Toward the end of college, I discovered Bob Dylan. His music spoke to me, and still speaks to me, more than any other artist I can think of. I quickly devoured his whole catalog, and even now, the guys at work make fun of me for how often he comes up in my playlist. Something about him and the way he puts words together really resonates with me.
One of my favorite lines of his is, “If you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.” I always liked that and secretly envied people who were able to cast things aside like careers and 401(k)’s to pursue a random trade or adventure. Back in my 20’s, I thought this line meant that the things you own end up owning you, but now, I understand it to mean something completely different.
Back in 2008, I was amazed at Barak Obama’s run for President. I had never witnessed anyone carry such energy. I remember talking with a lady I worked with who had been to one of his rallies and had left in tears. Tears! I was amazed. What really captured my imagination was he was able to transfer the energy from coast to coast, somehow connecting people in Texas with New York and California. When he accepted the nomination in Denver, they had to rent out Mile High Stadium because it drew a crowd in excess of 100,000 people. A couple of months later at his victory speech in Chicago, they estimated that more than a quarter of a million people were in attendance. Think about that. A quarter of a million people all motivated by the same dream. The same idea. What was that idea? “Hope and Change.” In other words, he had united a whole country like no one in a generation behind the idea that there is hope for a better tomorrow and together we can change things. The next day at the office, people asked me what I thought about it knowing that I had often criticized him and his campaign. I remember saying, “I feel sorry for him because there’s no way he can deliver on these people’s expectations.” And, of course, he didn’t, and now, it’s little more than a memory.
On me and Bob Dylan’s birthday in 2014, I came home from the pharmacy to discover my wife laying in the floor of our house surrounded by a puddle. She looked at me with fear in her eyes and told me her water had broken. She was only 29 weeks and 5 days pregnant. I rushed her to the hospital, and after a day filled with a lot of trauma my daughters were born. There’s a long, detailed story that, quite honestly, I don’t really like to think about because it’s too painful, but it boils down to this: the hospital was not adequately prepared for Jessica’s emergency and this was compounded by human error in the emergency area. Despite all of that, everyone survived, and I now was the father of 2 beautiful little girls. What I didn’t know at the time, but later discovered, was that Annika had been injured during labor and a portion of her brain was damaged. This left her with cerebral palsy.
Maybe someday, I will write a blog about the pain of discovering my daughter was handicapped caused me and the journey that I went on afterward. Literally years of not just anger but rage at everyone and everything that surrounded me. It’s an issue I still deal with and confront daily, but where there was once an inferno only embers now remain. But today isn’t about that. Today is about what I’ve learned.
When you are little, you play and imagine all kinds of different fantasies. I can hear my girls doing that in the other room as I type this right now. Somewhere along the line, you are taught to stop dreaming about fantasyland and start dreaming about your future. You are told, if not directly then indirectly, that if you will follow all the rules and do everything right then all your dreams will come true. It’s my belief that this lie is uniquely American. For example, if you are born in Ghana or just about anywhere else in the world, you discover very quickly that this life is no fairytale, and it will break you in every way it can. Not so here though (because there is no room for this kind of talk if you are living the “American dream”), and this is especially true among American Christians. You don’t have to be a “prosperity gospel” Christian to believe on some level that “God loves you and wants you to be happy”. We are told about Jeremiah 29:11 and Philippians 4:13 as proof of this theology. Forget about the fact that the children of Israel got led off into slavery literally only a few sentences down. That’s not important. What’s important is that if you follow the rules then you should be able to live happily ever after. If you ever have a problem, just call up what I refer to as “Magic Jesus” and he’ll grant your wishes in proportion to how good you have been. Like many people my age, I set off on this journey, and because there was no Great War and no Great Depression for us we bought into this idea wholeheartedly. In other words, we started building our Kingdom. I think that’s the big flaw. It’s Our Kingdom and not God’s. We try to do everything right. We go to college. We get married. We get a mortgage and a car. We go to church every Sunday and try not to say bad words at work. We follow the rules. And brick by brick, our Kingdom begins to form. But, this life is no fairytale, and as James says, “life (itself) is like a vapor” much less the things we have built within it. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how carefully you’ve followed the rules. At some point, life is going to rise up and smack you down. The dragon that came and destroyed my Kingdom was called Cerebral Palsy, but yours might be called something different. There are lots of them: Envy, Divorce, Death, Drugs, Abuse, Stress… it goes on and on. I have no idea what yours will be, but I can promise you that your Grendel is out there. What’s worse is like the story, if you kill it, his mother will show up and destroy what’s left. When this happens people will pity you, and you’ll find that it doesn’t help. In fact, it’s like throwing gasoline on that raging inferno that I spoke about earlier, and you are filled with resentment. That’s when you ring up Magic Jesus just as you’ve been taught only to discover that he’s not there. Even worse, you begin to believe that he doesn’t care. Finally, you wonder if he was ever real at all. This is a dark place. It’s soul crushing and the more it closes in on you the heavier it gets. It leaves you without hope, without purpose, and most certainly without religion. It was at this point that I realized that I hadn’t been following Jesus at all, but rather a fairytale. It was also at this point that He found me. Not a magical Santa Claus Jesus, but the real one, and He began to teach me things about himself. Honestly, He taught me things that I didn’t want to know, but like the Good Father that he is, he taught me anyway. He taught me that my Kingdom had never mattered to Him in the first place, but that His Kingdom should mean everything to me and I was humbled by it. He taught me that this knowledge is where the early Christians (and Christians throughout the world who are still being persecuted) found joy. A joy that allowed them to sing as they burned in front of crowds of Romans, just as countless martyrs after them. Recently, he emblazoned this on my mind yet again in the form of a story I was told about a group of Indian women who although held in slavery and used for prostitution, gather weekly to worship only to return to their lives of misery and bondage. He taught me that when He promised to rescue them it didn’t necessarily mean right here and right now. It meant that He would make it right someday. He died to give me hope in a hopeless world.
It’s changed the way I look at everything. Nothing really matters much to me anymore. I no longer have anything really, so Bob Dylan was right, I have nothing to lose. What’s more is that my eyes have been opened to hurting people like never before. I have a sense of empathy which I never had before, and I see them. Yes, my daughter can’t walk, but she’s not alone. Every single person I see is handicapped by something. No one is whole. Everyone is broken. And, they are all starving for hope. That’s why Barak Obama was so successful. He was promising that he was the answer to what they thirsted for. He’s not alone. Read any history book, and you’ll discover that there have been many, many others. They don’t always come in the form of men either. It could be the idea of America. The idea that because of our great country, you can create your Kingdom, but it’s not true. You may be rich, you will lose it. You may be an Iron man, but you will get old. You may have friends and family, one way or the other, eventually they will leave you. It’s all a mirage, but it no longer fools me. I’m not afraid of losing anything anymore, because I now realize I never really had anything to begin with. I’m just camping. I’m waiting for my real life to begin. It doesn’t matter. My eyes are now fixed on something better. The place I was meant for. A place of no handicaps not just for Annika but for anyone. A place of justice and love. I can’t wait for it, and it seems like I can’t almost see it. It’s just a little bit further. Just another 50 years or so. That’s not too long. I just have to keep going. It’s just around the corner. I just have to get over this last hill…
This world is not my home.
This is just 3 pages, but it’s taken me 5 pain filled years to write it. I’ve grown, and I no longer feel resentful when people have pity on our situation. In fact, the reverse is now true, I feel pity for people who haven’t met their Grendel yet. I haven’t reached the point where I can say that I’m thankful for CP yet, but I can say that I am thankful for who I have become. I have changed. I still love Bob Dylan, but my favorite line has just changed. Now, it is “he who isn’t busy being born is busy dying.” I want Him to keep me busy being born.
