world passing by under our nose in seat 3E...

We fancy ourselves explorers.

Because we get to.

Because we need to.

Because life is about more than simply surviving.

Spokane, Washington

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Klammath Falls

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The Importance of Failure

Someone close to me is walking through their husband’s first major work related “failure.” You know the feeling of dread that a guy gets before he hears the words “turn your head and cough” or “bend over, you’re going to feel three fingers”? These have nothing on the deep, deep sense of dread, shame, and anger he goes through when failing at his job.

I am not a man, of course, so I cannot tell you what a man goes through with complete certainty.

I only have a dad who has failed and a husband who has failed.

And let me tell you, watching a man that you love- fail- just plain SUCKS.

***

When I was a little girl my dad and mom moved my sisters and I from small town Mississippi (where all of our family lived), to the bustling, overcrowded, multi-cultural, drug-ridden side of the biggest city I had ever seen with my own eyeballs.

Fort Worth, Texas.

Before we moved my mom was a youth minister and my dad was a police officer. But one day he had an epiphany. My dad, the police officer with anger issues, felt like he heard God tell him to join the clergy. Become a minister. Go to seminary. Change the course of your entire life for MY sake. Incredibly, my dad listened.

My dad put a lot on the line.

He had three little girls: 8,7, and 3 who had only known life around our grandparents, life in a small town, life roaming in the woods and playing under magnolia trees. He wagered all that on a dream. An epiphany from God.

His dad helped us move to Texas and I will always remember my Papaw crying in the Pizza Hut parking lot as he hugged our necks and said good-bye. I had no way of knowing then that my Papaw and Mamaw would never come visit me. That because we were moving to a different state, my grandparents would not make any effort to be a part of my life. Maybe my dad knew the bitterness he was stirring up by leaving his parents behind. Still, he wagered that on a dream.

We moved to the ghetto. They started seminary. And three months later, I turned nine.

I only remember this because for the first time in my life my mom let me buy party favors for my birthday party. I was so excited. I had Lisa Frank bags with Lisa Frank stickers and coloring books and bubbles and candy for everyone who came. And as the minutes ticked away and no one came, I remember my mom wiping tears off her face and quietly slipping the party bags off the table while my dad took the few presents they were able to afford and unwrapped them, divided them up, and re-wrapped them to make it look like there was more there than there actually was. Like maybe I had a friend who had come and brought me a present.

My parents wagered a lot on this dream.

Dad took a job as a security guard at the local hospital to make ends meet. For a while he worked at a half-way house. Mom went on staff at a small church with a pastor who slept around with women in the congregation and stole money from the church. My sisters and I got lice from the neighbor kids and I spent the third grade convinced that, “Mexican men kidnapped little white girls with green eyes who walked home by themselves from school.”

I’m not sure who told me that, but I had never known anything urban or multi-cultural in my life; I was little and I believed it.

I spent an entire year convinced that I would be kidnapped as I walked home from school.

Several years later my parents graduated seminary and my mom found the perfect job at a church that ended up being our home for many, many years.

But my dad found nothing.

Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. He worked jobs he hated to put food on the table. He doubted whether he ever “heard” God in the first place. He lived, for quite some time, in the land of dread, shame, and anger. He had failed. He wagered everything on this dream. On what he thought was a calling from God. He put it all on the line. Uprooting his family. Changing the entire course of his little girl’s lives. Quitting the only career he had ever known and ever been good at to become “a man of the cloth.” And two years after graduating seminary he was bagging newspapers for minimum wage in the basement of a printing plant in downtown Dallas.

***

I have seen a man fail.

It is brutal. Gut-wrenching. And deeply heart breaking.

To watch someone risk it all and fail is to watch their heart being ripped from their own hands. And to know, that they know, the whole world is watching them fall a part- well, it only adds insult to life-threatening injury.

At least that’s what it feels like.

I would rather be run over by a car, or slowly tortured than to watch my dad or my husband have their confidence and dreams stripped from them.

Take me Lord.  Please. I will endure anything. I will voluntarily be tortured. I will work three jobs. I will scrub toilets. I will make a deal with the devil. Anything. Just don’t let a man that I love be humiliated. Don’t let him fail.

***

Last night, out of no where, Ryan said he would love a Nissan Maxima. Something sporty, but grown up.

“Really, I just so desperately want my own car.”

“What, you don’t love our vibrating 99’ Ford Escort? You don’t want to share a car with me anymore?!? That’s tacky. I want to share an old nasty car with you for the rest of our lives!!!”

I make light of it, but it is a constant reminder of our financial reality. Our failures. I see it in Ryan’s eyes and it kills me. He’s a grown man who has worked his butt off and sacrificed so much, for so many people, for so long. He deserves his own car.  Or at least a car that doesn’t vibrate.

Watching a man that you love stare failure in the face is numbing.

***

So to my friend, who is standing there today, I am so sorry. I have been there.

And here’s what I’ve learned along the way.

1. We all fail.
2. We all process failure differently.
3. Failure, eventually, ultimately, is good.

In light of that...

1. Don’t try and act as if he didn’t really fail. IE: “It’s not your fault, it’s that a**hole boss of yours.” “The test was rigged” “The process was unjust”  “Those results can’t be right... you don’t fail.”

Don’t put the pressure on someone you love of being incapable of failure. Trust me, they are actually capable of great failure. And while it feels good and does no harm to have the initial gripe session where you blame and bash the rest of the world, ultimately, the man failed and deep down he needs to be able to come to terms with his own limitations.

No one wants to acknowledge failure. It’s a bitter pill. But I would wager to say, at the same time, most men don’t want a woman in their life (be it mom, friend, sister, wife, lover) who goes around making excuses for them and being angry at the world for the perceived injustices that their male counterpart is experiencing. So after the initial anger and grieving are over, it’s ok to let it sit there. The failure. It’s ok to acknowledge its existence. He failed. It sucks. But he failed. Don’t make excuses for him.

2. Don’t force the process. Every human will process failure differently. Let him process the way he needs to. You don’t need to send out an urgent prayer request if he wants to keep the whole thing quiet and you don’t have to build him up into superhuman status if he just wants to sit and sulk for a while. The worst part of watching someone you love fail is that you simply can’t fix it for them and you have to allow them to muddle through much of the guilt and shame by themselves. Life is not meant to be a singular experience, that is for sure, but there is something about staring your shortcomings in the face- without the rose colored glasses and overprotective presence of a perpetual cheerleader, that causes you to grow.

Somedays dad would come home from bagging papers and he was just angry. I didn’t want him to be and I remember trying to make the spaghetti noodles extra good on those nights so that maybe it would make things better. Better dinner. Better life. But my sixth grade attempts of “fixing” my dad fell miserably short because what he needed was not a fixer, what he needed was the freedom to be mad. You gotta give them space to process their failures without writing it off as “God’s will” “somebody else’s fault” or trying to fix it for them so that they don’t have to face it at all.

The best thing you can do is give them the space they need to process the failure at hand. Let them know you are there for them and you love them unconditionally... then... zip it. Sit on your hands. Tie your ankles together with rope if you must. But don’t dominate his process of facing failures with lame attempts to rescue him.

3. Finally, as you watch the brutal process and long to make things better, take up the cause of HOPE, because eventually, ultimately, failure is good.

Failure is good for the man who lives in prideful arrogance. Failure is good for the man who lacks grace. Failure is good for the man who has lived a charmed life. Failure is good for the man who lacks compassion. Failure is good for the man who believes he can control his own destiny.

Failure is good for the man, woman, boy or girl who longs to know God; because it is only in our brokenness that we realize our need for grace.

Failure is good for the man who desires wisdom. Failure is good for the man who wants to live empathetically. And failure is good for the man who seeks to love others, because failure makes us real. Failure makes us relatable. Failure evens out the playing field. No one is beyond it or above it. Everyone fails.

Failure makes a man fully a man.

Failure is eventually, ultimately good.

***

I grew up and had lots of birthday parties with lots of friends and lots of presents.

I have more “adopted” grandparents than any kid I’ve ever known, and it has more than made up for the grandparents who chose to take a back seat in my life.

My dad got his dream job after being jobless for nearly three years.

The job was working for Baylor University. He sent my sisters and I to a top-ranked, private college for free. Not one penny of debt. And we have incredible degrees and life experiences that he never dreamed he would be able to give us.

My dad is a pastor now and has been in ministry for over 15 years.  He is an incredibly gifted minister who pours into the lives of others and makes a difference in the world around him.

The dream he wagered so many things against came to pass and his failures have became valleys of the past.

Most importantly, my dad walked a way from his failures a new man.

A man of grace. Courage. And perseverance. A man of empathy, humility, and awareness. Aware that he was not perfect, and no one else was for that matter. My dad came out on the other side of his failures a better man...

And I am convinced your husband will as well.  He is a good man. And this might be the best thing that has ever happened to him.

Don’t lose hope sweet friend.