Part of why I would like to have bundles of thousand-dollar bills beneath my mattress is that I grew up below what our government calls the poverty line. And though I’ve heard that money won’t buy you happiness, I’d like to research the notion for myself.
A dozen years ago my first book landed on a bestseller list. My elementary school teachers prepared me for numerous things, but not for success. If asked who might become a successful writer, they would have singled out girls with horn-rimmed spectacles who sat upright in their chairs, finishing assignments on time. My report cards prepared me for failure. But success? It is worse, my friends.
First off, a publicist calls to inform you that complete strangers want to talk with you. They want you to be on the radio (what will I say?) or on television (what will I wear?). She tells you that they’re couriering you stuff like plane tickets to different cities; you, who gets lost driving to the grocery store. They promise to pay for everything, though—everything but twenty-four-hour limousine service and movies in your hotel room. (Someone else already tried this. My lawyer said I can’t tell you his name.) Next up, the publisher swiftly couriers you another book contract with an advance three times the amount of the first one, and you sign before they retract the thing and tell you they were joking.
When the check arrives, so does a book cover awaiting your approval. You laugh so hard that vital organs begin to hurt because you haven’t written a single word of the book yet. While you’re still midway through writing the first chapter, a marketing guru calls to tell you how many copies bookstores have already ordered, and you begin to experience respiratory problems. Expectations aren’t so great when they are someone else’s.
Reporters conduct interviews. It is intoxicating. They ask you what it’s like to be an author. “I write much because I am paid little,” you say, and they like that. Your poverty endears you to them. You tell them that the garbage can is a writer’s best friend, that writing a book is like driving a car at night: You can’t see very far, but you follow the lights. You tell them that writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of loading hand grenades.
Fellow writers ask you to review their manuscripts and offer advice or, better yet, write a note of recommendation to a publisher of your choosing. You write them back: “This is great stuff. I’m sorry I have no time to read it.” They print your first sentence on the covers of their books. You ask a friend for advice, and he grows quiet. “I’m not boasting,” you say, “I’m having a panic attack.” And you are.
An editor calls. He is flying in to meet with you about more projects. Others discover your phone number. Accountants. Agents. Critics. Magazine editors. Hopeful authors. Financial planners. Fans in prison. Little kids who want your picture. The tax audit guy. No man can serve two masters, you think. But how about twenty-three? Surely that’s possible. But it isn’t. It’s like you are a bag of sand, and someone cut a hole in the bottom. You are dying of easy accessibility.
Dear people call you late at night to discuss your new book and how it relates to their unique problems. Could you drive to their house and help them with their marriage? You tell them you would, but you’ve hardly seen your own wife the past week. Still, they find your address and drive long distances to tell you of their childhoods, their failures, their sins. You advise them to talk with their minister. “He’s tired of me,” they say.
You cut your hair, and people write to discuss the new style. You find yourself standing before audiences of thousands—you, who couldn’t speak up in Sunday school for fear of ridicule. You go to sleep complaining to your wife of chest pains and she says, “Just say no. It was good enough for Nancy Reagan.”
And then one day you wake up and smell the decaf. It comes in the form of a beautiful letter. “My life was changed forever… My family and I are following Christ after reading your book.” And you get down on your knees and repent of your whining and give thanks to Almighty God for the privilege and the pains and the joys of being a writer. You thank Him for the true friends who stick around—even in the midst of your success. For a wife who gives all your money away. A woman who advises you to take a couple of those speaking engagements a year and use the money to help others.
And you thank God that throughout history He hasn’t always used the ones who please Him; He uses whomever He pleases. Even you.
I come from a family where gravy
is considered a beverage.
ERMA BOMBECK
Twice a week James Enns and I enjoy lunch together after exercising for twenty minutes on machines intended for gerbils. I The meal is really an incentive. We can’t stand the thought of exercise without immediate reward, and so we hold it in front of us, like the weekend on a Monday. Recompense gives purpose to our exercise.
When we were children, we ran ten miles a day without knowing it, kicking a ball or being chased by Mr. Pike for sampling his raspberries. But not anymore. No one plays sports these days unless their parents organize it. There’s too much on television.
James and I talked for some time about beginning an exercise program but were distracted by other things. After all, we are busy guys. James is a year away from completing his PhD from Cambridge. My schedule keeps me weeks away from a nervous breakdown. Then one day I stepped on the scales and thought to myself, Hey, I’d like to live to be fifty-five and have all parts of my body stop moving when I do.
And so I called James, who agreed that I needed help and that he would join me.
Contrary to what I say in chapter 34, exercise is a good thing and we’re wise to grab some of it each day. Also, we should eat right. It won’t kill us. Those who subsist on french fries and Cheetos risk having a heart attack each time the toast pops up. I once saw pictures in National Geographic of a somewhat wizened Russian man who, though he had no documents to prove it, estimated his age to be 120 years, give or take a few. He said the secret to his longevity was a pound of bacon at breakfast, a shot of vodka at lunchtime, and lots and lots of unfiltered cigarettes throughout the day.
There are three things I know for sure about this:
He is the exception.
He was probably lying.
He was probably twenty-nine.
The thing I like about exercise is the same thing I like about banging my head against a stone wall: It feels good when I stop. But it’s worth it for those meals we enjoy together in the little sub sandwich shop near the exercise room.
We are unlikely friends, James and I. The similarity in our sandwiches ends with the chicken and the mayo. He loves red peppers and jalapeños and Mother-in-Law hot sauce. I get heartburn just watching him order. James dislikes pickles. This is a spiritual problem he has. I eat pickles by the fistful. He prefers Coke with ice. I go without.
James is an Anglican. I am Evangelical Free. He is a scholar. I am not. He can debate circles around me. It’s like Plato and Steve Martin doing lunch. Steve knows that the next best thing to being wise is to hang out with someone who is. I try to keep up as James discusses the theological ramifications of the big bang theory, but since I personally invented attention deficit disorder back in 1966, the Big Bang makes me think of Mr. Big chocolate bars, which reminds me that I didn’t get my wife anything for her birthday on Saturday, which is the day of the week we were married back in 1982, the very year the Washington Redskins won the Super Bowl, which makes me think of quarterbacks, which makes me wonder if I have enough spare change for coffee this afternoon.
I interrupt. “Did you hear about the crisis in Colombia?”
He frowns. “You’ve got ranch dressing on your nose,” he says.
Real friends do that. They point out mustard on your mustache and tea leaves in your teeth and inconsistencies in your spiritual life. James and I don’t agree on every little point, so mostly we stick to the ones that matter. We bow together before each meal, like saplings that have learned the best way to deal with the north wind, asking God to bless and protect our wives and child
ren and to make us a blessing too.
“Lord, in a world where many go hungry, we thank You for food. Where many walk alone, we thank You for friends. Where many long for healing, we thank You for hope.”
What began as exercise has become a sacred friendship I would not trade for all the chocolate in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
I am sometimes asked why I live in a small town where everyone knows where you’re going before you turn your signal light on. The opportunities are golden elsewhere. And then I think of the words C. S. Lewis wrote in a letter: “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am very fortunate in that respect.”
I wish for everyone a friend like James, a friend to hold us accountable and soak us in community.
“As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend,” wrote Solomon in Proverbs 27:17 (NLT). Solomon must have had a James in his life. I wonder if they went out for submarine sandwiches. I imagine they were long lunches. After all, Solomon had his share of wives to pray for.
Untold suffering seldom is.
FRANKLIN P. JONES
An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Most of us do not grow one inch through success, or ease, or happy circumstances. I wish it weren’t this way. I wish we learned about patience by not having to loiter in traffic. I wish we learned about peace by living in peaceful times. And more than this, I wish we learned about suffering by reading good books on the topic, books that are on the blowout table for ninety-nine cents.
I first asked my wife, Ramona, out in tenth grade16 and soon learned that there was a 50 percent chance she was carrying around a hereditary disease known as Huntington’s (HD). Though we have known for more than a decade now that she does not carry it, three of her siblings inherited this neurological disorder—her dear brother, Dennis, succumbed two Christmases ago. Today her sisters, Cynthia and Miriam, along with their faithful husbands, Bill and Jim, are battling this awful disease, and though I don’t use the term very often, I consider the four of them to be saints, because they put others’ needs ahead of their own without telling you about it.
I fear our sad culture has replaced the servants with the stars and that we need to refocus. If you’ve been unfortunate enough to read scandalous headlines in the checkout line lately, I think you agree.
Recently I began receiving phone calls from the editorial staff at Life & Style, a Hollywood tabloid, asking me to comment on various goings-on in the unnatural lives of celebrities like Brad Pitt, Britney Spears, and Angelina Jolie. I joked with them a little, then asked why they’d called me. “You’re on file as one of our experts,” an editor said. I’m not sure if she could hear me laughing.
Now, I’m old enough to get away with being cranky, so allow me a brief rant: I have no clue about the lives of these people. I see Jessica and Paris on the covers of magazines when I’m buying mangoes, and I know that God loves them (Jessica and Paris, and probably the mangoes, too), but I can’t tell you a thing about their love lives. Will it help me in some small way to know more about the feud between Rosie and Donald? Will it better my marriage to know who broke up with whom this week?
I fear, in saying this, that someone may show up at my door and give me a talking-to for being insubordinate, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. Perhaps that is what aging is: sorting through what’s rotten and throwing it out.
At this time in my life, I cannot afford to be sidetracked by the trivial. If I am going to write about people, there needs to be some depth, some honor, something bordering on nobility. And that’s what I’ve found in the lives of these family members whose love for others propels me to love deeper, whose laughter astounds me as much as their attitudes.
Steve Cohen is the president of The Apple of His Eye Mission Society. Like Bill and Jim, Steve’s wife, Jan, wrestles with Huntington’s. And like Bill and Jim, Steve faces each new day with profound faith, a robust attitude, and a couple of much-needed chuckles.
I would love to see his face on the National Enquirer. “Man stays faithful to invalid wife. Maybe we should too.”
Recently the Cohens celebrated thirty-one years of marriage and the fourteenth year that Jan has bravely battled Huntington’s. When Steve travels throughout the country he meets people whose lives Jan’s story has touched, people who are praying for them. “Please tell me how Jan is doing!” they say.
“One of the realities of HD is that our house must be as friendly as possible to Jan,” Steve tells me. “This has meant a number of renovations, and most recently the overhaul of a walk-in closet so that she won’t slip on something strewn on the floor. It was quite a chore, but the closet never looked so good.”
With the renovation complete, Steve was downstairs with his children when they heard a thud and rushed upstairs to find Jan on the floor in the newly renovated closet. With no grab bar to steady her, she had grabbed the nearest thing she could find: the clothes. “We found her there in a mountain of clothing. Arms and legs protruding from the jumbled mass, but she was unhurt.”
It was 10:30 at night when they finished rehanging the clothes, and Steve herded everyone down to the kitchen table where he announced that they were having a celebration.
“What are we celebrating?” asked the kids.
“We are celebrating the fact that the paramedics did not have to come,” Steve answered. “Mom was not taken to the hospital. She did not need stitches. There is no recovery period this time, and she is not in pain. Also, we’re celebrating the fact that the closet has never been cleaner.”
Jan’s battle with HD has helped Steve count the blessing of each day and each situation. They have discovered together that the joy of the Lord grows best in the soil of thanksgiving. “And we acknowledge God’s grace and mercy—new every morning and evening, too.”
A recent e-mail from my brother-in-law Jim will give you an idea of the strength God gives His saints, and the attitude we can choose:
Miriam is doing great. Her speech is now to the point that we have difficulty understanding most of what she says. Sometimes I have to ask her to repeat herself five or six times and she starts to laugh at me. How great is that! The two phrases she says the best, and probably the most often, are “I love you” and “I’m happy.” It makes my day every time. Thanks for your prayers. Isn’t life amazing?
In high school I heard a sermon on what we should say when God meets us at heaven’s gates and asks in His thundering Charlton Heston-ish voice why He should stoop to unlatch the door for the likes of us. I was sitting with three friends that day, and normally we were busy distracting others, reading Alfred Hitchcock magazines stuffed in our Bibles, or listening to transistor radios through tiny earpieces attached to wires beneath our shirts. But this day the topic sobered us enough to listen.
The preacher listed seven things we needed to say, and a host of things we would need to do on earth, before we entered the hereafter. I’m ashamed to tell you I don’t remember more than one or two of them. I knew the preacher was a man who had no shortcomings; there seemed to be no reason God wouldn’t open the gates wide and hug him Home. But not me. I sat there hanging my head, knowing I could never measure up.
With a few years under my belt, I have come to the conclusion that I’ll be speechless when I arrive there. But if I finally find my voice and, for some reason, God asks me why He should allow me in, I will bow nervously and try to stammer out the words a wise friend of mine said: “Because You love me, You know You do.”
Then I think I will add this: “I know Bill and Jim and Steve. They’re over there in the front row. They’re my friends.”
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
believe me, than in half the creeds.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
&nb
sp; I’m sneakin into heaven’ with a borrowed halo.
CHRIS RICE
We have a dog by the name of Mojo, which is a Bible name, of course. Named after Moses and Jonah (Moses who stuttered, and Jonah who ran away from home a lot), this Maltese–Shih Tzu lap dog does not appreciate my laptop computer. I was typing away one night when Mojo leaped onto my lap and somehow managed to push Control+Alt+Delete, a sequence that completely shut my computer down. I kid you not. The dog had no sense of remorse whatsoever, just sat there begging to be scratched, unaware that she might have erased the last hour of my life, and possibly some truly deep thoughts.
After Mom and Dad moved in, Mojo became Dads number one fan, following him around their suite, pouncing on his lap whenever he sat down, grinning up at him past crooked teeth. The two sat by the window happily munching bananas, lost in a one-sided conversation.
Dad loved the old saying, “If you can start the day without caffeine, live without complaining, eat the same food every day and be grateful, relax without liquor, and sleep without the aid of drugs, you are probably the family dog.”
“That dog is a blessing,” Dad would say, and not just for the company but for what she was teaching him about doubt and fear.
He had been experiencing his share of both lately.
One night, in the midst of a short conversation, Dad asked, “Do you have any books on doubt?”
His words caught me by surprise. My father? Doubt? Are you kidding? I am young enough to have doubts, but not this rock-solid Christian who has loved and served God for almost seven decades. Preaching when called upon. Telling others the certainty of what Christ has done for him. How many times did he tell me that our faith is a fact, not a feeling? Perhaps there is more of Thomas than Peter in him, after all.
Family Squeeze Page 10
