An Authorial Gambit - Famous Opening Lines

My favourite way to browse for a new novel is to flip to the first page and read the opening sentence. To me, this is the author's big moment. These are the crucial few words that will prompt me to flip further; to read the back blurb, and finally to check the price to determine how interested I am in pursuing this story. Industry folks may talk a lot about having a good elevator pitch--a sum up of the story that can be delivered succinctly in the time it takes to step on at one floor and off at another--but I like opening lines. They're subtle in their revelations. They hint at a writer's style and priorities. They likely give some inkling to the themes that the story will encounter. Consider Pat Conroy's opening to The Prince of Tides: 

"Geography is my wound." 

Geography as wound is an interesting idea to mull over--individuals and stories not merely being shaped by where they take place, but injured by them. Immediately, I am given clues as to what kind of writer Conroy is, and what sort of story he will tell. Perhaps I am interested enough by this concept and its crafting to read further. (Spoiler: I was.) 

Margaret Mitchell grabbed the world's attention with the line:

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were." The nature of Scarlett O'Hara is the hinge upon which the entire plot of Mitchell's epic novel swings. When asked what Gone with the Wind was actually about, the author replied, 

'If Gone With the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't.'

This author's Gambit is not the authorial gambit you're looking for.

An opening sentence might even tell you what kind of story you are holding in your hands. The obvious clue of Russian authorship aside, Leo Tolstoy's opener to Anna Karenina reveals its tragic nature.

 "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 

Whereas George Orwell's famous sentence, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.", immediately reveals its dystopian reality. 

Opening lines are the author's gambit. They are first overture in a relationship between reader and story.  And so, in honour of engaging opening lines, I humbly submit mine for your enjoyment.

The following is an excerpt from my new novel Altruism in Gophers. 

Chapter One - How the Damn Foolishness Began

The big-time bad decisions made in life aren’t made in a vacuum. If you are willing to look at the whole picture—dare to examine far enough backward—you’ll find there were a lot of little compromises that preceded them. There was an edifice of choices; a gallows upon which the final choice—the damn foolishness—was only the moment when you put your head through the noose. Few people get married with the assumption that they will commit adultery, but one thing does lead to another if you let it. Few drug addicts start out with heroin because who wants to be a heroin junkie? No one. You step on those paths believing you’re going somewhere else. But there are really only two actions in life. You are either building something or tearing it down. Creating or destroying. That’s it. The only question is how fast you are doing it. Maybe it’s Mach 5, or maybe it’s glacial, but it is happening one way or another. You think you’re treading water—going nowhere—but you aren’t.

Maybe that woman at the office has a really suggestive sense of humour and after a while she’s texting you, and calling to chat when your wife isn’t home. One thing predictably leads to another and the next thing you know, your life shatters to hell because you left your phone unlocked and your wife happened to glance at it when it dinged on the counter while she was washing the lettuce for dinner. It wasn’t leaving your phone unlocked that caused your life to tumble to the ground like a gigantic, wobbly Jenga tower. It was everything selfish and reckless that you did up to that point. The tricky part is that it never really looks like it at the time because—like in that Jenga game—you get away with precariousness for such an impossibly long time.

I didn’t commit adultery. I don’t have a heroin habit. Some people think what I did was a lot worse than either of those things, even though it was essentially a victimless crime. I’m not saying that to justify my behaviour. I’m just pointing out how screwed up the cultural moral sensibility has become.

The first block removed in my personal Jenga game was the news that my parents were moving out in order to separate from me—their son. I am aware that sons usually leave their parents somewhere around the time they get their first real job. (Or, for the folks living biblically, when they get married.) But I never got my first real job. I mean, I’ve had lots of jobs but I never arrived. I’ve never even felt like I was on the cusp of arriving. Instead, there I was, thirty-three and still living at home and, if I am going to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t even that unhappy about it. And, no, not because my mom makes my lunches; she hasn’t done that since I was ten. Rather, it is actually nice to live with people you don’t hate. My friend Robbie once roomed with a schizophrenic drug user who kept going off his meds and starting fires in his closet and trashing the place. Robbie didn’t know about those issues when they first became roommates. There is a crazy that you only find out about up close. While my parents are utterly helpless when it comes to operating their entertainment system, neither of them makes a habit of psychosis, threats, drug use or arson. It’s pleasant to share a meal around a table instead of eating alone, your dinner for one illuminated by the faint glow of the television set left on for the illusion of company. There is something snug and homey about making coffee and knowing my dad will finish off the pot while he talks about the Arian Heresy or the collapse of the Roman Empire or whatever ideas might be percolating in his thoughts.

It isn’t all upside, though. There is a measure of societal judgment that accompanies living at home so long, but as any old person will tell you, the more you age, the less you care. There was a nine-month period when I was twenty-seven that it really bothered me, but after I got over that, I wore my residence like a badge of distinction. I was the punchline of so many jokes. I was the acceptable prejudice. I was an object of contempt to the sneering classes. Within a century, bachelors like myself had gone from being known as the respectable and unobtrusive sons who seamlessly and competently took over the running of the family homestead, to  cultural pariahs. It isn’t the same for girls. They can stay at home with their parents and nobody thinks anything of it. Nobody makes jokes about them living in their mom’s basement. It’s pretty sexist, if you think about it. We at-home boys really need some loser male suffragettes (suffragers?) to take up the cause. We won’t, though. Girls are much better at getting up in arms over bullshit nothings than we are. That is why you only see the really angry omega males in the dark corners of the internet railing against women while gorging on their masochistic pornography habit.

Those aren’t my people.

If guys are going to actually fight something, there’s probably going to be blood spilt, or else what’s the point? The right to live with our parents sans scorn hardly seems worth all that hullabaloo—blood crying out from the ground and whatnot. We want something worth fighting for—worth dying for, really—but even I can see that the right to live with Ma and Pop without mockery shouldn’t make that cut. What is worth blood and guts and death is the real question. Unfortunately, I’ve spent a good deal of time amassing a list of what doesn’t apply, rather than what does. I mean, I’ve got some inklings—certain intangibles like principles and so forth—but the call to die for your principles doesn’t come up as often as one might think, at least, not in Calgary. The worthy tangibles are people. A wife, if I had one. Kids. I occasionally craft daydreams about exacting a terrible revenge on those who threaten my imaginary family. But I don’t have a family. I just have dreams.

“Doesn’t it—you know—put a cramp on your love life?”

Everyone wants to know this, like it is any of their business. I see this question mark appear over a person’s head within sixty seconds of his finding out that I have lived at home into my thirties. As though living by myself would be some kind of guarantor of a happening lifestyle; like I’m Christian Slater in the ’90s or Will Smith in Bad Boys, and random scantily clad women are always showing up at my door in their lingerie at comedically inconvenient moments. Nobody really lives that life. None of my friends have, and not for lack of trying, either. Real life involves a lot less potential and a lot more humiliation and self-loathing. All the single people I know binge-watch Netflix in their underwear while glumly eating endless bowls of Cheerios for dinner. At least with my mom around I bother to wear clothes.

So—no, it barely affected my love life at all.

I’ve had relationships. In a fit of unqualified optimism a couple of years back (three years, two months and sixteen days, but who’s counting?), I even asked Cassandra if she wanted to marry me. She said yes with a blushing look about her and I felt—unoriginally—that I was the luckiest guy in the world. But while other newly engaged couples planned their nuptials, Cassandra and I inadvertently (yet painstakingly) undertook the destruction of Us. By the time we limped to our respective corners, our breakup was a textbook example of what David Foster Wallace was talking about when he wrote that acceptance was more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

So, neither my career nor my relationships have ever managed to generate any real traction. And since the Cassandra Incident, which escalated into a personal end of days, I’ve been content to weather the post-apocalyptic landscape alone. Alone is survivable. I reimagined myself as a confirmed bachelor of the black-and-white era of fedoras and nightcaps (the drink, not the kerchief from ’Twas the Night Before Christmas). I was Cary Grant or Clark Gable. Suave, witty and untethered by the romantic machinations of women who think not knowing what they want is an attractive quality. And inevitably, time just kept passing, as it does, without marker or notice and the next thing I knew I was being pushed out of the familial nest by my parents.

My dad refers to these confirmed bachelors as “beta males.” He subscribes to that anthropological theory about human interaction and relational hierarchy in which men and women have to strive to attain alpha status. Age does not confer it. It is only achieved through the selfless raising of children; the sacrificing of one’s own desires on the altar of parenthood for the success of the offspring. The beta members of the group are the unmarried juveniles. They may have great potential for alpha-hood, but they haven’t had to strive and self-sacrifice yet, so in beta-dom they shall remain. The only other category is the already mentioned anti-social omegas. They are at the bottom of the social ranking and are unlikely to do or accomplish much except occasionally take a shotgun into a mall and start firing in a hate-fuelled rampage. In such a scheme, it seemed to me that being a beta was A-okay. Especially in light of the fact that my attempt to join the alphas had been a colossal failure. Beta was my -dom. My mother didn’t see it that way, though. As I began to care less about my advancing age, she began to care more. She regarded it as a failing (possibly in her parenting), or a sign that I was intentionally avoiding maturity. I wasn’t. It’s just that things didn’t work out. They really didn’t work out.

Hooked? Want to read the back blurb? Flip through some more pages? Check out the price? Altruism in Gophers is available on (almost) all Amazon marketplaces. Check it out here:

https://www.amazon.com/Altruism-Gophers-Morgan-Wolf/dp/1983300187/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534445321&sr=8-1&keywords=altruism+in+gophers

You can because this cover is awesome.

Someone somewhere once said that you can't judge a book by its cover--to which Mary Stuart Masterson as Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful responded, "Yeah, but you can tell how much it's gonna cost ya."

All of that is apropos of nothing, except that I needed some kind of opener for this post.

Behold!

Altruism in Gophers is my newly published novel and it is available on (nearly) all of Amazon's marketplaces in both paperback and Kindle ebook. This is the result of my sweat and tears (literally, it is really hot in here these days, you guys.) It is the culmination of three years of work! A novel of ideas, as my editor declared! The best book not about gophers you will ever read--which if you think about it, is quite the claim. While you're at it, admire this fine, fine cover art by Cody Andreasen.

Not convinced? You Philistine! Watch this space and I might just post an excerpt or two.


Amazon.com!
https://www.amazon.com/Altruism-Gophers-Morgan-Wolf/dp/1983300187/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533240639&sr=8-1&keywords=morgan+wolf

Amazon.ca!
https://www.amazon.ca/Altruism-Gophers-Morgan-Wolf/dp/1983300187/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533240939&sr=8-1&keywords=Morgan+wolf&dpID=51nzF4RPc1L&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

Amazon.co.uk!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Altruism-Gophers-Morgan-Wolf/dp/1983300187/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533241025&sr=8-1&keywords=Morgan+wolf
And, so on...

And yes, that is a bomb sticking out of a backpack worn by a gopher in aviator sunglasses. You're welcome.

Insights from the Carpool

I used to carpool to work with my dad and his identical twin brother. My uncle would pick us up in his dark blue Chevy Suburban and together the three of us would drive downtown to our respective work places. My uncle is a slow driver. He enjoys the ride. He revels in the conversation. Being with him is like sitting on a sunny patio with a cold drink on a summer afternoon. It’s easy to wile away the time, laughing at his jokes and then wonder where the day went.

One winter morning when the snow was wet and clinging, he missed a sign forbidding right turns onto a residential street during rush hour. A cop was lurking nearby and promptly pulled him over. The police officer seemed abashed for giving him the ticket when the sign was covered in snow but explained (somewhat defensively, it seemed to me in the backseat) the danger of right-turning traffic between the hours of seven and nine in the morning. Unflappable as ever, my uncle nodded and said in his affable, Jeff Bridges-like manner. “Hey, it’s important to catch the evil doers.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘evil’,” the cop responded with rehearsed professionalism. “Just someone who, for a variety of reasons, happened to make a mistake at a particular point in time.”

Funny how words go out of fashion, isn’t it? Even when used self-deprecatingly for the sake of a dry rejoinder, ‘evil’ is out of fashion. Instead we must prevaricate and couch all of our words in semantic bubble wrap to avoid labels and judgements that some might find offensive. But if social media has taught us anything, it is that offence is an recreational sport.

Winston Churchill once opined, “You have enemies? Good! It means you stood up for something, sometime in your life.” 

God didn’t give us our lives in order that we might learn to walk so softly so as to never bend a blade of grass, but rather that we would bear witness to the truth. Being a witness sounds passive, but it is the furthest thing from it. It is about overcoming evil. It sounds a little hyperbolic to word it like that, but it is true according to Revelation 12:11. When Christians bear witness to the Truth it will undoubtably rustle up some enemies. Not the flesh and blood kind, though; but rather the ones that lurk in this present darkness beyond the sight of our natural eyes. Spiritual forces, who know better than we do, the power of our individual proclamation of what Christ has done. Those same spirits who seek to render us mute, lest the people who make up the Church comprehend that in worshipping our God; in declaring His greatness; in proclaiming His faithfulness to each of us personally, that He displays His might and our enemies are routed.

It is easy to reduce the notion of witnessing down to telling someone about how you became a Christian, as though the story ended at conversion, rather than began there. But whenever we tell anyone—even other believers—what Christ is accomplishing in our lives; how He is revealing the truth of His Word in our individual circumstances; how He is transforming us by His grace, we triumph over evil by the word of our testimony. The blood of the Lamb is already over the threshold of victory.  Whenever we testify as to what God is doing, even if it is only to our own selves, we overcome evil. We conquer by believing and speaking. In order to secure this triumph, we are only required to keep our eyes fixed on Christ; proclaiming as trustworthy witnesses the evidence we have seen.

Because hey, it’s important to catch the evil doers.

(A version of this article was published in the July/Aug 2018 issue of Live magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com.)

Perceiving is Deceiving

 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.”  (Matthew 6:22-23)

How we look through our eyes will determine how we experience life. If we have good vision, we will see clearly with an abundance of light. If we have poor vision, not only will we see the outside world in a blur of confusion, we will be in the dark as to what is going on within as well. It comes down to a matter of perception. Henry Ford is famous for opining“ whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Merely in terms of accomplishments, Ford recognized that personal belief was a deciding factor in success. Those who believed themselves capable of achievement proved themselves thus through hard work and perseverance, while those who believed themselves inconsequential would also demonstrate that was the case through lack of effort and easy discouragement.

Belief is a powerful thing; and belief in a lie empowers that which is false. It is crucial then, to see clearly and believe that which is true.  When sitting outside on a long summer evening as the sun goes down slowly, our eyes adjust to the growing gloom and it isn’t until you walk back into the light indoors that you perceive just how dark it has become. Darkness sneaks up and plays tricks on your eyes but light, though sometimes glaring to our sensitivities, never does.

Perception can only be trusted to be full of light when it is brought into contact with the very Source of Light  “This is the message that we have heard from him [Jesus Christ] and declare to you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5) We cannot afford to risk deceiving ourselves by believing things and thinking thoughts that God does not think. Everything must be dragged into the light so that it can revealed for what it is. Even the ideas that we think to be right and true must be regularly brought into contact with the light of God’s Word so that we can see each matter clearly, rather than through the dimming effect of habitual opinion.

Throughout the Old Testament, God reminded the people of Israel to repeat the stories of their relationship with God to each new generation; that every new Israelite would know that the Lord God had rescued them from slavery in Egypt, that He divided the Red Sea, that He fed them manna in the wilderness and so forth. The repetition of who God was to them and how He had abundantly provided for them in the past was meant to give them good eyes to see their present circumstances clearly. The God who brings you out of slavery with the riches of your former captors (without a battle) is certainly able to deal with the threats of today. Reminding yourself of how God has provided for you in the past will encourage you regarding how He will provide for you in the future. It is when the Israelites forgot God; when they neglected to retell the history of their relationship with Him that they went astray. We are no less prone to this same danger if we forget to remind ourselves of our story with the Lord and the truth of His Word. This trend toward the gloom of forgetfulness is evident not only in our personal lives but in the tumultuous cultural context in which we live.

The Judeo-Christian Western nations have at their foundation the principle of liberty. This liberty was not prized because it enabled an anything goes lifestyle (though it certainly can be abused in such a way) but rather because it mirrored the freedom that God Himself gave to mankind. Each individual had the freedom to choose God, to love Him of his own free will and to benefit from all the good that He entails. Or, conversely, to have the freedom to reject Him, shunning His wisdom and inevitably choosing evil for there is no good apart from God. This is the source of our cultural valuation of freedom, yet the passage of time and the failure to bring this important ideal into remembrance has instead watered it down to cliched maxims of “to each, their own”, or “what’s right for you isn’t right for me”. This is a darkened perception of freedom without understanding its God-given source and intent. Liberty becomes licence when we fail to bring it into the Light of God’s Word.

Things I thought while walking through the Mall

Photo by Vinicius Wiesehofer on Unsplash

I’m standing in line at the book store. There is a tickle in my throat that wants to manifest. I’ve been keeping it down there with Halls candies and the odd ‘ahem, ahem, ahem’. I need a drink but they don’t sell those here. At least, not right here. There is a Starbucks halfway down the store but you can’t pay for your book there. There are two people in front of me. I notice their coats. One is navy and quilted with a faux fur-lined hood while the other is a black parka smeared with dust from brushing up against a dirty car door. I don’t notice what books they are buying. Maybe they aren’t books at all. Maybe they carry ‘goods’ in their hands from the Lifestyle section of the store that has crowded out both the Fantasy and Sci-fi books so that they can offer teal scarves and little zippered pouches encouraging one to, ‘be brave’; or throw pillows with not-quite-clever sayings on them. The books are gone but fantasy is still on sale.

I attempt to clear my throat again and reach somewhat frantically into my purse for another candy; my fingers lost amid the familiar shapes of my wallet, cell phone, sunglasses case and keys. Restraining my cough makes me feel like I might choke and the unexpected sound of strangulation undoubtedly startles the woman standing in front of me, but she doesn’t turn around. We’re Canadian like that. She takes a step away and busies her interest with the last minute purchase options decorated with red and gold and hawking love for Valentine’s Day. The chocolates look expensive and waxy; while the coffee table books look like the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed for anyone to see in your house. At least, you should be embarrassed, I think primly as I stuff the once elusive candy into my mouth. I pay for my book and leave the store with the phoney sense of purpose that buying things always gives me. 

Mall pet peeve number one: People who walk the wrong direction down the right side of the mall. Mall pet peeve number two: groups that fan three (or more) across the corridor and walk at a snails pace and block the rest of us who use speed as an indication of our importance. I walk through the mall like an assassin in a movie. I scan faces as though I am looking for my quarry. I don’t look in the windows. I don’t watch the floor. I am the biological equivalent of all that high tech scanning gear that you only see in movies. Except instead of weapons, I zero in on things like a Canada Goose logo on the pauldron of a jacket or an intense bug-eyed expression in a woman’s face.  

I immediately feel bad for thinking of the adjective ‘bug-eyed’ to describe her. It’s not as though she picked that face but it is the one that she has to wear. It is one thing to judge someone’s bad clothing choices--like the teenage girl I just passed with novel-sized cutouts in the thighs of her jeans--but picking on the faults in someone’s face just makes you a jerk. (Unless of course they earned that face, in which case, fair game.) But I do penance for the bug-eyed observation as I walk along trying to think of a kinder descriptor for what was truly an interesting face. Protuberant? Bulging? It all sounded kind of mean. One could say that her eyes popped, but that would just be misleading. Maybe it was only an individual’s expectations that made bulging eyes sound like a flaw rather than an attribute. But then again, a lot of lovely things don’t sound that nice when you try to describe them. Blue cheese, for example.

I once plugged a paragraph of text I had written into one of those super reliable online “Which great writer most resembles you?” tests. Without even pausing to ponder the content, the answering algorithm came back with David Foster Wallace which is flattering since he’s lauded as this literary genius, but also too bad since I found a good portion of Infinite Jest incomprehensible. I liked his essay, A Supposedly Fun Thing that I’ll Never Do Again, though. So that’s something.

My scanning of faces yields a hit of recognition and my brain instinctively reacts to the challenge, searching my own memory banks for where I have seen that face before. The young man with blond hair and beard is approaching from the opposite direction. Even his glasses and way of dressing is familiar. I light on the answer just as we pass one another. That drama class at the college. That’s where I know him from. He had a support person with him. Her name was Sarah. I think we’re still friends on Facebook. I knew his name too at one point, but it is long gone. I keep walking and wonder if I will see anyone else that I once knew. It happens more often than you would think in a city of a million; especially if you go to the trouble to look.

I don’t have anything else to do here. Truthfully, I didn’t even come to the mall to buy the book or anything else. I came because I wanted to park underground and melt all the accumulated snow that has built up in the wheel wells of my car. You have to stay awhile for that to happen. I keep walking in my long strides, dodging people, weaving around them like a motorcycle in traffic. It’s a pretence of importance, but it is gives me something to do nonetheless.

I almost bought a notebook so that I could stop somewhere and write, but I couldn’t bear to spend twenty five bucks on a Moleskin when I probably have twelve virgin notebooks at home. When I was a kid, I used to feel bad for my toys that didn’t get played with as often as the others. I would occasionally pick them up and say nice things to them, but they didn’t spark my imagination and so I would set them back down again. My notebooks at home are like that. Too small. Too lined. Too aggressive with their encouragements to “Write!”. Their covers are too fancy. Too busy. There is a reason the bookstore places them in the Lifestyle section with the scented candles and the cards. These aren’t tools of the trade. They are decorations. These fancy journals are like the pink hammers and screwdrivers marketed to women with feather boas glued onto the ends. Heaven and a man help you if you actually have something to fix. Those cutesy tools aren’t going to cut it. So it is with the sparkly journals filled with writing prompts. They too are a fantasy at writing. They aren’t writer’s notebooks. They won’t lie flat. They are uncomfortably thick so that your hand falls off the side like a house giving way to an eroding bank. Each page is a distraction of discomfort. Might as well throw in an inconsistent pen, too. You’ll hate writing before you come to the end of the first line of your (unwanted) lined page. 

I like the black unlined Moleskins the best, but they are hard to find and even harder to justify when you’ve got twelve unsuitable notebooks pretending at usefulness at home. They fit in my purse and aren’t so loaded with pages that it feels like I’m carrying around a notebook. They open wide and welcomingly and don’t presume to bind your writing into twenty lines. Draw a diagram if you feel like it. Doodle something while you try and think of a kinder adjective than ‘bug-eyed’. The pages are creamy coloured and substantial without being rigid, welcoming to both pencil and ink. The bookstore closest to me only carries the lined or gridded ones; not the blank ones in my perfect Goldilocks size. But even though I found them today, I didn’t buy one.

I’m feeling introspectively brave as I head back toward the parkade, and I wonder whether I have this same perverse attitude of keeping the useless and neglecting to acquire the useful in other areas of my life as well. I already know the answer. Life is a game of catch and release. There are some things or seasons that you hold onto for a little while, others; longer. And sometimes, either the catching or releasing mechanism jams and you start piling up junk at high speeds like Lucy and Ethel at the candy factory. ‘Goods’ from the Lifestyle section are one thing, but bad ideas are the metastasizing cancer that spreads from one area to another with reckless abandon. Bad ideas attract other ones with magnetic capacity. They are the grime that smatters up a windshield and makes it impossible for us to see clearly. At least the useless crap fills up your rooms and you begin to wonder, unsettled-like, if you might have a nascent hoarding problem. But few us evaluate the ideas that we’re always accumulating for whether they are true and profitable and worth looking out at the world through. And, there is a world of difference between what ideas feel good in a moment and what is good. 

The floor of the parkade runs with streams of dirty water; melting off a thousand cars in this perpetual underground Spring. I examine the wheel well by my driver’s door, and note--with the peculiar satisfaction of one raised in cold weather-- the sloshy clump on the pavement behind the tire melting into oblivion. I open the door and toss my purse across the console onto the empty passenger seat. The car is colder than the parkade and has the aura of an ice cube melting in a glass of tepid water. If only one could melt the accumulation of untruths and bad ideas that gum up the workings of her mind as easily as the frozen slop falls to splatter under the weight of its own inconsequence with a little heat. The ignition of my car springs to life with the magic of mechanics I do not understand. My seatbelt buckle gives a satisfying click and it occurs to me that maybe life provides the heat free of charge. The frustrations, the heartaches, the grievances that erupt like landmines are heat to the frozen accumulation of bad ideas. Turn up the heat and the hard-packed, crystallized foolishness must give way to clarity.

I emerge from beneath the ground into the brilliant blind of sunshine on snow. The roads are still covered and the snow quickly begins accumulating again on the underside of my car. I can feel it when I turn the corners, but I don’t worry about it. I can always come back.

God Says Amen

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” 

-Hamlet (Act III, Scene 3)

I was fourteen when I first saw Hamlet, and though much of the meaning passed over me in a whelming flood of poetic language, I was nonetheless arrested by the play’s opening as fog steals silently across the ground for the scene which sets the whole plot in motion. It must be night. It must be cool and humid. There is something eerie afoot. You can sense it in the atmosphere. A ghastly anticipation rises as the spirit world intersects and overlays the physical one; and fate begins to wind the wheels of Hamlet’s life into motion. The ghost of the king is about to make himself known.

Sometimes when we pray the Holy Spirit slides unnoticed into the room like fog along the ground and changes the whole atmosphere. We can sense the shift; the transformation in the people who are praying around us. They are no longer merely people who entered clothed in winter coats and cares, but those who have been radiantly transformed and speak in the oracles of God. Anticipation rises as the veil between the spirit and the material world shows itself to be gossamer thin. God is listening— and not only listening, but incredibly— it even feels as though He is adding His amen. The words prayed are no longer just words, but become heavier things—weighted with purpose like a cup filled to the brim with water. 

I’m always surprised when God shows up to pray with me like this. This experience of Him makes me thirsty for more of His presence; for prayer that enervates, rather than a rote experience of the words without thoughts that barely make it out of my head, let alone all the way to heaven. And I long for that feeling—as though a divine hand has laid itself upon my shoulder—and suddenly I’m praying things I’ve never thought of before and believing with earnest faith because they resound with the clear ring of truth.

But it isn’t always like that. More often than not, it is prayers that evaporate in the yawning face of sleep, and or get shuffled in the deck of thoughts that I deal throughout the day. I want more of God Himself, but I get more of me, instead. If I’m honest, sometimes I don’t want God to show up and start talking when I’m about to fall asleep. I don’t really want to hear from Him when I’m getting my day sorted out. I want to leave Him a spiritual voicemail and then He can get back to me with His specific answers to each of my requests when it is convenient for us both (but mostly for me). 

The difference in those prayers, it seems to me, is anticipating His presence and not just the answers that He could give. It is so easy to focus on the problems at hand that need a God solution; rather than to expect the presence of the God for whom nothing is a problem. For truly, when God shows up, the normal rules no longer apply. Perspectives are dynamically changed by the Unchanging One. No one will drop off to sleep when the Holy Spirit speaks. No one will forget that they are praying and start composing a grocery list instead. 

The truth about faith is that when you start to look for God, you begin to hear Him moving just beyond your sight. Anticipation grows as the mist of His presence descends while you are still straining in the dark to see Him. The night begins to flee; the true light of dawn is breaking. There is something holy afoot. You can sense it in the atmosphere as you begin to realize that there is no veil between the spiritual world and the one you live in. The circumstances that masqueraded as random hardships begin to look like plot. Soon, the Holy Ghost of the King is going to make Himself known.

American Martyrs

American Martyrs.

This phrase has been running through my mind since hearing of the massacre of Christians in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The news felt like it blew a sucking hole in my own chest that stayed throughout the whole of the day and into the next. Not too long ago, my own little church was made up of about fifty people. Multiple generations of my own family attend there. It could just as easily have be us. 

This feeling doesn’t really fit with the media talking points about lax gun laws or the Second Amendment since I live in Canada--a supposed utopia of non-violence--where few people carry guns. I was in high school when Columbine became the buzzword for mass shooting. How many times in its immediate aftermath did I hear my fellow Canadians say, “Only in America. That would never happen here.” It proved to be hollow comfort when a week later a teen took a gun to his own school in the small town of Taber, Alberta (pop. 8400) and shot at three students, wounding one and killing Jason Lang, the son of a Taber pastor, before he was wrestled to the floor and disarmed by a teacher.

‘Only in America, where guns are as plentiful as the gun nuts’, was proven to be the foolish and despicable sentiment that it was. Guns are heavily restricted in Canada. According to the law, the Taber shooter shouldn’t have had one. He also should have trembled before God at the thought of committing such an evil act. But he didn’t. Laws, be they governmental or moral, are breakable. That’s what sin is. When the ‘only in America’ explanation failed, the media moved on to discussing motives--video games and bullying--as though such things made surrendering to an evil temptation more acceptable. At Jason Lang’s funeral, his father, Rev. Dale Lang, did something much harder than surrender to the temptation to sin. He forgave his son’s killer.

That story has receded into the mist of memory as other atrocities take up our collective attention, from 9/11 to the current onslaught of terrorist acts. “Church shootings” is now also a thing. Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tennessee’s Burnet Chapel Church of Christ, and now First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, can count their own as martyrs for the sake of Christ. These churches are outposts of my family. They are made up of brothers and sisters whom I have never met, but we share the same precious blood. They are now counted among those who lost their lives for the word of God and the witness they bore; those who cry out from the alter in heaven, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?”

I shall leave the exploration of the layers of motivations to the investigators, but what none of us who are part of the Body of Christ should deny is that these are not senseless acts of violence. These are not random victims. These were targeted acts of persecution. While the shooters themselves may not be aware of the demonic powers that influenced them, we should not be oblivious to the enmity that is directed at those of us who are in Christ. We do not need to be missionaries in foreign climes to find ourselves abhorred for His sake.

The issue is not the availability of implements by which to harm. Cain murdered Abel because murder was in his heart, not because he’d been bullied, played video games, or been radicalized on the internet or had guns available. From fists to firearms to vehicle to weapons of mass destruction, the issue is evil in the heart of mankind. It has always been thus, and until it is dealt with at the cross, it will continue cut its bloody swath through the pages of human history.

Those of us in Western countries with a Judeo Christian founding have been--for a time--largely shielded from the outright violent persecution that our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world experience on a daily basis. But as our nations increasingly decry the godly precepts that established their strength and prosperity; proclaiming themselves to be post-Christian and too scientifically sophisticated for such foolish beliefs as “God”; we will face increasing hostility. One only needs to briefly peruse social media to observe the way that celebrities and cultural figures can revile the dead as ‘having the prayers shot out of them’ in order to note that we are truly aliens in a hostile world.

Martyrdom and persecution is a frightening prospect for us all, but we should take heart. The very persecution that seeks to stamp out the gospel, always serves to spread it rapidly. The fires that are meant to obliterate the Church, always serve to refine and strengthen her.  Not a single one of those lives lost--from the smallest in the womb to the elder who should have been honoured--will be wasted. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. (Psalm 116:15) Joseph’s words to his brothers echo through the generations and proclaim the truth of what can only be true by the grace of an almighty God. “What you intended for evil, God has used for good.” This is our faith. Take heart, He has overcome the world.