Letters to Disappointment

 

Cover Art by Cody Andreasen

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about about it." 

-W.C Fields 

My grandfather used to describe the quality of perseverance--in his self-effacing, backhanded compliment kind of way--as just being too dumb to know when to quit.

This is my too dumb to know when to quit project. I began penning the first draft in an incredibly dull History of Modern Art class at the University of Calgary so many moons ago that it doesn't bear contemplating. The story has gone through countless iterations since then. The manuscript has sat abandoned wholesale for years at a time only to be woken from its slumber at intervals as I rearranged, rewrote, and then re-relegated it to the obscurity of my many, many unfinished projects. The characters have deepened, growing more complex and colourful with each draft. Even when I determined to finish it last summer, it dragged its feet to near comedic levels of finicky difficulty. It has exhausted even my superhuman tolerance for incompletion. But I introduce you at long last to my newest (and oldest) novel, Letters to Disappointment, now available in all Amazon marketplaces and elsewhere.

"'Begin at the beginning,' the king said very gravely, 'then go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"

-Lewis Carroll  (Alice in Wonderland)

Walking on the Surface of the Storm

 

“And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2)

We all have our Youtube rabbit holes. One of mine is watching videos of storms at sea. Usually, they are filmed from a camera mounted on the bridge of a ship which implacably records the churning waters as the prow of the ship mounts high on the crest of a wave before plunging down into the valley below. An inadequate windshield wiper periodically swabs the glass impervious to intimidation by the elements at war around it. Facing a terrible storm on land is one thing—the wise man built his house upon the rock and all that—but facing it in a tiny vessel at sea is another. And really, all vessels are tiny in comparison to the size of the ocean at storm.

We’ve all been trying to hold on for a while now. Yet it seems like the wind only blows wilder and the waves mount higher and the night gets darker. Holding on is excruciating when it feels like the storm will never end; that morning might never come; and despair, rather than faith, feels as close as a breath upon your neck. What is there to lay hold of when everything around you is moving water?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of Jesus walking on the water in the fourth watch of the night. Walking on calm water would be a miraculous feat. But traversing it the middle of a storm when the wind whips spray off the tops of the waves and the waves are cartwheeling across the surface of the turbulent deep in foaming chaos? ‘Impossible’ doesn’t quite cover it. The gospel accounts each give a slightly different glimpse of the miracle as they always do. Perhaps most arresting to me is the detail that the disciples wonder if Jesus is a ghost; so incongruous is his form to the circumstances; so uncertain is their sight of him amid the waves. It is disturbing to realize that there are some times when even Jesus seems insubstantial in the middle of the storm.

But what seems isn’t what is.

In times like these the temptation is to judge what seems and what is likely; searching for any solid piece of flotsam on which to cling. But that is how idols are made. Instead, straining to see the Lord in the middle of the crashing waves—when we can’t quite get a solid look to know for sure that our Deliverer is at hand—takes us to the outer limits of our measure of faith. It requires lifting our focus from the strain of pure endurance to fixing our gaze on the one who is Spirit and Truth. It is anchoring our sight in another kingdom and calling the things that are not as though they are. 

Man doesn’t walk on water, but the Son of Man does. 

How perplexing that Jesus walked on the surface of the storm instead of calming it. He covered the distance on foot; an experience that must have been cold and challenging as he strode up and down over the swells to reach those straining against the weather in their little boat. It begs the question for me—and for all of us, really—why doesn’t Jesus calm the storm? We’re all exhausted from straining against the wind and the waves of circumstance. We’re all tired of this long night and its troubled weather. 

Storms are catalysts for revelation, though. They bring to the surface what is hidden in the depths of each one of us and strip away the superfluous from our circumstances. They make the world formless and wild, but they have their purposes;—even if those purposes are known only to God on this side of eternity. But even so, I can’t help but feel that the fourth watch of the night is at hand and the Lord is near. You can catch a glimpse him—if you look up—he is once again moving over the face of the deep.

(A version of this article was published in the Nov/Dec issue of live magazine. Check them out here.)

Approximations of Love

Somewhere between the halls of elementary school and junior high, an insult began to circulate among us kids—a pejorative moniker that was only offensive because of the tone with which it was wielded; but wielded it was—and with the kind of zeal for indifferent cruelty at which children often excel.

“What a try-hard.” 

It looks awfully silly written out. I’m sure it sounded even sillier to any adult ears that might have overheard it. After all, perseverance, hard work and a willingness to risk are all positive attributes that maturity requires. Trying hard is generally a good quality. Perhaps this is why “try-hard” only enjoyed a brief—and perhaps geographic—season in the sun of childhood insults; falling far short of other 90’s favourites like ‘butthead’ and the ever ubiquitous, ‘loser’.  But I find myself thinking about that long mothballed insult and wondering if perhaps we were onto something without knowing it. Because inherently, the charge was not about perseverance or hard work, or risk taking—but rather, it was about inauthenticity.

And, if we’re being really honest, we all know that even when we’re trying to be authentic, the counterfeit sneaks in to parade around its phoney credentials. Like that stubborn wheel on the shopping cart that persistently sends it careening into the Stovetop Stuffing display, the imitation is always ready to sneak in to subvert the authentic article. We hear it in our voices when we say that we’d love to get together to catch up when we know that it will never happen. We know it in our hearts when we fein feeling more concern about a situation than we actually do. We can all feel it—and we feel guilty about it—so we try harder.

Nothing irritates my inner curmudgeon more than a smear of Christian syrup to gild an unpleasant pill. It irritates me because, like the old adage that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on, the counterfeit has a way of rushing in ahead of the real.

“Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” (Romans 12:9)

We wouldn’t need a reminder to have our love be genuine, if there wasn’t going to be a real and continual temptation toward insincerity. This knee-jerk insincerity isn’t ill-meant; it is just easier than roughing it through the discomforting wilderness of emotion, critical thinking and spiritual wrestling required to test and approve that which is both true and good. And usually, it doesn’t feel like we have time for all that. So, we wrap up our difficult conversations with banal statements like, “Well, God is going to do what He’s going to do…” and promise to pray and often never think about the matter again;—except to know that we don’t want to think about it again.

And then, there are those situations where genuine love feels downright impossible. What then? I can either try real hard and produce a syrupy forgery of love, or disobey the command to love my enemies altogether. The answer to this conundrum requires spiritual pursuit; discernment and a humility that acknowledges that I have no love for my enemies on my own. Loving one’s enemies requires nothing short of a miraculous work of divine intervention. The genuine love that God desires isn’t sourced in me at all, but rather in His character. It can only be supernaturally supplied. 

Human love is only a shadow; a reflection of divine love. On its own it is as dim and two dimensional as all shadows must be. Instead of being try-hard Christians seeking to generate a pseudo approximation of love, we must instead be receive-hard saints who acquire the genuine love of God spiritually and are then able to give from that same love in a supernatural exchange. We were not called to what was possible in our own strength, but rather to die to our own efforts and live supernaturally through His. If we forget this, we’re in danger of relegating ourselves to an impotent and inauthentic faith. 

And if we choose that? Well, as the kids used to say, “What a bunch of buttheads.”

(A version of this article was published in the Jan/Feb edition of live magazine. Check them here.)