Our Father, who art in Heaven…

Posted on April 12, 2019 by skipmckinstry

R. A. McKinstry, Jr., 1926-2019 on Thanksgiving 2018, at the age of 92.

(What follows is the text I delivered at my father’s memorial service on March 23, 2019. He passed away on January 12, 2019. The memorial service was basically a second funeral in order that members of his family from Arkansas could attend. The photo above was taken at Thanksgiving of 2018 when Dad was, as my sister put it so well, “Still chasing the dog around with his walker.”)

I want to say thank you to Wilmar Baptist Church for graciously allowing us to hold this celebration of my dad’s life. Their generosity is a tribute not only to him but to the entire family who lived in the house that used to occupy what is now the parking lot. Pretty much all of us came to this church from time to time, but my great-grandmother, Eula Jane Haigh, was a long-time member and pillar of the church. This service is a blessing to her memory as well.

I want to welcome and thank all of you for coming. I’d mess this up if I tried to name all of you, but I do want to acknowledge my Aunt Joan, who was married to Dad’s youngest brother Victor. And I especially want to acknowledge my Uncle Joe and Aunt Mickey. They have very generously purchased the headstone for my Dad and Mom that will be in the cemetery at Greenhill. Thank you so much for that lasting tribute.

Since Dad was the oldest of the three brothers, I guess his passing offically makes Joe the patriarch of the McKinstry family. That is exactly as it should be. But Joe, I think Dad would want me to remind you of something. When my sons were younger and they got into the usual arguments and fights, I would often bemoan that fact to Dad and seek his advice on how to fix the problem. Having grown up with brothers himself, Dad was sympathetic but didn’t offer a lot of hope. “Boys will be boys,” he would say and he almost always told me something Joe said to him when he and Joe got into fights. “I can’t wait till I am older than you so I can beat you up.”

So I think Dad would like me to point out, Joe, that you’ve still got about two more years before that becomes literally true. So hang in there.

Our Father, who art in heaven…

Well, that’s a phrase that takes on even more poignancy today than ever before. As the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, it is first a reference to our Heavenly Father. But today, my earthly father is in Heaven. And I am grateful to God that he chose to reveal himself to us as “father.” Because I had a good one.

I did not always think so.

But that is just a symptom of the awkward relationship between fathers and sons that has existed since Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden of Eden. Every man here knows exactly what I am talking about. As a son, there are times when you have thought, “Whose idea was it to give me that guy as a father?” And as a father, there have been times when you have looked up at God and asked with a little frustration and maybe a little anger, “What did I do to deserve this guy as a son.” I’m sure there is a similar dynamic between fathers and daughters, but I’m a son and I have four sons. So I don’t really know much about daughters.

I’m pretty sure all this awkwardness between fathers and sons is intentional. It is one of the most important reminders sewn into the warp and woof of a fallen world, that the relationship between God the father and all of his children is awkward, and in need of repair.

Dad was a good son, though he shared with me numerous times how difficult it was with his Dad, my grandfather, who was, according to my Dad, a stern taskmaster who demanded a lot from his three sons. But Dad often said that he and his father could never sit in the same room and carry on a real conversation and he didn’t want that to happen between us. I never doubted my grandfather’s love for me. He was a fun grand-dad, he loved taking me to the bank, and the farm, and he bought a horse and a shetland pony just for the grandkid’s fun when we got too big to ride on his knee any more. And he always had butterscotch candy on hand in case the conversation lagged. What’s not to like?

For whatever reason, and I am certain it was not my grandfather’s intent, Dad never really felt like he had my grandfather’s approval—something that every child, son or daughter, really craves. When we don’t receive it, it creates what psychologists and theologians alike call the “Father Wound.” Very few people completely escape it. And we all long to hear the same words that Jesus heard from his Father when he was baptized by John the Baptist, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.”

Please indulge me for a moment as I take care of some personal business that I believe Dad would really want me to do.

I want to say to my four sons, on the record, you have my approval. I am well pleased. Aaron, the Eagle Scout, gamer, and stained-glass artist who is working through the challenges of engineering school. Don’t give up. You have my approval.

Carson, the German major who realized after graduation two years ago that he needed to find something to pay the bills. He taught himself web development and will be leaving on Monday to go to work for Trivago, in Dusseldorf, Germany. Carson, you have my approval.

Jonathan, who, in the eighth grade wanted to become president, went to college in Washington DC and got a political science degree. He also taught himself web development and after working in Congress for several years decided he had seen enough and no longer wanted to become president. He moved into the private sector and now works for a succesful digital advertising firm. But I think his real job is managing social media for his dog Bently, who has over 24,000 followers. Jonathan, you have my approval.

And then there is Nicholas, the father of my two bright and beautiful grand-daughters, Jonah and Havah. He is a gifted musician who is smart enough to recognize that music is a pretty good hobby but in the real world, with real responsibilities, the Masters in Public Administration he completed in December will serve him and his family much better. Nick, you have my approval.

I say all that because I am so proud of you guys I could burst. Not because of your accomplishments, those are just icing on the cake, but simply because I love you. You have my approval. Follow your dreams and seek the incredible life that God has prepared for you. I also say this because your grandfather was equally proud of you as he was all of his grandchildren, and he wants you to know that.

Does it matter that we have our Dad’s approval? Of course it does. Is it the most important thing in the world? Not by a long shot. What really matters is that you come to know how much your heavenly father loves you.

When I was in junior high school Dad packed up the family and, following his career, moved us to Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Mark Twain. In our Presbyterian church, I think I may have learned more about Mark Twain than about Jesus. But one quote of Twain’s that I have always remembered is this, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-three, I was astonished at how much he had learned in nine years.”

Like a lot of things Mark Twain supposedly said, he probably didn’t say that. His father died when he was eleven, so there really is no way to work out the math. But that does not change the truth of the statement. And I am happy to say, that after I came to my senses, like the Prodigal Son, Dad acted like the father in that story, running to meet me on the path of my return. We became very good friends.

Dad was a man of faith. He might not have agreed with that as faith was always a bit of a struggle for him. But struggle isn’t all bad. Remember, the name Israel means “struggles with God.” If you aren’t struggling with God at least a little, you might not be paying attention.

Dad was a believer but in that old-school, Calvinist Presbyterian way where grace means being part of the elect, and being part of the elect comes with just a hint of pride, but since pride is a sin, that makes you feel a little guilty — so you don’t talk about this stuff very much. And as a hedge against any misunderstandings about grace, you work your tail off to earn God’s favor.

Today, I am certain he knows that admission to heaven has absoutely nothing to do with how hard you work to earn God’s approval, but has everything to do with the gift of salvation you can receive through what Jesus did for all of us on the cross.

To quote my favorite agnostic, Mark Twain, again, “Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out.” Dad loved dogs. I’m pretty sure that he would do anything necessary to get to heaven
if you told him there were dogs in heaven. And tomatoes…
And women.

I don’t mean anything untoward by that, he was a faithful husband, but he was, at least in his last few years, a bit of a flirt.

I have to tell this story that occurred at the funeral in January. We were toward the end of the service when a couple of older women walked in. I was on the front row, so I missed exactly what happened, but piecing together the story from others in the room, it went something like this.

There was music on the loudspeakers as they came in— a hymn that Dad was fond of sung by Randy Travis, I think. As they came into the sanctuarly, one of the ladies, lets call her Mabel, said to her friend in fairly loud voice, “Gladys this music is awful. I sure hope it gets better.”
They walked to the center aisle, and as they were headed toward the front, they continued their oblivious conversation, using their “outside voices.” I think Gladys was a little hard of hearing.
“Gladys, do you want to sit down front? You know it’ll get pretty loud once they start.”
They settled on about the third row. Once they sat down, still chatting with each other, it suddenly dawned on them. Not fifteen feet away was Dad’s open casket in all of its funereal glory.
Mabel blurted out, “Oh my God, Gladys, I think this is a funeral!”
They jumped up and, with great embarassment, scurried back up the center aisle toward the door. The funeral director’s wife, Carla, met them at the back of the sanctuary and asked, “May I help you ladies?”
Mabel, obviously a little flustered, said, “We’re here for the singin’.”
Carla, said, “I’m sorry but that was last night.”
Mabel then turned a little defensive and said, “No, the newspaper said it was Saturday evening.”
After Carla politely pointed out that this was Sunday evening, the ladies made their exit.

I still think the best way for that story to end would have been for Dad to sit up in the casket and say, “Ladies, we’re about done here, but if you can hang around for a little while after, I’d be happy to chat.”
He was a charming guy.

Dad married and buried two beautiful women. He was married to my mother, Mary, the yellow rose of Longview, Texas, for 50 years until she passed away. He was married to my stepmother Lois for 15 years before she passed away. He was 89 at the time and if he had his way he would have married again. I think he had a gift.

His gift wasn’t being a titan of business or making a lot of money, although he was very successful in his career, retired early and he almost made it to 93 years old before the money ran out, so he did something right. He wasn’t a great orator. He would rather have a root canal than get up in front of a crowd and speak.

Although I was blind to this when I was growing up, and he would likely deny it as well, he had the gift of mercy. He had good helpings of the others: service, leadership, kindness, encouragement, etc. But I think mercy was his big one.

He taught me a lot of things. How to bait a hook. How to throw and catch a baseball. How to shoot. How to clean a fish and dress a squirrel. I’ve never been any good at those things, but that’s not his fault. He aslo taught me how to mop a floor the way they do it in the Navy, though I am not very good at that either.

But the biggest lessons I believe I learned from him came through watching him as both of his wives suffered from disabling and terminal illnesses in their last years and months.

My mother, Nana, developed emphysema and for the last decade of her life dealt with all of the trials that brings. But she did not have to deal with it alone. Upon retirement, once they settled in North Georgia, their plan had been to relax and to travel. Nana’s illness took away both parts of that dream. Ever the engineer, he was always tinkering and coming up with ways to improve her oxygen intake, and make her equipment more portable. That was 20 years before the advent of the portable oxygen equipment available today. Those were not easy times for them. He confessed to me that he simply did not feel up to the job, but in the end, he was faithful to her, to God, and to himself. He remained at her side and was her primary caretaker until the end. He persevered.

Later when he married Lois, who had battled cancer three times—and won— before they met, he was able to realize the dream of travel with her, at least for a while. Their 15 year marriage was a beautiful testimony to the way God, as it says in Psalm 30, “turns mourning into dancing.” But we all know this life is never without struggle. When Lois was stricken with cancer for the fourth time, he was her primary caretaker for three challenging years as she fought a valiant fight and then passed away.

So even though he was never outspoken about his faith, I learned so much about God, from watching him minister to those two wonderful women. All of us were able to see Dad’s gift of mercy on full display with Nana and with Lois. It was a beautiful. It was the embodiment of Jesus words in Luke 6:36, “Be merciful even as your Father is merciful.”

At 92 you could say he died of old age. Of course as he put it, old age isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and if anyone ever asks, 92 is the new… well, its the new 92.

Even before Lois died, he was beginning to show signs of dementia though we didn’t know enough to recognize it at the time. He exhibited behaviors that were completely out of character for the man we called Dan-Dan.

One of those behaviors was a fascination with get rich schemes, scams and of all things, the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes. Anyone could call him up on the phone and tell him they had a brand new Mercedes and a check for a million dollars if he would give them a $400 handling fee and he would fall for it. We did not know that until way after the fact, but scammers cleaned him out—due in part to a little gullibility, but also to his trusting and generous heart.

If you want to watch a movie that tells a similar story, watch the movie Nebraska on Netflix, where Bruce Dern’s character starts to walk all the way across Nebraska to the Publisher’s Clearing House office because nobody will take him. But he got that letter, right? And he may already have won 10 million dollars.

I say all that to highlight the problem of Alzheimer’s and dementia and why we have asked that anyone who wishes to memorialize my Dad, do so with a gift to the BrightFocus Foundation at Brightfocus.org. Dementia comes on even before you or other people around you know it and it is as evil a disease as cancer. There are aspects to it that—when we retell them sound almost humorous—but in the moment it is very painful.

In some ways we all suffer a kind of dementia. It is analagous to the problem Paul describe in Romans 7 when he said “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it… there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. What a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Paul answers that question and elaborates in chapter 8: “So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.”

For Dad that war is over.

When it became obvious that Dad did not need to be living by himself, Nikki and I offered him a choice of living with me or with her. After months of wrestling with it, and some arm twisting by my sister and brohter-in-law, Nikki and Montie Ray, he chose to live with them. Oklahoma just seemed to him like it was on the other side of the planet.

It was for the best though, because I don’t believe I could ever have done the extraordinary work that Nikki and Montie Ray did in these past couple of years. Caring for someone at the end of his life may be the hardest work anyone is ever called to do. All of the merciful care that Dad gave Nana and Lois was repaid to him in kind. A hundred-fold.

To Nikki, to Montie Ray, and all of their beautiful kids, grandkids, cousins, in-laws and outlaws who were there for Dad in his last days, he says thank you, and so do I. And for all of you whose prayers supported him in his last days and months, We owe all of you an eternal debt of gratitude.

So whether you knew him as Dick, Dick, Jr. or Dan-Dan, may God richly bless you and your memory of him.

Locked Out of Heaven?

Posted on November 12, 2018 by skipmckinstry

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Temptation. From the series, End of the Desert, by Skip McKinstry.

[Written originally as part of the curriculum for a class on divorce recovery at Crossings Community Church in Oklahoma City, this is addressed primarily to divorced individuals wrestling with the issue of sexuality. But the ideas also apply to those who have been sexually active without the benefit of marriage, and probably it applies to those who have just thought about sex. So if you find yourself in any of those categories, I hope this essay helps. It is rated “R,” though the culture would likely give it a “G.” But we are dealing with what should be an adult subject. It is a struggle that all of us face and one that we must learn to talk about with the deepest of respect for each other and the deepest reverence for God’s intent.]

“Haven’t you read the Scriptures?” Jesus replied. “They record that from the beginning ‘ God made them male and female.’ And he said, ‘This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.’” (Matthew 19:4-5)

“Locked Out Of Heaven” (Bruno Mars)

(Click the title for the official Warner Brothers video.)

Never had much faith in love or miracles

Never wanna put my heart on the line

But swimming in your water is something spiritual

I’m born again every time you spend the night

‘Cause your sex takes me to paradise

Yeah, your sex takes me to paradise

And it show, oh, oh, oh, ohs, yeah, yeah, yeah

‘Cause you make me feel like I’ve been locked out of heaven

For too long, for too long

Yeah, you make me feel like I’ve been locked out of heaven

For too long, for too long

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Ooh!

Oh, yeah, yeah,

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Ooh!

You bring me to my knees, you make me testify

You can make a sinner change his ways

Open up your gates ‘cause I can’t wait to see the light

And right there is where I wanna stay. (1)

(Lyrics abbreviated)

Then sprinkle in a few more Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Ooh!’s just for good measure.

115 million people watched Bruno Mars perform his hit song at the Super Bowl 48 halftime show in 2014. At the time it was the most watched halftime show in history. (Only Katy Perry in 2015 and Lady Gaga in 2017 have surpassed Mr. Mars.)

We’ve come a long way from marching bands forming an image of the school logo at the fifty yard line. It is almost cliche to talk about football as a religion, but look at the language in Mars’ lyrics: Born again? Paradise? Love? Miracles? Testify? Make a sinner change his ways? See the Light? If you didn’t know better you might think this is a worship song being played at a Hillsong venue or perhaps at an old-time tent revival. Can I get a witness?

But the song isn’t about football. It is about, well, you probably can figure it out.

Whether your “first time” was in the back seat of a car with the windows fogged over or—more appropriately—on your honeymoon, there is at least one thing you know about sex: it feels good. No, it feels very good. Even when it was bad it was good—good enough to try again. And again. And again. And again. Don’t stop!

…Time out! Before this gets completely out of hand. The bottom line is this. We like it. Although every instance did not necessarily transport us to the pinnacle of erotic bliss, we cannot un-ring the bell.

If you’re like the rest of the culture and are over the age of 17 or 18, you’ve “had sex.” (At least that’s true for close to half of you.) Even if you waited for matrimony, if you’ve been married you’ve “had sex,” and the bell continues to ring in your ears. Sadly, that ringing in the ears does not go away just because you have been divorced. The object of our desire may be gone, but the desire remains and acts as a persistent and annoying reminder of our incompleteness. But like it or not we already know that, as a single Christian, sex is out of bounds. We know that is true, but we generally don’t like it. It hurts. Chastity (a word that sounds like it was coined by Queen Victoria) is way too difficult.

These are typical of the questions that come to mind:

Is sex bad?

Why do I feel like a junkie going through withdrawals?

What is sex really for anyway?

Why do I have these desires when a sexual relationship isn’t an option?

This is all well and good, but what I want to know is, what can I do with my girlfriend?

Am I really locked out of heaven?

Does God think sex is bad?

Let’s get the “Is sex bad?” question out of the way immediately. Here are a few verses from the Song of Solomon:

Kiss me and kiss me again,

for your love is sweeter than wine. (1:2)

My lover is mine, and I am his.

He browses among the lillies,

Before the dawn breezes blow

and the night shadows flee. (2:16,17)

You are beautiful, my darling,

beautiful beyond words.

Your eyes are like doves

behind your veil.

Your hair falls in waves,

like a flock of goats winding down the slopes of Gilead.

Your teeth are as white as sheep,

recently shorn and freshly washed.

Your smile is flawless,

each tooth matched with its twin.

Your lips are like scarlet ribbon;

your mouth is inviting.

Your cheeks are like rosy pomegranates

behind your veil.

Your neck is as beautiful as the tower of David,

jeweled with the shields of a thousand heroes.

Your breasts are like two fawns,

twin fawns of a gazelle grazing among the lilies.

Before the dawn breezes blow

and the night shadows flee,

I will hurry to the mountain of myrrh

and to the hill of frankincense.

You are altogether beautiful, my darling,

beautiful in every way. (4: 1-7)

You are my private garden, my treasure, my bride,

a secluded spring, a hidden fountain.

Your thighs shelter a paradise of pomegranates

with rare spices—

henna with nard,

nard and saffron,

fragrant calamus and cinnamon,

with all the trees of frankincense, myrrh, and aloes,

and every other lovely spice.

You are a garden fountain,

a well of fresh water

streaming down from Lebanon’s mountains.

Awake, north wind!

Rise up, south wind!

Blow on my garden

and spread its fragrance all around.

Come into your garden, my love;

taste its finest fruits. (4:12-16)

Somewhere in the middle of reading the Song of Songs (Right after you blurt out something like “I had no idea this was in the Bible!) your heartbeat starts to quicken and you realize that Bruno Mars may not know the half of it. He has a clue; as it turns out, sex itself is a clue, but unless he is singing about his marriage—and he is not married though he is in an unusually long-term relationship by celebrity standards—he is missing the point, regardless of how much fun it is.

Between “Locked out of Heaven” and the “Song of Songs” is a nearly infinite distance, even though at first blush it does not feel like it. Lauren Winner sums up the difference this way, “Indeed, one can say that in Christianity’s vocabulary the only real sex is the sex that happens in a marriage; the faux sex that goes on outside marriage is not really sex at all. The physical coming together that happens between two people who are not married is only a distorted imitation of sex, as Walt Disney’s Wilderness Lodge Resort is only a simulation of real wilderness. The danger is that when we spend too much time in the simulations, we lose the capacity to distinguish between the ersatz and the real.” (2)

Whatever your theological, political, hermeneutical, metaphorical interpretation of the Song of Songs may be, there is no mistaking the fact that this is a story of deeply romantic love and the physical expression of that love. And it is right there in God’s Holy Book. (The good Reverend Shaw Moore must be devastatingly scandalized.) One cannot read the Song of Songs and come away thinking that God hates sex.

Quite the contrary, He invented it.

So why do I feel like a junkie going through withdrawals?

The short answer is, because you are a junkie going through withdrawals. And believe it or not, that is exactly the way God designed you. Recent neuro-scientific research has given us insight into the chemistry and wiring of the brain and their impact on human sexuality. Sexual activity, real or imagined, lights up several parts of the brain, including an area known as the nucleus accumbens, resulting in increased production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter which activates the brain’s reward centers leading to a euphoric sense of well being. The result is the development of new memory pathways in the hippocampus and the amygdala and a desire to repeat the activity that led to the reward. (3) In a very real sense, the human brain is saying, “you might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.” In fact, according to Dr. Gert Holstege, a neuroscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands has explained that, during an orgasm, the brain looks 95% the same as the brain of a person taking heroin. (4)

Another significant point to make regarding the brain and human sexuality is the fact that certain parts of the brain seem to suspend activity during sex. Apparently, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain behind the left eye that functions as the seat of reason and behavioral control, goes dormant during arousal. (5) In other words, sex suspends reason, a perfectly acceptable outcome for a married couple committed to each other for life, but for the couple who is still not certain that they have found “the one,” that suspension of reason can be a big problem. A challenged ability to reason, coupled (pun intended) with the ferociously addictive nature of sexual activity can lead to bad choices. Or, as Woody Allen (a man not well-known for his wise choices) put it, paraphrasing Groucho Marx, “Love goes out the door when sex comes innuendo.” When it comes to making the choice of someone to spend the rest of one’s life with, it is clear that sexual activity can short-circuit our ability to make that decision cautiously and prayerfully and wisely.

Additionally, two significant hormones are released as a result of sexual activity, oxytocin and vasopressin. In women, the presence of oxytocin stimulated by breastfeeding assists in developing the bond between baby and child. Sexual stimulation also increases the production of oxytocin in women again resulting in a bonding experience with her mate. While men also experience an increase in the production of oxytocin during stimulation, its role is somewhat different. The bonding chemical released in the male brain during sex is vasopressin. “There is also some indication that vasopressin may be involved in protecting the mate and becoming aggressive toward other males.”(6)

All this talk of euphoria, rewards, suspended reason, bonding and especially addiction through brain chemistry, may sound negative at first. But when you think about it, this really just means that God has designed us in such a way that our sexuality, when exercised according to God’s wise plan can make that euphoria a very, very good thing. Some research has even suggested that sex can increase the production of brain cells. The brain rewards and the hormones of bonding can lead to a healthy attachment to our mate, and even the suspension of reason can lead to intimacy beyond mere intellectual agreement. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” (Blaise Pascal)

This is, to quote The Fabulous Thunderbirds, “powerful stuff.” Too powerful to be mishandled. As an additional insight, it is speculated that the Hebrew words for “fruitful” and “multiply” as in “be fruitful and multiply” are both rooted in the word “ur,” which aside from being Abraham’s original neighborhood in Chaldea, also means “flame.” This is one of those flames that, as the old story goes, in the fireplace it will keep you warm. But out of the fireplace, it can burn down the whole house.

Promise me, O women of Jerusalem,

not to awaken love until the time is right.

(Song of Solomon 2:7, repeated at 3:5 and again at 8:4)

And if you think that kind of admonition is only for women, consider this from Proverbs 5 (NLT):

Drink water from your own well—

share your love only with your wife.

Why spill the water of your springs in the streets,

having sex with just anyone?

You should reserve it for yourselves.

Never share it with strangers.

Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you.

Rejoice in the wife of your youth.

She is a loving deer, a graceful doe.

Let her breasts satisfy you always.

May you always be captivated by her love.

Okay, we get it, sex is good. (Duh.) But what in the world is it really for?

While defending the inclusion of the Song of Songs in the canon, one ancient Jewish rabbi put it this way, “For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” (7) We may feel the rabbi’s comment is a little over the top. But maybe not.

We know that Adam and Eve’s sexual relationship had God’s blessing. If fact, he pretty much told them to do it right there in the first chapter of the Bible. “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it.” (Genesis 1:29) Sexuality was part of God’s plan. For one thing, human sexuality was a way for the world to become populated with more humans with whom God could share his love and who could, because they are made in God’s image, love each other. Is God great, or what? He could have simply created more humans out of the mud, but instead, chose to let us in on the fun.

The sexual relationship in marriage is also a real-life metaphor for the self-less giving that characterizes God’s love for us and provides a flesh and blood way for us to emulate him. And finally, it is intended to aid in the creation of a powerful bond between a man and a woman. Recall how Jesus affirmed the godly origin of human sexuality: “Haven’t you read the Scriptures? They record that from the beginning ‘God made them male and female.’And he said, ‘This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.’” (Matthew 19:4-5) He didn’t say that a man leaves his father and mother and just kinda hangs out with his wife for the rest of their lives. He said the two are “joined… united into one.” The King James says, “they twain shall be one flesh.”

We were not created for isolation. We were created for to be in intimate relationship—with God and with others. Isolation is precisely what God was talking about when he declared, “It is not good for man to be alone.”(Genesis 2:18) Usually translated as “man” it may be easier to understand if we look at the more literal meaning of the Hebrew word “ha-adam” — humankind. Out of the oneness of humanity seen in the first Adam, God finished the imprinting of his image on human beings when he “split the Adam,” so to speak, taking Eve out of ha-adam’s side, making them male and female (Genesis 1:27).

From that moment on, as described by psychologist Larry Crabb, they found their genuine identity in the relational truth of their being (Crabb, 2013), first in each individual’s relationship with God, and further, in their love relationship with each other. God, in his eternal desire to share joy with his creatures invented human sexuality. He invented sexual intercourse when he divided humanity (Adam) into two parts, male and female, and provided for the physical, psychological and spiritual connection that can, in the right context (and we do know what that context is), provide a depth of intimacy and joy that strengthens the bond between two people and with God himself.

Adding it up, we have a profound reflection of the Trinity of God himself, in whom, as Francis Schaeffer reminds us, “The Persons of the Trinity communicated with each other and loved each other, before the creation of the world.”(8) Or as Crabb further puts it: “If the eternal is relational because God is a timeless community of three persons in heaven, and if the temporal consists centrally of male and female persons relating on earth in community, then could it be that men and women relating together in this world are intended to provide a glimpse of the relational life of the Trinity?” (9)

But it is all about context. There really is a context for expressing the gift of human sexuality—marriage. One man, one woman, committed to the best of their ability and with God’s help, for life.

You are my private garden, my treasure, my bride,

a secluded spring, a hidden fountain. (Song of Solomon 4:12)

Why do I have these desires when a sexual relationship isn’t an option?

So now we have a picture of at least some of God’s intentions for human sexuality—procreation, pleasure, joy, bonding and a reflection of God himself in the Trinity. That’s pretty cool for Adam and Eve and all the married couples I know, but I’m divorced and that sort of sexual relationship—if I am true to God’s intent for my life—remains somewhere, if it exists at all, over the horizon. It just doesn’t seem fair that I would have the same desires when I’m single.

While those desires are indeed about “sex,” especially for those who have been married, we need to consider that they are about something else, too. Look back at Adam and Eve in the Garden before the Fall, still joyously wearing nothing but their birthday suits. Genesis 2:25 says, “Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame.” “Naked,” as we generally understand it, is a curious term to be used at that point in Scripture. Why? Because clothing had not even been invented. In fact, clothing was unnecessary given that God had created human beings and the perfect environment for them to dwell in. It was not until the Fall, when Adam and Eve sinned and had something to hide that clothing showed up, first as they tried the impossible, to cover themselves from God’s eyes, and later as God, replacing their feeble efforts, provides animal skins, a foreshadowing Christ’s sacrifice for our sin. So since they had not yet sinned, their nakedness was not merely the state of being unclothed. It was completely bare, physically, emotionally and spiritually unhidden. They had nothing to hide, which is why they were unashamed. We are only ashamed when we have something to hide or we feel we have some sort of shortcoming. Eve never had to ask Adam if this dress made her butt look big. And Adam never had to make up some lame response to avoid conflict.

This nakedness is prerequisite to intimacy, to knowing and being known by the other. They knew each other fully because there were no barriers. Total openness. Total honesty. The perfect environment for love and genuine intimacy with each other and with, as it says in the Book of Common Prayer, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden.” And to quote Bob Dylan, they “had no secrets to conceal.” So they lived happily ever after. Forever and ever, amen.

Oh wait…

Enter the serpent. Hey, baby, wanna be like God? Just one taste of this apple and you’ll be just like him. See how beautiful it is? Did he really say you shouldn’t eat it? Go ahead, try it. Why should he be the only one to know good and evil? Seriously, just one bite. And give some to that guy with the missing rib who’s standing there not saying anything.

We know how that turned out, don’t we? They tried to play God and wound up losing their relationship with him. Even after the Fall, God did not take away their sexuality; he still wanted grandchildren (so to speak). Sexual desire remained. But the result of the Fall was estrangement with God and with each other. One aspect of that estrangement was an increased difficulty with intimacy, which we have all inherited.

Because of her disobedience, God said to Eve, “you will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16, NLT) Controlling and ruling indicate the presence of some serious trust issues. They had both sinned and therefore could not trust each other. They couldn’t really even trust themselves. Yielding to temptation had introduced distrust into their relationship and true intimacy requires trust. Before the Fall they were “naked and not ashamed.” Now they had something to hide. This inclination is the opposite of intimacy, yet the desire for intimacy does not go away. “The need for intimacy, to be known and to know, to be close, affirmed, loved; all are human needs. The need for intimacy requires that we understand who we are and share that with those we long to be known by. As we become more intimate, the other speaks into us things about ourselves that we could not possibly know from the inside. We allow the one we are intimate with to discover us in ways we could not do on our own, and we do so with them. It is a process that develops and deepens over time. We know ourselves more fully because we are known more fully.”(10)

Now that sin has entered the picture, intimacy becomes more difficult. We all have things we think we must hide and for that reason we do not fully know and are not fully known. We may even think that sex is the answer to that problem, but many of us have learned the hard way that the kind of nakedness out of which true intimacy can flourish, is more than skin deep. Dawn Eden, author of The Thrill of the Chaste, describes it this way, “A supreme irony…is that the longer you develop your relationship while keeping your clothes on, the more naked you feel.” (11)

It is no accident that the King James language for “have sexual relations” is “to know.” That does not mean that sex is a shortcut to intimacy, it is the consummation of an already intimate relationship and in the context of a godly marriage it is an enhancement of that intimacy. We still have these desires because, properly understood, they are a signpost, they point to our need for genuine intimacy, first with God and then with others, in Christ. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (St. Augustine)

“This is all well and good, but what I want to know is, what can I do with my girlfriend?”(12)

While the famous “True Love Waits” campaign made for a nice slogan, statistically it turned out to be a bit of a failure. “The efficacy of the program has been questioned based on a 2003 study showing that 6 out of 10 college students who had taken the pledge had broken it, and of the 40% who identified themselves as abstaining from intercourse, 55% acknowledged having participated in oral sex.” (13) (For the record, contrary to a popular cultural assertion —at least an assertion made too often I the back seat of a car — oral sex is sex. Appropriate in marriage, but nowhere else.) Slogans and pledges are not always effective. Gritting your teeth and taking cold showers are insufficient.

If absence makes the heart grow fonder in a relationship, abstinence sometimes causes an unhealthy focus on the very thing we are abstaining from. Try this exercise: Repeat this to yourself for the next 10 seconds: “I will not think about blue elephants. I will not think about blue elephants.” Now, what are you thinking about? Blue elephants, of course. We recognize that we are not talking to teenagers who are trying to decide if they should “go all the way.” We are adults and we know what we are missing.

And despite the “high view” of human sexuality presented here, we are not trying to say that if you wait you’ll have better sex when you’re married, that it will automatically become the land of milk and honey. If you wait, the odds of marrying someone with whom you are ultimately compatible are increased, largely because you will be taking the time to become truly intimate, truly naked before taking your clothes off and letting the hormones have their way with your heart. And we can say that with that kind of openness and honesty in—and perhaps more importantly, out of the bedroom—it is more likely that you will be able to develop the kind of intimate sexual relationship God intends. But it will still take work—pleasant and very rewarding work—but work, nonetheless.

But that is later. Maybe. What about today?

Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is helpful. Everything is permissible for me, but I will not allow anything to control me. (1 Corinthians 6:12, ISV) Yikes! Everything is permissible for me? That is what it says. By the grace of God through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, you are forgiven for every sin you have ever committed and every sin you ever will commit. But you were bought with a price, and as Paul goes on to say, “Therefore, honor God with your bodies.” (1 Cor. 6:20)

Great. Now God has become a killjoy again. Wrong. He is giving us guidance that will enhance our joy, not kill it. In a godly marriage, sex is one of the ways you can honor God with your body. Paul was merely making it clear that you have a choice between healthy, God-honoring sexuality and unhealthy, soul and spirit damaging sexuality.

Let’s make the comparison even more clear in this chart: (14)

So as you prayerfully make your choices and draw your boundaries, perhaps that list can help you discern the matter more clearly. Will my actions demonstrate caring or using? Does my activity lead toward intimacy or toward compulsive behavior? And so on. These are not laws. We have been delivered from that through Christ. But they can be help us decide what is helpful, and avoid those things that would negatively control us.

While we are on the subject of “What can I do?,” we may as well bring up one of the blue elephants in the room, the subject of [whispered] masturbation. Okay, admit it, you wanted to ask but were afraid to. An honest reading will not find it directly addressed in scripture. You can find numerous discussions on the Internet—no, not those discussions—by well-meaning and sincere Christians. And you will find as many opinions as people who are willing to give their opinion. Some people endorse the practice for what they consider to be good reasons. Other people condemn the practice for what they consider to be good reasons. But that does not mean that the answer is a toin-coss.

Again, we remember as Paul has told us, “Everything is permissible, but not everything is helpful.” Since it is not our place to impose a new “Law” it is up to you and your conscience, prayerfully guided by the Holy Spirit to make the call. Perhaps the chart that compares healthy sexuality and unhealthy sexuality will be of some value. Should your understanding place the practice squarely within the healthy column, as Paul put it regarding eating certain foods or drinking wine, “Each should be fully convinced in their own mind.” (Romans 14:6) As with any other human activity, our first (and perhaps last) question should be, “Does it glorify the Lord?” As for the related question of pornography, that one is much easier to answer. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which it falls in the “healthy” column. Keep in mind the last phrase of 1Corinthians 6:12, “I will not allow anything to control me,” and then re-read the section on brain chemistry above.

C. S. Lewis, in his book, The Four Loves, describes the difference between positive sexual desire (eros) and negative sexual desire (lust) in this way: “Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved. The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. … Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.(15)

Lust turns human beings into consumables; once consumed, they are discarded. That may happen immediately following a “one-night stand” or it might occur twenty years into a marriage. One partner may simply wake up one morning and decide that they no longer love the other. Perhaps that is an indication that either it was never about love, or at some point what might have been love had been mis-directed, turned into mere lust and having consumed all they thought was available, is ready to move on. Of course we probably would not describe it that way. Instead we would simply lament, with B.B. King, “the thrill is gone,” a distinct echo of Lewis’ description of sensory pleasure as, “something that occurs within one’s own body.” If what we think of as love is merely a feeling, something that originates within our own body, it will fade and eventually die. Isolation will be the ultimate result, regardless of how many “partners” we may go through.

It is certainly ironic that acting out of lust leads precisely in the opposite direction of what we truly desire. Why does God want to keep us from that which we think we desire? From John Cloud and Henry Townsend, Boundaries in Dating: “…notice the command not to eat from a certain tree (a command that presents the opportunity to celebrate God’s provision by honoring His prohibition [Gen. 2: 16– 17]) is immediately followed by God’s observation that “it is not good that the man should be alone,” and by His declared intent to make further provision for Adam, “I will make him a helper fit for him” (v.18). Notice two things about this strange sequence of warning then blessing. First, God followed His prohibition by increasing His provision. God created Eve so that the man and woman could dance together in the rhythm of His love and so put His relational glory on display. He provided everything we needed to share in the joy of the Trinity’s party.

As Lewis insightfully wrote, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” We need to be clear: God’s prohibitions exist to safeguard the enjoyment of His provisions. God told Adam what not to do so that he and his soon-to-arrive wife would enjoy all that they could do. (16)

So what can you do with your girlfriend, or boyfriend?

Lauren Winner, out of her own experience with her fiancée Griff, describes, not so much the answer, but a way to help find that answer: Griff’s friend Greg, a campus pastor at the University of Virginia, sized up the situation and gave us this piece of guidance:

“Don’t do anything sexual that you wouldn’t be comfortable doing on the steps of the Rotunda.” (This was not just practical instruction, but also wisdom: sex has a public dimension and a private dimension. Christians gain access to the private side at a wedding. The question for unmarried couples is not How far can we go? but How do we maintain the integrity of our sexual relationship, which at this point is only public?) (17)

Winner goes on:

“The point is not that you should visit Charlottesville, kiss your sweetie on the steps of the Rotunda, and draw your line there. Rather the point is to discern, with your community, what behaviors can protect the body and God’s created sexual intent.” (18)

Promise me, O women of Jerusalem, not to awaken love until the time is right.

Am I really locked out of heaven?

In the Italian movie, “Il Postino,” a simple-minded postman named Mario in a small Italian coastal village is befriended by the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Mario asks Neruda to teach him how write poetry for the beautiful, but aloof, Beatrice, with whom Mario is smitten. In one of the more memorable scenes from the movie, the two men are sitting on the beach and the poet is helping Mario understand the concept of metaphor. In a moment of epiphany, Mario pronounces, “Maybe everything is a metaphor for something else!”

Millions of lines of poetry and literature have been written with symbolic and metaphorical reference to the romantic, emotional, spiritual and physical love between a man and a woman. From Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ to Robert Burns’, “Your love is like a red, red rose” to the Beatles’ “Happiness is a warm gun,” and Miley Cyrus’, “I came in like a wrecking ball,” poets have searched for the perfect metaphor to describe their love and what that love brings out in them. Sometimes they have succeeded sublimely and sometimes…not so much.

Curiously, it turns out that human sexuality, even the very act of intercourse itself, while it has a practical purpose, is itself a metaphor of the most sublime love of all, the love of Christ for his church, for us. Paul, echoing Genesis and Jesus, takes this a step further and reveals something of ultimate significance about all this: As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. (Ephesians 5:31-32) A great mystery, indeed. So the Song of Songs really is about sex. And it is also about much, much more.

Just in case this talk about Jesus and sex and his bride makes you a little nervous, you are not alone. In an essay entitled, “Is There Sex in Heaven,” Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, compares the title question to a child asking, “Can you eat candy during sex?” “… a funny question only from the adult’s point of view. Candy is one of children’s greatest pleasures; how can they conceive a pleasure so intense that it renders candy irrelevant?”(19) The sexual relationship between married lovers is, as stated before, a flesh and blood, real-life metaphor, a wonderful experience. But when seen as a foretaste of the depth of what Kreeft calls “the delights of spiritual intercourse with God,” it pales in comparison. It is a gift of God, but it is intended not as an end in itself, its purpose is to point us toward God himself. (20)

But sex is not the only foretaste we have of that divine connection with God. Prayer, reading scripture, service to others, close friendships, meditation and reflection on God’s word or his creation, are all among what is likely an endless list of ways we can see our vital connection with God. For the single person, our goal is not that we should become married in order to have that foretaste of heaven found in the marital bed. That would really be setting our sights too low. (Even in marriage we are called beyond that.) Instead, we ought to use our time of singleness to more fully seek God himself, recognizing that even those things we feel deprived of can be seen as reminders of our incompleteness apart from him, challenging us to do what we can to move closer into intimacy with him, recognizing that intimacy comes only as a gift from him, not from our works.

During this time, it might be of some help to discover a few things about ourselves as individuals and how we have each been uniquely created to experience God in particular ways. Gary Thomas, in his book Sacred Pathways, lists a number of ways that individuals approach God, based in their own God-given personality. Naturalists find their closest experience of God in the outdoors. Traditionalists love and experience God through ritual, liturgy and symbol. Intellectuals approach God through their mind and study. Contemplatives connect with God through meditation and adoration. There are others and he includes a quiz that can help you identify your own style. That kind of book may be of help.

Spiritual Formation programs at your church—the Apprentice Series and community groups, or courses such as DivorceCare, Divorce Recovery, Celebrate Recovery, and others can be an aid to you in growing your understanding and relationship with God. They all exist to help you connect with increasing depth with God and with others. The literature of spiritual discipline has many exercises you can do. Brennan Manning, for example, has an exercise that he suggests you do for thirty days. It is very simple and can be profoundly life changing. Simply close your eyes and pray, “Abba, I belong to you.” at least once a day. (20) As Manning would have put it, God will be ecstatic that you have turned your focus toward him, however briefly.

In many ways human sexuality remains a mystery. But that is not a bad thing. In the right context it provides us with something to explore, a source of seemingly endless joy. Even as a single person, some reflection on the topic gives us insight into ourselves and more importantly into the person of God, the author of endless joy and the person we, in our heart of hearts, most desire to know and be known by. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13, 9-12) And that really will be worth the wait.

A personal addendum:

For some reason I feel like it is a good idea to practice what I preach. Today I am happily engaged to a godly, intelligent, funny, beautiful, woman. We have known each other for 8 years, been close friends for a good part of that, and when we get married this August we will have dated for almost two years. When we started dating, we immediately took the possibility of premarital sex off the table. This is not because we aren’t attracted to each other, we are. A lot. But having done things the wrong way before, we decided to trust God and wait.

What have we learned? Most marriage counselors will tell you that sexual intimacy is only a part of true intimacy. True intimacy includes what happens in the bedroom, but is nurtured and grown outside the bedroom. Celebrate the time before marriage by developing true intimacy. I can honestly say that I have now experienced a level of genuine intimacy with my beloved that I did not really even know existed before. It is not to be confused with the infatuation phase. Infatuation fades. Intimacy of this sort is the real deal. It is a foretaste of the foretaste of heaven. Instead of being locked out of heaven, we are learning how we can become trusted with the keys.

1 Locked Out of Heaven, Bruno Mars, Writer(s): Peter Gene Hernandez, Copyright: Thou Art The Hunger, Roc Nation Music, Music Famamanem, Toy Plane Music, Northside Independent Music Publishing LLC, BMG Gold Songs, Universal Music Corp., Mars Force Music, Bughouse

2 Winner, Lauren F. (2006-07-01). Real Sex (Kindle Locations 475-478). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

3 Miller, Max. (2010-09-15) Braingasm: Sex and Your Synapses. (http://bigthink.com/going-mental/braingasm-sexand-your-synapses)

4 Quoted in Travis, John. There’s no faking it. Science News, Vol. 164, Issue 22.

5 Nuzzo, Regina. (2008-2-11) Science of the Orgasm. Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-orgasm11feb11,0,4954575,full.story)

6 Struthers, Wm. M., Wired for Intimacy. p. 105, Inter-Varsity Press, 2009.

7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Songs

8 Schaeffer, Francis A. Francis Schaeffer Trilogy. p. 288, Crossway Books, 1990

9 Crabb, Dr. Larry (2013-06-01). Fully Alive: A Biblical Vision of Gender That Frees Men and Women to Live Beyond Stereotypes (p. 30). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

10 Struthers, Wm. M., Wired for Intimacy. p. 43, Inter-Varsity Press, 2009.

11 Eden, Dawn. 2007-2-14) Father’s Day, National Review Online, (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219968/fathers-day/dawn-eden)

12 Winner, Lauren F. (2006-07-01). Real Sex (Kindle Location 1451). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Love_Waits

14 Modified from Struthers, p. 49, which was modified from Maltz & Maltz, The Porn Trap, p.182, Harper Collins,2008.

15 Lewis, C. S. (1971-09-29). The Four Loves (Harvest Book) (p. 94). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

16 Cloud, Henry; Townsend, John (2009-05-26). Boundaries in Dating: How Healthy Choices Grow Healthy Relationships (pp. 241-242). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

17 Winner, Lauren F. (2006-07-01). Real Sex (Kindle Locations 1464-1468). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

18 Winner, Lauren F. (2006-07-01). Real Sex (Kindle Locations 1484-1487). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

19 Kreeft, Peter. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven, Ignatius Press, 1990. (excerpted at http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/sex-in-heaven.htm)

20 Manning, Brennan. The Furious Longing of God. p. 57, David C. Cook, 2009.14

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore.

Posted on October 10, 2018 by skipmckinstry

pancakes for 311blog

In the winter of 1971, our little band of merry pranksters had travelled from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Little Rock to attend a concert. I have no idea what the concert was. As cliched proof that I am someone who officially lived through that era, there are a fair number of things that I simply don’t remember. But there are things that I do remember and this is one of them.

Ken, Ted, Tom, Erika and I stumbled into a 24-hour breakfast restaurant in North Little Rock the morning after on a bright, sunny day, made all the more bright because our eyes were not at all accustomed to light. We were the proverbial motley crew. Hippies. Refugees from a college life that afforded us too much privilege and required of us too little diligence, we thought of ourselves as somehow radical, but we were more like the hapless characters from…

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The Grace of A.D.D.: Reflections on a Dear Childhood Friend.

Posted on July 17, 2018 by skipmckinstry

String Theory #1, by the author, 2017.

I was eight or nine. 1960. Little Rock, Arkansas. My dad was moving into management in the world of manufacturing and we moved from the south side of Little Rock to a new subdivision on the west side. Our neighbors were doctors, business owners, and teachers, the Arkansas bourgeoisie if you will. They were all successful young families participating in that historic southern exodus of the late 50s and 60s—white flight. But that’s another topic altogether, which I have addressed here. Of course, I didn’t pay attention to the details. I just thought it was cool to live in a split-level house in a neighborhood with lots of kids.

Next door, lived a family with four kids—three boys and a baby girl. Their father was a surgeon. The oldest boy, Buddy, was my age. He and I and his brothers explored the “wild forests” surrounding the neighborhood, built tree houses, climbed on real houses under construction when the workers weren’t around, played Cowboys and Indians, re-enacted Revolutionary War, Civil War and World War I & II battles, and generally shared an idyllic childhood. Pretty typical of the time. Even when the weather kept us indoors we would turn the family room downstairs into a battlefield, playing Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” 45-rpm single on the record player over and over and over. “We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’ / There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago /We fired once more and they began a-runnin’ / On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. …they ran through the briars /And they ran through the brambles /And they ran through the bushes / Where the rabbits couldn’t go / They ran so fast / That the hounds couldn’t catch ‘em / On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.” And so on, ad infinitum. (My mother was truly a patient woman.) We were noble defenders of the New World, acting out the logical consequences of the Declaration of Independence.

It was the kind of kid friendship that we have all experienced. An intensity that could cause us both to erupt in uncontrollable laughter simply looking at each other. And the kind of intensity that could lead to inconsolable anger and sadness over a perceived slight, such as the time Buddy offended me—I have no idea how—and I wrote a long note which I threw from the car window in the general direction of his front yard one afternoon when my Mom was driving me somewhere. I don’t even know if he saw it or read it. Regardless, we reconciled at some point, forgetting petty differences.

I recall one afternoon, walking along a gravel road in the woods with Buddy, when we decided to race. In true “hare” fashion, I sprinted ahead, while he moved faster than the tortoise, but not rushing things. In a couple of minutes I would (“Squirrel!”) lose focus and wander off the road to inspect some unusual rock formation, or interesting tree or flower that presented itself to my field of vision—I had attention deficit disorder (ADD) before it was even a thing. Sure enough, Buddy would catch up and pass me, continuing at his measured pace. Once I got my breath back (I also had asthma) I’d sprint ahead again. We would repeat the process a few times until we both bored of the game. I remember clearly him saying to me, not as a childish taunt, just as a matter-of-fact, “I will always be able to run farther than you. My dad told me to keep a slow but steady pace to win.” His dad was a doctor, so who could argue? Besides, Buddy always won the distance race. It has been a continual battle for me to “go the distance.”

In 1961, as my dad changed jobs, my family moved several times, settling in Hannibal, Missouri, until close to the end of my senior year of high school when we returned to northwest Arkansas. In 1969 I started college at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. That was a pretty serious year of cultural upheaval, even in the slow-to-change South. I was attracted (or, perhaps, distracted) by “the Movement” and soon found myself far more interested in extracurricular life than school. True to Timothy Leary’s motto of the time, “I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out,” literally dropping out of school after three semesters.

Coincidentally, Buddy was also in Fayetteville. In fact, much to my envy, he became the lead guitarist in Fayetteville’s most popular and iconic rock and roll band. It seems that part of his “slow and steady” approach had enabled him to become a musician of some merit, while I struggled just to remember a few chords on the guitar. More than that, he was wise enough to recognize, despite his musical success, that long-term goals such as finishing college and cultivating a real career were important. By 1984 he had completed medical school and done a plastic surgery residency at Wake Forest.

I lost track of him after Fayetteville. I did manage with fits and starts through the years to complete a BA in philosophy. It wasn’t that I was stupid, I did manage to graduate cum laude. In 2006! I always lacked the kind of focus and consistency that lends itself to “worldly” success. However, in my mid-twenties I was mercifully rescued from trying to measure the worth of my life in terms of worldly success. I became a Christian. My worth is a gift from God. Even as a follower of Christ my life has continued to be just like the race between me and Buddy at 9 years old. In so many ways I have remained the hare, starting strong and fading, only to start strong and fade again, over and over. I became a graphic designer and worked successfully in advertising for most of my career. Thanks to the ever-present deadlines, it is kind of an adrenaline driven industry, and adrenaline is a neurotransmitter craved by people with ADD, so it worked out pretty well. Creative fields reward people for their distractibility, or as it is perhaps euphemistically described, non-linear thinking. And despite not being especially adept at the art of marriage, I do have four wonderful adult sons, a delightful daughter-in-law, and two beautiful granddaughters.

Buddy’s life has not been without struggle or tragedy. I knew that his parents divorced and in 1980, his father, who was also my doctor during the Fayetteville era, committed suicide. In preparation for a class I am facilitating at church on the value of autobiography in spiritual formation, I recently did a Google search to see what my childhood friend had been up to since those heady days in northwest Arkansas. He had become a cosmetic surgeon, settling eventually in toney Asheville, North Carolina, with a successful practice and was by all accounts very popular with his patients. He was still an active and accomplished musician, but had traded his rock and roll roots for something a bit more Appalachian, mastering the violin and the fiddle. He was an artist with a scalpel and on stringed instruments. Unsurprisingly, he had turned from childhood game playing to become a genuine Civil War re-enactor. He had married a beautiful woman who shared at least some of his passion for re-enactment as they regularly attended period balls and antebellum soireés. Though he had no children, it appears that slow and steady served him well.

Naturally, none of that detracted from my unfortunate envy of his success.

The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, in an essay entitled, “Learning to Live,” wrote the following: “A few years ago a man who was compiling a book entitled “Success” wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, but to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this, be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

I am not a drunk and am likely not a bastard nor a madman (depending on who you ask), but I have managed, through no great achievement on my part to avoid success in many areas of my life. ADD is the subject of a lot of jokes, and there are many who challenge its very existence as a psychological disorder. Certainly there is a tendency to over-diagnose and over-medicate those who are diagnosed. But I can say from personal experience that it is real and it can wreak varying degrees of havoc in the lives of those who suffer from it and in the lives of those around them. It can be poisonous to relationships. Focus comes and goes in fits and starts. Sometimes flashes of brilliance show up, but more often there is the frustration and self-doubt borne of not being able to stick with something until it is finished, because some infernal shiny object has created an unavoidable diversion. I wrestle with it on a daily basis, in a way similar to the way a person with dyslexia struggles to read. It is hard to call it a handicap, but it is a major annoyance. Still, too much focus on that is just me playing the victim card. (I’ve taught a class on overcoming victimhood, too.) Everyone has their own cross to bear.

In many ways, I am still that somewhat envious 9-year-old, unable to keep up with my measured and steady friend. I have also struggled with a degree of resentment toward God for the differences in our brain chemistry that led Buddy to his successes and me to a life that has been, not without pockets of success, but perhaps a little less than I might have hoped for. Yet I am slowly coming to understand how much I am loved by God unconditionally regardless of my shortcomings. For me not to see that is to remain deeply committed to works-righteousness—to trying to be good enough or succesful enough to please the God who loved me enough to die for me, even before I existed. Romans 8:28 is not a cliché to me. “…we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” All things.

On July 16, 2016, the Asheville, North Carolina police received a heartbreaking 911 emergency call from Buddy’s wife. Someone had shot him in the back of the head during what appeared to be a home invasion while she was upstairs asleep. Although the murder weapon was found in the bushes outside their house, the police did not have sufficient evidence to identify a killer. After the funeral, his wife moved to Memphis. On November 9, 2017, she was arrested for his murder and is now awaiting trial. I hope she is not guilty.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

And may Buddy rest in the arms of the Savior.

Finding Sinai

Posted on February 7, 2018 by skipmckinstry

BTF_07+Horeb–Holy+Ground+20x11.125_96ppi

Horeb: Holy Ground, from the series Before the Foundation

Lord allow my life to reveal you to others and empower others to reveal you to me.

This was one of those thoughts that came to me recently in prayer with enough impact that I had to write it down in a draft email. Draft email is kind of my version of John the Revelator’s scroll and I put things there whenever I have a sense, like John did in Rev 21, that God might be telling me to “Write this down for these words are trustworthy and true.” My truth claims are a bit more tentative, but I do know it is something I should ponder.

Lord allow my life to reveal you to others and empower others to reveal you to me.

So why was this so significant? On the surface it seems like something we kind of always pray. Jesus said “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” (Mt 5:16) As children we remember praying that through a song, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…” As adults we become familiar with all kinds of similar prayers such as “The Prayer of St. Francis” which begins with the words, “Lord make me an instrument of your peace,” and includes the line “where there is darkness let me bring your light.”

All of those prayers are about being used by God, desiring that our transformed lives might serve as examples, however imperfectly, of a Christ-centered life that can bring hope to others and glory to God. Good stuff. Part of our calling.

But it crossed my mind that just letting our little light shine is really only half the story. “The Prayer of St. Francis” probably wasn’t written by Francis himself.’ The argument is that it is too filled with the words “I” and “me” to have come from his lips. Maybe that’s the case, but at least it provides a clue as to why “let your light shine” feels a little incomplete. As usual, it ain’t about me.

So Moses goes up to Mt. Sinai, barefoot, hangs out with God, and when he returns, his face shines so much from the encounter that he has to wear a veil to keep from blinding the rest of the tribe. His light shone because he had been in the presence of the (capital “L”) Light.

Nothing like a good mountaintop experience, is there? We think about that a little and immediately want to set out for Mt. Sinai in our own life so that we can have the kind of encounter with the living God that requires us to wear a veil when we are around the common folks, those who are less “enlightened” so to speak. Yet despite our best efforts to practice the “spiritual disciplines,” that kind of encounter with God seldom happens. The Christian mystics call it the beatific vision and It does happen sometimes, but rarely. I suspect this is because God knows it would go to our head. We’d get all holy (in our own mind) and Christian bookstores would make a killing selling all kinds of veils branded with the names of famous religious leaders. You could buy a C.S. Lewis veil, or a Beth Moore veil, or a Marty Grubbs veil.

If I recall correctly, the (capital “V”) Veil was in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple and it was torn in two in the crucifixion. No longer would anyone have to crawl into the Holy of Holies once a year with a rope tied around their waist to interact with the living God on behalf of the rest of us. The meeting place between God and humanity has moved, as Brian Zahnd puts it, “from the Temple to the table.” So, is the Mt. Sinai experience still valid? And if it is, how does that happen to us? Where exactly do we encounter God? How does our “little light” get switched on?

Jesus was clear that, although he would always be with us, we would not always be able to see him. But he gave us some really big clues about where we could find him.

‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.’ (Matthew 25:35-40)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but those verses come from Jesus’ discussion of the scene at the final judgement.

It seems to me that if we truly want to have that Mt. Sinai experience in our own lives that we need to go where Jesus is. And if he says he is to be found among the hungry and the thirsty and the poor and the sick and the stranger, then we need to seek out the hungry and the thirsty and the poor and the sick and the stranger. He calls “the least of these” his brothers and sisters. And he tells us that by loving them, we are loving him. And for the record, the word “stranger” in Greek is “xenos” (as in xenophobia) and it refers to people of other ethnic groups, foreigners, aliens, and probably even immigrants. (Just sayin’)

My church has a program called LifeCare where anyone who is living through a difficult season in life can find others to walk with them. The people who come to LifeCare may not be hungry or poor, though sometimes that is also the case. But they struggle with the symptoms of a sickness that is common to all of us—clouded vision—the inability to see God clearly enough to know how much he is head over heels in love with us. When we know that it is so much easier to accept his healing.

It is a high privilege to walk with people in their struggle, and we may think we are helping them, but in that helping dynamic, it becomes less clear who really is “the least of these.” Jill Carattini, editor of Ravi Zacharias’ newsletter describes it this way: “He is both the hand extended to the weary and the eyes of the one in pain.”

If Christ is in them, and he certainly tells us he is, I believe we have located the source of our Mt. Sinai experience—the hungry and the thirsty and the poor and the sick and the stranger. That is where we encounter him and that is where we both find healing.

Lord allow my life to reveal you to others and empower others to reveal you to me.

Perhaps this is a better way to put it: Lord help me to see you in others and then allow my life to reveal you to others.

Now, go see Jesus.

Dadvent

Posted on January 10, 2018 by skipmckinstry

Advent started on Sunday. And as every good Christian knows, that means the football bowl pairings have been released and we can count the days until our favorite team gets to play again. As a public service I will here note that for Oklahoma State Cowboys fans that would be 25 days until they play Virginia Tech in the “Camping World Bowl” and for Sooners fans it will be 29 days before they play Georgia in the Rose Bowl.

So, to quote the great philosopher Carl Spackler (Caddyshack), “We’ve got that to look forward to.” And the anticipation is killing us. Seriously, I can hardly wait. I mean, if they both win their games—and especially if OU goes on to win the national championship— this could be the best Advent ever.

Anticipation is such a big part of this season. There is an old story about a wife who, in early December saw an oddly shaped present wrapped, with her name on it, sitting under the Christmas tree. That wouldn’t be all that unusual except that her husband was famous for forgetting things like Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Pretty much any time a special day came around he was oblivious to it. He really was a nice guy, just a little forgetful.

Over the years she found herself buying her own birthday, Christmas, and anniversary gifts, a practice which of course does have its own set of benefits. But this year it was different. There was her gift. He had remembered! And she couldn’t wait to find out what it was.

For the next three weeks she walked around with a smile on her face and a special glow. He had remembered her and it felt wonderful. She wanted to peek under the wrapping paper but she restrained herself, waiting for what she anticipated would be a beautiful, even historic moment in family history on Christmas morning when her gift was unwrapped.

Finally the big day came, she could see that her husband was very proud of himself for remembering and kept asking her to open the gift. But she wanted to savor every moment so she kept putting it off until it was the very last present under the tree. Beaming, he picked it up and placed it on the coffee table in front of her. With tears in her eyes she started unwrapping the paper. When she finished she tried very hard to maintain her joy but ended up with a seriously puzzled look on her face. She had no idea what it was. It wasn’t as if this was the “major award” in the movie “A Christmas Story.” Remember? The leg. At least that was a lamp.

Breaking the momentary silence and still obviously full of pride, he asked, “Well, honey, what do you think?”

The very last thing she wanted to do was to hurt his feelings. This was a major moment in their relationship and they both had been anticipating rapturous joy at the unveiling of this gift. She took a deep breath and stammered, “Oh dear, this is so wonderful and so thoughtful and I am so moved that you remembered. But what is it?”

They sat there for a moment, both looking at a clay pot with a stick in it. Just a basic stick with maybe a couple of small branches sticking out. No leaves. Not a potted plant really, just a stick. Near the top there was a string, maybe five or six inches long, and at the bottom of the string was an ink cartridge. You know, like the kind you would use in a fountain pen. She thought perhaps it was a clue to something else, so she looked around for maybe a nice Waterman fountain pen, but there was none.

She could see that he was beginning to feel a little hurt by her reaction, so as politely, gently and sweetly as she could, she asked again, “I so love that you remembered, honey, but really what is it.

Crushed, he answered. “Well I thought you would know right away. It’s the best Christmas gift ever. You know, like the line in that Christmas song. “A cartridge in a bare tree.”

My apologies for what may be the worst Dad joke ever. But it provided a nice segue into what I really wanted to talk about—my Dad.

He turned 91 years old last June. He has had a pretty good life. He has married, and buried, two wonderful women. As far as I know, he always remembered their birthdays and anniversaries. He is a believer but in that old-school Presbyterian way where being part of the elect comes with just a hint of pride but since pride is a sin that makes you feel a little guilty—so you don’t talk about it much. I think the clinical term for that is CCDD, Calvinist Cognitive Dissonance Disorder

He still has most of his faculties, is in good health “for a man of his age,” and he is convinced that pretty much the best thing that could happen to him would be to get married again. At least for the moment that does not seem likely so when I ask him how he is doing, his usual answer is, “I’m okay. Really bored, but okay I guess.”

Bored. There is something very sad about that. My sister and I have tried to help him see that even at 91 his life can still be a kind of adventure but he’s not buying it. Getting out of bed in the morning and finding his way down the hall is an adventure. But it’s not very exciting. He argues that 91 is the new … well … 91.

Yesterday I had a thought. Advent is a time of expectation and anticipation. It is a time when we know something wonderful is coming; something that is more wonderful than a national championship; something that is even more wonderful than presents waiting under a tree.

But it occurred to me that at the age of 91, even though you have no idea exactly when, if you trust in Christ, one day soon you will experience a Christmas morning when, in the presence of the Savior you get to open the big present. You will get to see what Jesus has been preparing for you, and unless I am very mistaken, you will never be bored again.

So I asked my Dad about that. Isn’t it possible to spend each day with the same kind of joyous anticipation that a child has on Christmas Eve? Never a guy to use more words than necessary, he said, “Yeah, that really is something to think about.”

Ever since the church figured out Hal Lindsey’s math was wrong and Jesus didn’t come back in 1988, we have earnestly and properly tried to focus more on living in the presence of the kingdom now, and not as much on compelling people to say the sinner’s prayer so that when they die they will go to heaven, live happily ever after, and we, apparently, get some sort of finder’s fee. (I was never very clear on that part.)

But at the age of 91 it seems appropriate to spend at least a part of your day in child-like, Christmas Eve anticipation of the life to come. In fact, I think Advent is a reminder of just how appropriate that is at any age.

The keen of eye will recognize that this is about Advent and yet it was posted on January10. The Oklahoma State Cowboys won their bowl and the Oklahoma Sooners lost the Rose Bowl. Okay, so I’m a little slow. But largely this is a tribute to my dad and I figure the date of posting isn’t all that important. I could be wrong. No doubt one of my 2 or 3 readers may point that out.

They are everything you say but so much more… A Review of Wonder Woman

Posted on August 24, 2017 by skipmckinstry

I like superhero movies, if for no other reason than the fact that they’re fun to watch with the kids. I have four sons. Trust me, over the years I have seen a lot of superhero movies, although any one of the kids is more conversant with chapter and verse in the DC and Marvel universes than I will ever be. I’m only in it for the special effects and the roller coaster ride. Besides, when I grew up my Mom would not let me read superhero comics. Instead she would purchase, with some reluctance, Classics Illustrated comics. Among the comics she would let me read were The Three Musketeers, Moby Dick, Last of the Mohicans, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Huck Finn (I did, after all, live in Hannibal, MO, as a teenager.)

When it came to the honorable hobby of trading comic books, it was nearly impossible to convince a kid to part with his Superman or Spiderman issues. And if they happened to have a copy of Wonder Woman, well let’s just say, echoing Jessica Rabbit, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” No teenage boy would part with that at any price, except perhaps for the “Action Comics No. 1” issue that introduced Superman in 1938. That one sold a few years ago for over 3 million dollars. Naturally, at the time, I thought the comics prohibition was a form of child abuse, but I do know that Mom had nothing but the best of intentions as she knowingly allowed me to think bad things about her—for my own intellectual good—even if she did lack a little investment foresight.

So I recently ventured out with my second youngest—he’s 23— to see if the latest iteration of Wonder Woman for the big screen could live up to the hype. Let me say unequivocally, “It does.” It’s not a perfect movie, but as superhero flicks go, it is very good. If you like special effects, more or less predictable battle choreography, and most importantly, you don’t anticipate seeing something as profound as your average Scorsese film, you’ll probably enjoy it. But set your expectations at a reasonable level. This is, after all, about a character that is only loosely related to the Greek Pantheon and that originated in a comic book, although that is arguably at least one step above the Transformers series—which were based on toy cars.

As I understand it now, the folks at Classics Illustrated also released a comic book edition of The Iliad. If mom had let me read that I might have developed some vague knowledge of the pedigree of Princess Diana of Themiscyra, or Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), the name she uses when she walks among us mere mortals. But even then it would not have been any more vague than film’s treatment of her lineage. As the story goes, Princess Diana is the child of Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons. The question of paternity is a little fuzzy but according to some fictional genograms (Okay, so all of them are fictional.) Diana is also somehow related to Zeus, the king of the Gods, and to Ares, the God of War, though she desires to use her various inherited divine superpowers for good rather than evil.

Diana leaves her paradise after rescuing a World War I fighter pilot, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) who inadvertently crashes through the invisible barrier that hides the island pf the Amazons. Learning of the Great War, she is convinced that Ares is behind it all (of course he is) and she is equally convinced that she is the only one who can stop it. She further believes that, except for Ares’ manipulation, humanity would be a generally peaceful and loving lot. “They’re everything you say, but so much more,” she claims. More than lust, greed, violence, etc. While this version of the film will likely reboot the franchise, if not the entire DC universe, just as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy did for Batman, it won’t be based on some dark inner angst. Diana Prince, at least so far, is an incurable, almost naive, optimist.

Aside from her intelligence, charm and evident beauty, Diana Prince can move really fast, has truck-tossing strength, and can deflect bullets with her bracelets. Her most powerful weapon, however, is called the “Lasso of Truth.” In addition to being able to force the truth out of anyone who is wrapped up in it, the Lasso of Truth even has its own Wikipedia page, wherein you can discover that the Lasso of Truth, indeed, Wonder Woman herself, was originally conceived by the inventor of the lie detector. Honest. (As a good Oklahoman I am compelled to point out the injustice here: not even Will Rogers’ lasso has its own Wikipedia page, even though it may have had a more significant impact in real history than a fictitious device used to extract truth telling through vasoconstriction.)

As one would expect, the movie reaches its peak when two “gods” fight, mano a mano, over the destiny of the human race. The scene is part special effects battle and part philosophical discussion. This is where Diana presents her impassioned defense of mere mortal humans, while fending off lightning bolts from Ares (David Thewlis) which he hurls along with accusations about humanity’s essentially corrupt nature.

Diana’s sympathies for humanity are as hard won as is her defeat of Ares, since she has just witnessed the self-sacrificing, and heart-breaking, behavior of Steve Trevor who blew up the plane he was flying while it was loaded with the lethal gas that the Germans had intended to unleash on their enemies. Ares is dispatched to end the battle, but that may only be temporary given that the need for a sequel is a nearly absolute value in Hollywood—the contemporary version of Mt. Olympus. Unless Steve Trevor manages to escape the explosion via a parachute that we do not see, he won’t be back, and coming back as Captain James Tiberius Kirk doesn’t count.

But I have to ask a serious question at this point. Who really is the hero here? I do not raise this question to diminish any of the beneficial value of having women in strong roles in film. This Wonder Woman is not the woman pictured on the comic book cover above. Yes, Diana did heroically and single-handedly cross the intentionally-named “No Man’s Land” battlefield to effect a rescue that the men could not. Director Patty Jenkins has said that scene was “the most important scene” in the movie. And yes, Diana has (purportedly) sent Ares packing, thereby eliminating his evil and corrupting influence on the world. She is definitely a hero of the movie.

But what is it that Diana really sees in humanity? Perhaps it is exactly the potential for self-sacrifice that Steve Trevor exhibited. Is that a characteristic of human beings or merely a potentiality? For all the superpowers, lusts, sexual misadventures, jealousies, murders, etc., recorded in mythological literature, self-sacrifice was rare among the card-carrying members of the Greek Pantheon.

It is often suggested that the traits and powers of the mythological gods are merely human traits and powers writ large. For all the sturm and drang of those myths, in fact, for all the flash of this wonderful iteration of Wonder Woman, it is possible to miss that the greatest power exhibited in the movie just might be the power of love as demonstrated by Steve Trevor’s sacrifice. Perhaps his act is only possible because he, and not the gods of Mt. Olympus, was created in the image of one who chose a cross as his moment of greatest self-revelation.

Skeuomorphism. Why We Are Never Surprised When Wile E. Coyote Loses.

Posted on August 12, 2017 by skipmckinstry

(This was originally published in 2013 on my other blog, but since it was the only post, I decided to consolidate. I keep telling myself I need to write more, but hey, I’m slow—and that’s all I have to say about that.)

Apparently one of Chuck Jones’ cardinal rules for Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons was, “The audience’s sympathy must always be with the Coyote.” They were largely successful on that count. The guy couldn’t catch a break, much less a running bird. Just an everyman trying to feed himself in a dangerous and unforgiving environment, Coyote always managed to screw up his elaborate schemes to capture and make a meal out of the Roadrunner. With all due respect to PETA, we all know the Roadrunner would have deserved it. But Coyote was always at the mercy of his own ineptitude and the faulty product design of the notorious, ACME Corporation. He was also easily fooled by skeuomorphs. Admit it. You know you’ve yelled at your TV screen a few times, “Don’t do it, Coyote! Don’t do it!”

Skeuomorphism might be the longest word in the average graphic designer’s vocabulary—at least it probably is in mine. And since it has become the common enemy of some who think-about-graphic-design-for-a-living, much of the rest of the design community assumes it must be a bad thing. Apparently the mere existence of skeuomorphism causes indigestion among a certain class of design purists who, like the disciples of Walter Gropius, and Adolf Loos before him, believe they have found the Holy Grail of Design and are now equipped to usher in a Utopian age where all pretense, dishonesty and bourgeois ornamentation can be stripped away to reveal Capital-T-Truth. Well, at least this year’s Capital-T-Truth.

According to Wiktionary, a skeuomorph is defined as “a design feature copied from a similar feature in another object, even when not functionally necessary.” Wiktionary also tells us that use of the word traces back at least as far as 1889, which should serve as a reminder to the design-hipsters cum baristas that they aren’t really on the cutting edge of either art or language evolution. (If you want to jump right in to the deep end and really impress the latte crowd, try this debate over the fundamental meaning of the term. As for me, I am using the term to mean what it has become in the vernacular: Apple looks kitschy.)

So when your screen background looks like a piece of “fine Corinthian leather,” or your Google earth icon has beveled edges, or your iBooks interface looks like a wooden bookshelf, that is skeuomorphism. The horror.

When Apple first popularized a graphic user interface back during the Stone Age, they were attempting to put a face, or perhaps better, a skin on a technology that few people understood. Steve Jobs and crew were creating the “computer for the rest of us” by using visual metaphors that we all recognized in order to enable us to use this new technological marvel. No longer did we need to know the rudiments of programming language or even “C-prompts” on a green screen in order to navigate around the Matrix. Instead we got familiar-looking file folder icons and document icons that emulated dog-eared pieces of paper, a now politically incorrect bomb with a lit fuse, and the ever-dreadful dead Mac icon with the upside down smile and x’s for eyes. We navigated—the term itself is a verbal skeuomorph—through the computer by pointing and clicking at items and buttons on the screen. Pointing, of course, was a violation of the rules of etiquette but we were all familiar with it. The buttons weren’t really buttons, they just looked like it. And clicking, especially with the magical transformation that occurred once you did it, gave the user a sense of power. Admittedly it was power in an alien world, but does it get any better than that? For those of us who were familiar with rubber cement, wax, X-acto knives, t-squares, rubylith, type books, proportion wheels, galleys and the stimulating smell of printer’s ink, getting to use a Macintosh was like being handed the keys to the Space Shuttle. Once they added color and higher resolution, we were no longer merely orbiting the earth. It was infinity and beyond.

Those first Mac icons, largely designed by Susan Kare, were pretty primitive though brilliant for their time, in a way like the guano drawings on the Magura Caves. You do the best you can with what you have. The original Mac had a bit depth of 1, in other words, black or… wait for it… white. As bit-depth/resolution improved it was to be expected that the detail on those original icons would evolve—and clearly they did. So we wound up with beveled edges, sophisticated shadows and color schemes, backgrounds that look like paper, or wood, or marble, or galaxies or whatever in the real world a designer might imagine, all used with the best of intentions. Looking like an actual notepad can be an immediate way to communicate to the user what a virtual notepad is and how to use it. Early iPhone and iPad icons became celebrations of dimensionality bordering on trompe-l’oeil, as did the interfaces within the applications they represented.

Trompe l’oeil is a recognized and celebrated category of art, unlike skeuomorphism, although both are darn near unpronounceable. You can find some astonishing examples here. If you’ve been to Las Vegas and seen the ceilings in the Venetian Hotel or in the Via Bellagio, you’ve seen trompe-l’oeil. Frankly, you could make an argument that the entire Las Vegas strip is a monument to the ersatz—trompe l’oeil and skeuomorphism unabashedly presented as reality. For a more familiar example, but still from a desert in Nevada, think of Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel on the side of a canyon wall to fool the Roadrunner. When Roadrunner turns the corner and runs into the newly created tunnel, Wile E. tries to follow, with the expected result. He crashes into the canyon painted stone and gets “flattened” against the wall. Despite what ol’ Wile E. may have thought, even the kids watching the cartoon knew it wasn’t a real tunnel. Kids, of course, are smarter than coyotes (and adults for that matter, most of whom think that Las Vegas is a real place.)

Kids are also smarter than many philosophers of design. At least my kids are. They absorb visual metaphors like breathing. They never, ever had to answer the angst-ridden question of “Mac or PC?” They don’t care. If it has a screen they can operate it, and they know without thinking about it that their fingers are not going to slip off a virtually beveled edge. So they are not fooled by skeuomorphic details. Neither are they offended by them. I never had to utter the words, “Son, you know that leather background isn’t real, don’t you?” Had I done so I would have gotten the same look of consternation when I asked my then six-year-old if he realized the magic in Harry Potter movies wasn’t real. “Seriously? Dad? It’s just a movie.”

Apple’s work on interface design ushered in a golden age of ornamentation, perhaps even arresting the Modernist trend to the point where, in 2005, Eye Magazine could declare “The Decriminalisation of Ornament,” (a direct reference to Adolf Loos’ “Ornament and Crime” which argued “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.” ) But now, after years of increasingly realistic looking, but fake, bevels, shadows, colors and textures among iPhone visual elements, designers, especially user interface (UI) designers, have scraped themselves off the wall of the virtual canyon and decided they are once again allergic to ornamentation. But these days it is more fashionable to use (or perhaps, misuse) the term “skeuomorphism.”

This issue turns out to be a pretty ancient problem. The guano painter in the Magura cave didn’t have an alphabet and knew nothing of taxidermy that would have enabled the hanging of a stuffed animal as a trophy on the wall. Instead, he or she drew a picture, with sufficient detail to communicate, but no more. You could even argue that those drawings were the very essence of flatness so desired by modern UX design purists. 15000 years later (though still 17,000 years before Jonathan Ive was even born), the artists of the Lascaux cave paintings added color, dimension, perspective and ornamental detail to the mix. I’m guessing the Lascaux paintings were called skeuomorphic by the art critics of the Paleolithic Era. But I doubt the artist or anyone else for that matter, Wile E. Coyote-style, confused the pictures on the wall with actual animals.

Tom Wolfe, in his brilliant skewering of modern art and architecture, From Our House to Bauhaus, reports an exercise by Josef Albers, an early Bauhaus instructor, that clearly explains the purist attitude toward skeuomorphism:

“Albers would walk into the room and deposit a pile of newspapers on the table and tell the students he would return in one hour. They were to turn the pieces of newspaper into works of art in the interim. When he returned, he would find Gothic castles made of newspaper, yachts made of newspaper, airplanes, busts, birds, train terminals, amazing things. But there would always be some student, a photographer or a glassblower, who would simply have taken a piece of newspaper and folded it once and propped it up like a tent and let it go at that. Albers would pick up the cathedra and the airplane and say: “These were meant to be made of stone or metal—not newspaper.” Then he would pick up the photographer’s absentminded tent and say: “But this!—this makes use of the soul of paper. …This!—is a work of art in paper”

At the risk of appearing ambivalent, let may say simply, “BS!” If we were to follow his logic—beyond where even Albers seemed to go—we might reach the conclusion that one ought not make anything out of something else, since the original materials are best suited to be just that, the original materials. Wood is best used for trees, not newspapers or cornices; sand is better suited to remain as sand rather than turned into crystal goblets or the glass facades of Bauhaus Big Box Architecture. In fact, by following Albers’ logic we might eventually do away with all forms of not merely ornamentation, but representational art and even color, as some Bauhaus influenced trend-setters wanted to do. Although the leading edge of smartphone interface design today looks like Ellsworth Kelly color explorations, you just know someone is going to eventually argue for all black and white. Seen the Drudge Report lately?

I do confess to a certain sympathy with the anti-skeuomorphic crowd. (Then again, I tend to root for Wile E. Coyote, too.) I have a visceral disdain for wood-grained laminate countertops and printed faux-wood wall paneling. It seems to me that if you want your countertops to look like wood, you ought to use wood—especially since a chef friend of mine once told me that real wood has chemistry that helps kill the bacteria on its surface. But even at that, I wouldn’t turn down a meal served on a Formica counter. Heretically, I find the iPhone’s icon-oriented interface to be more clutter than order, even as executed in iOS7, and although I am an unrepentant Apple fanboy, all those flat squares in Windows Phone 8 are clean, simple and attractive. How effective they are as navigational tools, I have no idea. And I also know that they are “buttons,” regardless of how preciously flat they appear.

For Gropius and his followers in the Bauhaus this intense desire to eschew ornamentation was about politics. The assumption was that ornamentation was expensive and therefore, only members of the bourgeoisie could afford it. The search for “flatness” became a political, as well as artistic, movement. Roger Scruton describes the modernists and their agenda this way: “They were social and political activists who wished to squeeze the disorderly human material that constitutes a city into a socialist straitjacket.” So it is not surprising that, in an era when the cultural desire for socialism is in ascendance, we might return to a fear of bourgeois ornamentation.

Such simplification is tempting, and when presented as the manifestation of (faux-) humanizing ideals, eliminating ornamentation takes on a certain (equally faux-) nobility. But just because a group of design philosophers want to protect the masses, whom they presume must be fooled by the painting of a tunnel on a canyon wall, doesn’t mean we have to fall for that sort of reverse-elitism.

René Magritte, made the point back in 1928, with the inscription on his painting “The Treachery of Images.” “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (This is not a pipe.) We know. We also know that on-screen buttons are not really beveled, the clicking sounds are not mechanical, the calendar doesn’t have a real leather border, the picture of our kids on the lock screen is not really our kids, the cars and trucks in Transformers didn’t really transform, and Skeuby Doo isn’t a real dog. Unless the day comes when we can jack ourselves directly into the Matrix, I imagine that human beings will always prefer a little visual metaphor— maybe even a little kitsch—with our computer interfaces.

God’s Good Order: The Cycle Will Be Broken, Bye and Bye.

Posted on August 12, 2017 by skipmckinstry

Will

(Originally published in the Edge of Faith‘s premiere issue, February 2017)

The path to reconciliation must begin with the act of confession.—Soon-Chan Rah¹

In the summer of 1960 I was eight years old and lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. Most summers I would spend a month or more at my grandparents’ house in Wilmar, a small, south Arkansas town in Drew County known as “The Home of Tall Pines and Pink Tomatoes.” The soil was red and sandy, and we were near enough to the Louisiana border to have Spanish Moss lend its distinctive grayish-green mystery as it lurked, hanging from the branches of large, live oak trees. The humidity was always on the edge of bursting into rain; the water was so soft you could never quite dry off or feel clean after a bath. I can still taste the faint combination of salt and pine sap in the air.

Each day I woke to the sound of multiple roosters crowing. I got out of bed to help my grandmother and great-grandmother feed the chickens; collect the eggs; dust the house; make biscuits, cakes and pies; and look forward to having a Pepsi-and-vanilla-ice-cream-float every day at 10:00 am and again at 3:00 pm. They called it a Tea Party. Sometimes I would roam the gravel pits and the pine woods with my cousins, playing cowboys and Indians or re-enacting famous battles from the Civil War, especially those few battles that the Confederate Rebels actually won. At night I slept in the same lumpy bed in the same room that my father and his two brothers grew up in. I read Tom Swift novels and Hardy Boys mysteries by flashlight under the covers.

Around 5:00 pm every day I would climb in the old Ford pickup truck and ride with my grandfather a couple of miles to the farm so we could feed the cattle. I always took my treasured pocket knife. Cutting the twine on bales of hay stored in the loft and tossing it down to the cattle feeders made me feel like a real ranch-hand, maybe even a real cowboy. Once in a while I would accompany him to the “bank” he owned, although I never felt like a real banker. The word “bank” is in quotes because it wasn’t a real bank. The technical name was “exchange and trust,” a forerunner of the modern savings and loan. He couldn’t loan money, but he could keep it for people in his cavernous, walk-in safe. I guess he was pretty good at double-entry bookkeeping.

Nonetheless, he was known as the town’s banker, and the water commissioner, and the school superintendent, and I think he was even mayor for a time. Everyone called him Mr. Dick. When he died they found a little pocket ledger with a list of initials and dollar amounts next to them. The best guess is that he did loan money—his own. A stern father to his sons, he must have been generous to a fault with everyone else.

The town was built alongside a single highway that ran east and west. Railroad tracks ran parallel to the highway about fifty yards to the south. They had a Methodist, Baptist and a Presbyterian Church and my grandfather attended all three. They had the “bank,” two general/feed stores, a gas station, a school, a flour mill with a couple of grain silos, a sawmill with endless mountains of pine wood chips, and a United States Post Office.
My grandfather’s brother was postmaster. In a town of 500 people our family was about as privileged as you could get.

There was also the Star Café, one of my grandfather’s less than successful entrepreneurial ventures, which may have been a less than transparent attempt to get my great-grandmother out of the house and keep her busy. A little mother-in-law drama was about all the drama they had. Except for the night when the flour mill burned down there wasn’t a lot of excitement. Idyllic.

500 people. As near as I can tell, about 300 of them were black. Sixty percent. You can do the math. You already know where the black people lived—south of the railroad tracks in little shacks and pre-fabricated houses. Some of the white folks had pre-fab homes as well, and some lived on the other side of the tracks, but they also tended to have acreage around their houses where they could grow tomatoes to sell to the grocery chains and the Campbell Soup folks in the county seat, and pine trees they could harvest every 15 or 20 years for big money. That kind of real estate was rare for black residents, if it existed at all.

One very slow moving afternoon I was hanging out with a couple of the local kids when one of them suggested we play “Chuck Rocks at the N–––––s.” Yes, this was Arkansas, 1960. He used the word.

We gathered our ammunition—small, round, gravel rocks from the driveway. Hiding behind the two-story mother-in-law house in the back of my grandparent’s home, we would quickly sneak out and launch a volley across the railroad tracks onto the roof of the small, pink, pre-fab house on the other side. Quickly retreating to our hiding place we would peek around the corner to check the results. The first couple of times, nothing happened. The rocks all fell short or on the roof and it seemed that nobody noticed.

So we did it again. After a couple of volleys a Very Large Black Man came out on the stoop and looked around. Seeing nothing he went back in. Still, the fact that we had elicited that reaction was success to us. Congratulating ourselves on a mission accomplished we wandered off to other adventures.

The thrill of doing something we knew to be completely wrong was more enticing than eight-year-old boys could stand. Even more thrilling was the fact that we seemed to have gotten away with it. So naturally we did it again. And again. For several days
in a row we played our new game, waiting for the increasingly puzzled (we thought), Very Large Black Man to come out on the stoop, look around and go back inside.
Then we would quit. We never considered what would happen if we broke a window. The possibility that someone might get hurt didn’t enter our minds.

Of course, nobody was fooled. The people in the house figured out what was going on almost immediately. The deep tragedy is that it took several days for them to do something about it. Mr. Dick was known to be “good to the black folks,” but to directly challenge him regarding the behavior of his grandson and two other white kids was a violation of the deeply embedded but unwritten protocols of the existing social order. When white people of the time thought about it—something they seldom did—they merely understood those protocols as the way the world is supposed to be. God’s Good Order. Today we call it systemic racism and that is not too harsh a label.

One afternoon, sitting in the breezeway, likely enjoying a round of Pepsi floats, we saw the Very Large Black Man walking across the railroad tracks into my grandparents back yard, seeming to grow Larger with every step. The game was over. We were busted. Before he reached the back door to ask if he could speak with Mr. Dick, my two co-conspirators made a quick exit out the front door. Hiding, I watched from a distance as the two men talked though I could not hear what they were saying. I didn’t really need to know; even an eight-year-old has a conscience. I braced myself for the consequences.

Aside from a stern lecture from my grandfather, repeated in a slightly gentler fashion by my grandmother, and then repeated again a couple of weeks later when my parents showed up to take me back home to Little Rock, there were no real consequences beyond being “grounded” for a few days. I have searched my memory to see if, at the very least, they made me go apologize to the Very Large Black Man and his family, but I don’t think so.

Later that year, in December, about a week away from my ninth birthday, my mother, my younger sister, and I were getting gasoline at a little filling station on the southeast side of downtown Little Rock. Southeast Little Rock was “colored,” as they called it in those days, perhaps even intending politeness. The morning was overcast but the haze was beginning to break up. We were only three years removed from the day when nine frightened but courageous black students attempted to integrate Central High School just a few blocks away. The “Little Rock Nine,” as they came to be called, faced an angry mob barring their entrance. They also faced the Arkansas National Guard, which had been called out by Governor Orval Faubus, to “keep the peace.” The Guard was clearly there to support the mob and bar the door to the schoolhouse. The nine black students were turned away. Two weeks later they were admitted, but only after President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and sent 1,200 paratroopers to the campus to escort them up the steps of the school. Paratroopers sounds a little theatrical. I’m pretty sure they showed up in Jeeps and trucks. Either way, Eisenhower made his point.

Sheltered in the growing suburbs of northwest Little Rock—read: white flight—the only knowledge I had of the standoff was overhearing my father on the phone telling my out-of-state uncle that we didn’t really know anything more about it than he did. We got our news from the paper and the Huntley-Brinkley Report just like everyone else in America.

Aside from housekeepers, gardeners and the occasional “lawn-jockey” statue—yes, it was that kind of neighborhood—African-Americans did not exist in my world. The whole environment was a study in Jim Crow reality. Even the more liberal members of the community believed separate-but-equal was an honorable, even Christian, position—reflective of divine intentionality. This filling station was run, and likely owned, by a white man. Black neighborhood. White-owned business. God’s Good Order.

Mom (we called her Nana) pulled up next to the gas pump. The car was a 1955 Pontiac Star Chief, a chrome appointed behemoth with enough presence to herald my father’s arrival into middle management, yet not so garish as to outshine the Rocket 88 Oldsmobile driven by his boss. Status was a finely tuned machine in those days.

Nana and I climbed out of the car while my sister sat in the back seat fascinated with her Chatty Cathy talking doll. Even today Chatty Cathy is described on Wikipedia as a “fanciful depiction of a human being…a five-year-old Caucasian girl…blonde hair in a short bobbed style and blue eyes.” [Italics added.] It was not until 1962 that Mattel discovered there were people of other colors. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it was not until 1962 that Mattel discovered that there were markets made up of people of other colors ready to part with their hard-earned money. I wonder that rarity does not explain why collectible Chatty Cathy dolls on eBay tend to be perceived as more valuable if they have the “ghostly white” color found on some models from 1964 bearing a “Patented in Canada” marking.

Nana went inside the station and waited to pay while I watched the attendant fill the tank. This was long before the days of self-service at the “convenience” store. Fascinated with the mechanics of fueling the car and secretly enjoying the mysterious fumes of the gasoline, I watched the friendly, grease-covered, Andy Griffith look-alike perform his liturgy. While the gasoline pumped and I tasted the air, he lifted the hood, pulled out the dipstick, wiped off the end, reinserted it into the pipe, pulled it out again, and inspected the now, oil-covered tip. With a knowing nod of the head and a wink in my general direction, he returned the dipstick for a second time to its proper place in the natural order of auto-mechanical physics and lowered the hood. Then he topped off the air-pressure in the tires and cleaned the windshield.

What happened next was completely outside the realm of the natural order for a nine-year-old white kid from Little Rock, Arkansas in 1960. A boy from the neighborhood, about my age, walked up to me and tried to strike up a conversation. It seems it was his birthday. He was nine years old, very proud of that fact, and he asked me if I knew anyone else who was nine years old. I backed away from him in silence trying to avert my eyes, just wishing he would go away. Something about being the same age as this kid was disturbing. I was not usually that shy, but I didn’t respond to his questions.

He was black. The only black people I knew about (aside from the aforementioned service class) were the people from the other side of the tracks in my grandparents’ south Arkansas town. My recent, narrow escape from justice was fresh on my mind. What I did know of black people I knew only from a distance. I had heard stories—stories in which men regularly referred to dark-skinned human beings by using the “N-word” and otherwise genteel women referred to them using the condescendingly polite but equally profane term, “Nigra.” “Don’t let them fool you,” I was told, “they are not the same as us. They’re okay as long as they stay in their own place, on their own side of the tracks, but you definitely don’t want one marrying your sister.”

He persisted. Like a black Chatty Cathy doll that could pull its own string, he continued to pepper me with questions, which I continued not to answer. “What’s your name? How old are you? I’m nine years old. Do you know anyone who is nine years old? Is that your sister in the car? How old is she? Is she nine years old.”

I was pretty certain that the only appropriate response for a child of my “station” was to ignore him. So I did. Nervously and completely unsure of what he might do. You just never know.

Nana watched the whole encounter from the station window.

My mother was raised in east Texas. The word “hardscrabble” was invented to describe her Depression-era childhood. In her poverty she always felt “less than.” She spoke often of the rare treat of going to see a motion-picture with her father. Admission was nine cents. She would pray that her dad did not need to keep the extra penny so she could buy a Tootsie Roll. I was always reminded of that story when I took my sons to see the latest superhero movie and I had to spend over $20 for two drinks and a popcorn. While some poverty is real, some is just a first-world problem.

The outsider mindset solidified when she was fourteen. Her parents divorced and she had to quit school to help support the family. Ironically she took a job in a movie theater. At the time, divorce carried an unredeemable social stigma, not merely for the divorced couple, but also for their children. There were no mommy blogs or support groups for single mothers or classes to help the newly-divorced find their way back to normalcy. Normalcy was for other people. To be touched by divorce in those days was to be diminished as a human being, to be not quite a whole person. She could genuinely empathize with someone who, by popular opinion, political compromise and Constitutional provision, was considered to be only 3/5th of a human person—at least until the chicanery of the 13th Amendment. Besides, she was, or so she believed, part Native American, another aggrieved group. That turns out to be mostly true, but not Cherokee as she hoped. A test of my DNA reveals that she was descended from Mexican ancestry and from Cree Indians—darker-skinned Canadians.

As I backed away from the frightening specter of a smiling, friendly, nine-year old black child, Nana walked up behind me. Bumping into her I suddenly felt trapped. With the Pontiac Star Chief on one side and the gasoline pump on the other, she had cut off my only avenue of escape. Putting her hand firmly on my shoulder, she asked, “Are you going to answer his question?”

I couldn’t get words out of my mouth. I stammered and stuttered in pretty much the same way I had when a few years earlier I had a face-to-face encounter with a garden snake on my grandmother’s front porch. Once my grandmother decrypted my message she took a well-sharpened hoe from the shed out back and summarily dispatched the poor snake.

But my mother was not carrying a garden hoe and this black kid, whatever my misgivings, was no snake. Nana was not coming to my rescue, at least not in the way I hoped. Instead, she struck up a surprisingly genial conversation with this dark, mysterious, and intimidating (at least to me) stranger, this pre-adolescent representative of a tribe that the author of my family genealogy (circa 1952, Blue Mountain, Mississippi) described as the “people of Ham.” It must be true; it’s in a professionaly printed, hardback book with gold foil embossing on the cover and coated stock on the interior. Although, to be honest, the foil has pretty much worn off now.

That genealogy miraculously manages to trace our family origins all the way back to one of Noah’s sons. Impressive, given the fact that the riches of Internet research did not exist in 1952, much less Ancestry.com. Yet he was sufficiently persuaded of our roots to write, “When Japheth stepped out of the Ark and his father delivered that prophecy [Cursed be Canaan…God shall enlarge Japheth…and Canaan will be his servant… Genesis 9:24-29], there rose a kind of Gulf stream of history carrying the promise of the gospel, numerical enlargement and superiority over the people of Ham. These latter are the Egyptians, Ethiopians, colored races, etc.”

Don’t be overly troubled by that “superiority over the…colored races, etc.” thing. According to the author, himself a well-educated Presbyterian pastor, at least one prominent member of our lineage “led family worship in his home” and “had a sense of responsibility that extended to his family and slaves alike.” So I guess that makes it all okay, right? God’s Good Order.

Of course, as a nine-year-old I knew nothing of family history and it was not until many years later that my mother discovered a copy of the will of the first member of my lineage to settle in America in a dusty county courthouse in South Carolina. It is dated February 2, 1837. In the inventory of his property (pictured above) you will find:

1 Negro man, Lewis$1,000.00

Beck & 2 Children$1,506.00

Rose$ 475.00

Right there, categorically, yet almost casually listed among the farm implements, the household items, the cows and horses and chickens, the jugs of cider and vinegar, and the lard, are five people. Five human beings. And those dollar values? That is what they sold for at auction. Their original valuation was less than $1100.00 all together. When the folks in the HR department talk about the importance of investing in “human capital” it sends a shiver down my spine.

What I did know at the age of nine was entitlement. Not consciously, it was merely something I inherited from my ancestors and absorbed from the culture of the 1950s in these United States of America, the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” and the southern state of Arkansas, the “Land of Opportunity” for some folks—those fortunate enough to suffer from a modest level of melanin deficiency. Somehow, without even realizing it I had fallen prey, as had much of white America, to the “curse of Ham” myth. There is no truth to, and certainly no Biblical support for, the idea that dark-skinned human beings are that way due to a so-called “curse of Ham.” Yet, thanks to a lot of bad teaching and the endorsement of the once nearly ubiquitous Scofield Bible, this false belief dominated much of American theology of the past two centuries and even persists in a few places today. As Dr. Tony Evans puts it, “Myths don’t need facts, they just need supporters.”²

I didn’t need facts. I didn’t even need conscious awareness of my inherited prejudice.
I just knew there was something unusual about my mother talking with this boy.

Nana smiled at him and offered that I was almost nine years old. Vigorously prompting me at the elbow, she told me to shake his hand, which I did very cautiously. It was no fist bump or interlocking thumbs, “bring-it-in,” kind of “bro-hug.” Instead it was typical of what two nine-year-old boys almost always do—a weak, tentative grip, shy and uncertain. What my father would have called “a limp fish.” It ended as quickly as it began.

But as our hands touched I discovered something I had not known before. Black skin feels like white skin. It’s the same thing. Who knew? Epiphany! Somehow that was comforting to me and although I still couldn’t quite hold up my end of the conversation, I did stammer something about my birthday as we got in the car to leave.

My new-found, black best friend looked at me with warranted suspicion and probably wondered why I had been so distant. We waved at each other as the car pulled out of the gas station and I felt different—somehow forgiven even for the egregious sin of rock-chucking the previous summer. My nearly nine-year-old self knew intuitively that my mother had just given me a gift—a gift that I must pass on to my own children and they in turn, to their children—a legacy of infinitely more value than that cloth-covered family geneaology with the faded gold foil. I felt like I had entered a new world—one in which God’s Truly Good Order was being restored.

¹ Soon-Chan Rah, (2009) p. 71, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press

² Evans, Tony (2015-09-24). Oneness Embraced: Reconciliation, the Kingdom, and How We are Stronger Together Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition.

The Arc of the Covenant

Posted on August 12, 2017 by skipmckinstry

Part of a photo series, A Cautionary Tale, by the author which can be found here: http://bit.ly/2wEEHd2

Stories, at least classical stories, tend to follow what people who study stories call a narrative arc. If you took a high school literature class—and stayed awake for enough of it—you may remember the term “dramatic structure.” From the time of Aristotle, a story studier himself, the form was considered to be a beginning, a middle and an end. So maybe you didn’t have to be as smart as Aristotle to figure that out, but nonetheless, he got the ball rolling on the idea of literary analysis.
The version of Aristotle’s idea that your high school teacher taught you is likely the one conceived in the 19th century by a German novelist named Gustav Freytag. Now Gus had his problems. His most famous work was a novel called Debit and Credit which extolled the virtues of the German people (so far, so good) in contrast to Jews and Poles. Oy! But his literary theory—thankfully less anti-Semitic—caught on. It went something like this:
1. Exposition. This section presents the stuff you need to know for the rest of the story to make sense. The setting, the main characters, a little about the back story, etc.
2. Rising Action. This is where a series of unfortunate (or fortunate) events cause conflict, build tension, and lead inexorably toward part three, the climax.
3. Climax. This is the main point of the story. The lead character, the protagonist, steps up, becomes the hero, or maybe just fixes the problem. Sometimes it goes the other way, the lead character fails. That version is called a tragedy. Sometimes the protagonist defeats the antagonist, but the antagonist doesn’t fully realize it yet, which sets up the rest of the story.
4. Falling Action. In this part of the story the protagonist continues to struggle against the antagonist, which may be a person or maybe just an idea. The final outcome may still be in doubt, but the battle continues with varying degress of intensity.
5. Dénouement. You can call it a resolution or a revelation (my favorite). I just always like the sound of the word “dénouement.’ In this part of the story, conflicts are resolved, things either go back to normal in which everyone lives happily ever after or they move on to a new normal, with just enough tension to suggest there is more to the story with hints of a possible sequel.
That’s a pretty simplisitic understanding of a narrative arc, and probably more dependent of modern movie economics, than Gus Freytag. But it is a pretty common way stories unfold.
Even before Aristotle, there were stories. In fact, long before Aristotle, stories were the primary way that historical knowledge was passed from person to person and generation to generation. The Bible, even before it was written down, was that kind of collection of stories. Each of those stories has its own narrative arc, a lot like your high school teacher would have described. (At least if you went to high school back when it was still acceptable to talk about the Bible in class, which kind of raises the question of why, exactly, can we still discuss the notorious anti-semite, Freytag’s theory, but we can barely mention the Bible in a school.)

For the most part the Bible is a collection of stories that go something like this:
Part 1
God does something wonderful for his people. Something like: Creating an entire universe for them to live in;
Putting them in an exquisitely beautiful garden with an even more exquisitely beautiful partner;
Delivering them out of slavery in Egypt by parting the Red Sea; Providing food for them in the wilderness that they didn’t have to grow; Outfitting them with shoes that didn’t wear out in 40 years;
Leading them into a land of milk and honey, which always sounded kind of sticky to me and very likely to attract bees. But if you lived in the ancient near east it probably sounded like the Promised Land to you.
Part 2
They faithfully follow him until they get rebellious or tired or just plain stoopid.
Part 3
God lets them have their way even though he knows things are not going to end well.
Part 4
Bad stuff happens.
Part 5
He calls them back and, often reluctantly, they call on God again.
Part 6
He forgives them, rescues them and takes them back.
Part 7
Finally God sends his own son to die for them, making it possible for them to receive eternal life and a brand new heart, one that loves God and desires to do his will—not out of duty or fear but for the sheer joy of participating in the life of the all good and all beautiful creator and sustainer of the universe.

Repeat parts 1 through 6 as often as necessary until you get it through your skull (and your heart) that God really, really, really loves you—so get over your bad self.

Literally, get over your bad self. That’s where part 7 comes in. It is his major work in you and it is a work in progress. Philippians 1:6 says, “God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.”

To sum that up, here’s the way the story goes: God is good. He does good stuff. We don’t believe it. We rebel. We fail. He calls us back. We repent. He restores. And he is ushering in a kingdom where that restoration is permanent.

That’s my story. And it is probably yours.

I have had opportunity after opportunity to see first hand how God works all things together for good, for those that love him (however imperfectly) and are called according to his purposes. He has taken the gifts he has given me and placed me in situations where he wanted me to use them. Those situations have seldom looked like what I might have expected or planned, but that is just a reminder to me that this story is ultimately not about me, it’s about him.

I look at all the ways I wandered and I don’t really know why God allows that. But to be honest, I’m almost glad he did. It probably has something to do with what Paul talked about in Ephesians 2: “For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life.”

That may be my favorite verse in the Bible. (It’s pretty hard to pick just one.) I always like to remember that the word “workmanship” in that passage is the Greek word “poiema.” It literally means we are God’s poetry. It makes me think about the book John refers to in Revelation 13:28 and again in 21:27 as “the Lamb’s book of life.” Traditionally, we have tended to think of it as a ledger. Enough credit (good works, right?) in one column and you get to stay in heaven. Too much sin in the other column and you drop through a hole into a lake of fire.

But what if it is a book of poetry?

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