HOLY FUCK!!!
(it's a gun!)



it's not as much a lack of time that has dictated me not posting this week as much as it's been a lack of inspiration. i guess that's kind of sad considering i have any number of good and beautiful things to write about here in my house. but, for whatever reason, my motivation has been missing. nothing like a little armed robbery to change all that, huh...

i wish i was kidding. i really do. obviously, what happened yesterday morning falls underneath the category of "things you don't believe can happen to you until they do". and they did. i was walking out to my car yesterday morning around 10:00 a.m. just like i always walk out to my car when i am taking the daily deposit to the bank. my head was down. i was in my own little world, contemplating things that i would try and accomplish when i got back to the store. behind me, i heard footsteps on the pavement that sounded like someone was running across the parking lot (little did i know...). out of curiosity, i turned to see who was in such a hurry. as i turned, i made eye contact with a black man dressed in black jeans, a long-sleeve black shirt and a black mask. the man was no more than twenty feet away from me, heading in my direction. as we made eye contact, i noticed the man was carrying some sort of revolver. i noticed the gun because as i turned and noticed the dude, the fucker cocked his weapon. out of everything that happened in that fifteen seconds or so, i will never forget the sound of him cocking that gun. instantly, my body instinctively froze. i turned my head down and the guy got right up on me, pointed the gun in the direction of my face and upper torso and screamed, "GIMME THE BAG! GIMME THE BAG! GIMME THE BAG!" i said back to him, "ok, ok, ok." i lifted the bag up with my left hand. dude grabbed the bag and took off on foot running in between sal's and o'reilly's. i wondered if i should chase after him. follow him on foot while i was calling '911' and try and give the police some direction. but as i tried to take a step, i realized that every muscle in my body had been scared stiff, literally. it was like everything in me cramped all at once. it took me taking a couple steps to loosen up and have my wits about me enough to call the cops. i did. reported the robbery. went back into the store. told the employees what had happened. called my boss. helped an officer fill out his report. and that was it. the event was over. the rest of the day was spent remembering what happened, retelling the story over and over and trying not to think about all of the things that could've happened. it was my boss that scared me the most when he said to me that it was probably a good thing i turned and caught his attention. otherwise, maybe his plan would have been to knock me out cold and take the bag off the ground or use the gun for something even worse. thankfully, neither of those things happened and i walked away not much more than stunned.

the scariest part of the aftermath was the realization that it was the easiest sum of money the guy had ever made in fifteen seconds. and the thought that if it was that easy, that he or one of his buddies would be back for more. we'll hope that doesn't happens, but we will never really know for sure. the knee-jerk reactions will lead us to change our routine. to make intentional decisions and moves that might keep anyone that is watching us off-balance. but short of hiring a hired security person (which we can't afford) to take our deposit to the bank everyday, we will never be 100 percent safe. clearly, we never were. in one of my conversations yesterday i mentioned that during my time in the store, i had played through all sorts of scenarios that included armed gunmen coming into the store to rob us, but never once had i worried about my safety walking to my car.

i will now.

so, what now? now, i have to calm down. now i have to beat back down my "inner racist" and remind myself that yesterday's trauma had nothing to do with color and everything to do with a sense of hopelessness that lead a young man to feel like robbing someone at gunpoint was his best option of taking care of himself or his family. i have to try not to hold it against "my community" and spin the positives of me being ok into action pointed towards finding ways to fill needs around the church. find ways to do my part, however little that may be, in curing a culture and neighborhood that is sick with desperation.

yesterday, i wished that the douchebag was hit by a dumptruck fleeing the scene of the crime. today, i am sorry that he felt like he had to do it, and i am thankful that i wasn't hurt in the process.

for the length of time that his eyes and his gun haunt my dreams, though, i'll ask for forgiveness in not wanting to treat the dude to lunch if we are ever properly introduced.

UNDER-WHELMING!!!

(clap, clap, clap-clap-clap)

it's what i get, really. i should've learned by now. and it works both ways. if i set myself up for something to be super-great, it will usually end up mediocre. if i spend way too much time dreading that something is going to be horrible, i am usually rewarded with the experience in question being less than loathsome. but, i haven't learned. and i let myself put too much stock into yesterday morning. in my head, i wanted our sunday school's meeting with the pastor to be more than it possibly could have been. sunday school is already short. we didn't have enough time to have a discussion. what we were given was a very gracious and humble pastor in our presence. what we were given were three or four anecdotes that were intended to give us an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny nugget of insight into the grand plan of huffman that we don't have a blueprint for yet. and i left. disappointed. again.

but i wasn't really disappointed in chris, more in myself for setting myself up for failure again. it bothers me when i make the same mistake over and over again. it seems to be an instinctual mistake. something that's wired into me. maybe it's like that for everybody. who knows. if it is, it could explain why we, as a church, continue to trip over our own feet over and over again. we don't mean to. we just can't help it. but, i can't believe that. i believe that i've conditioned myself into a bad habit. i don't smoke. i don't do drugs. my vice is to worry. what are you gonna do?

so, sure, i was underwhelmed by the experience. i think we all were. it's the first time since sarah and i rejoined the class that we've had perfect attendance. when chris walked in, it was like the principal had just interrupted class and we all piped down. we weren't talking about him, but i am sure it seemed that way. it's probably been that way with every class. well, most classes. hannah and her pre-school class probably didn't really give a shit unless he was giving out candy. i digress. we all were looking for something. and there is a small part of me that is sad that the very small, very time-constrained meeting with our senior pastor didn't foster more of a positive response. but, again, that's probably just a product of misplaced expectations.

"from the depths of despair (o, lord)", it seems as if the meeting might have fostered something more important. "hear my (our) cry (o, lord)", it seems that our class may be sending forth a collective prayer. what, in the moment, may have seemed like a letdown looks like it now could become something more. i will choose my words wisely, and i will try to govern my enthusiasm. but i think that, yesterday, our class may have turned a corner. not because of our special visit, but in spite of it. and that, my friends, gets a tired christian excited.

only god knows what we, as a collective sunday school and church, are capable of. for the first time in a long time, though, i can claim confidence as part of my artillery. when i am confident, i play a better shortstop. when i am confident, i play a better speaker. when i am confident, i play a better husband, father and friend. i have to believe the same can be said for playing a christian too.

attention, good folks of humc:

come december 2nd, things begin to change.

hannah and caroline and me
(part three)


really??? this time next week caroline will be two months old? that's kind of hard to believe, but not in the "man, time really flies" kind of way. i don't feel like the last two months have dashed by. i know sarah does. the calendar had not flipped over to october before she was stressing out about having to go back to work. and i understand that. every time i have two days off, i feel like i could never go back to work and be completely happy. that idea, in and of itself, i know is ridiculous. usually around midday of the second of any two consecutive days i have off i will find myself bored and pacing around the house looking for someone to annoy or some cat to wake up. but i couldn't imagine having a couple months off with a brand new baby girl, each day filled with not much more than taking a walk and snuggling and feeding the baby and napping, and then coming to grips with the idea of not having that anymore. coming to grips with taking that sweet baby girl to daycare and "only seeing her at night and on the weekend." it's a sad thought, but it's part of our reality. i've mentioned here that sarah and i, both, are the kind of people that need more than their kids for stimulation. i think sarah'll soon enough realize how much she likes work and helping people and it won't seem like too much of a burden. and that time at home with the baby girl and the baby, baby girl will seem even more precious. and rare. and priceless.

these first two months in the life of caroline lilla o'kelly have treated our family well. we've seen each other a lot. we've gotten on each other's nerves. we've done fun things together. we've visited with family. we're getting back into church. we're finding new friends. not giving up on old ones. we are wondering when our back yard will start to not feel weird. we've discovered the best tv show since arrested development. we laugh together. as of last week, we feed the baby together. mind you, things could be a lot worse.

and so we turn the page. we will begin to write the next chapter. the one that's titled, "caroline goes to school". it will be different, but different isn't a bad thing. it's just...different.

that next chapter will include the resurrection of the halloween carnival. it will include a new basketball season. it will include sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top and dressing. it will include my old ass turning 31. it will include christmas, which should be a new and exciting ballgame this year since we will be scaling back our commitments. i can see it also including my sunday school class deciding what direction we really want to go in. do we want to embed ourselves into every committee and ministry of our old, tired church and try to "corrupt" from within? or do we just turn the bastard on it's head and go in a new direction? i don't want to try and be the northeast birmingham annex of ginghamsburg united methodist church, but, hell, i am not above stealing anyone's good ideas. this sunday could be a turning point. the pastor comes to our sunday school class. for 45 minutes, we'll either scare him to death or excite him because he's just learned he has 15+ good soldiers to add to his army. we'll see. one thing i do know. i am certain that our class is ready to be much more than "all talk." i'll let you know what happens.

if this current chapter ends with alabama kicking tennessee's ass saturday, that'd be cool too.

5:45 a.m. will never be quite the same


5:45. that's what time my phone would wake me up on mornings during the week that i would open the store. it would give me enough time to talk myself out of bed, stumble down the stairs, feed KAMmie, get myself ready, wake hannah, get her ready and then head out the door to take hannah to school and daddy to work.

yesterday, i lost a very sweet friend. between the time i fed her thursday morning and the time sarah and i went out to feed her yesterday morning, KAMmie fell victim to a horrible, one-in-a-billion type accident and died. i intentionally steer clear from the phrase "passed away", because there was nothing peaceful about the accident. make no mistake, KAMmie's latter half of her life was taken from her through no fault of her own, through no fault of anyone, only through the fact that, on some days, life deals you a shitty-ass hand.

KAMmie was a charming, very smart puppy. she was great with hannah. she was great with anyone that would spare a second or two to pat her on the head. i thank KAM (katie, amy and meg) for presenting her to me as a birthday present almost six years ago. i thank donna for playing foster parent to her for a year and letting me have the last 14 months back with her. i thank sarah for ever and always enduring that i never taught her to not jump and loving her just the same. and i thank KAMmie for being the definition of man's best friend. i wasn't always fair to her as a dog owner. there were many days, including our last together, that the only time i would see her was at 5:45 or whenever i went out to feed her. yet, she certainly wasn't neglected. she had dogs in four or five neighboring fences that would keep her busy and entertained as they ran along their respective fences for hours on end. my retired neighbor seemed to think of her as his own as it was common for me to look out the back window and see them playing around. when i first moved into the townhouse, this made me jealous in a silly way. as time passed, it just made me happy for KAMmie. on days i needed her, though, she was there for me. happy to either walk or fetch or watch me cut grass and then sit on the porch with me. she could not be any better about sleeping inside once the weather got cold. for having no real training, there could not have been a more well-behaved dog.

today, i won't try to make any sense out of her not being here and available to our family. there is just no sense to be made. it's sad. and tragic. and doesn't make any sense. it throws us off our routine. it grounds us. reminds us of the fragility of life in general. i never had a two-way conversation with KAMmie and i won't go so far as to say we've lost a member of our family. but i cared for her deeply. and in her own way, she cared for me too. i will never forget her. and i will never set my alarm for 5:45 again.

today, i miss my dog. if i happen to run into her again in the next life, that would make me happy.

refine is a good word


if only we were as aware before the service as we were at the end, maybe this week's world communion sunday service would have felt like less of a trainwreck. from chris' knowing admission that translating an entire worship service "takes time" to feedback i've received from the very few people i've talked to about the service, consensus seems to be that the way the whole thing went down sunday morning was a little like forcing a a square peg through a round hole. it'll probably go, but something's going to end up broken. the common breaking point sunday morning seemed to be the congregation's patience. you could feel the restlessness like it was leaning against you. i could see eyes rolling. i could feel my own doing the same. my sister-in-law and brother-in-law looked liked they were being held against their will. all that being said, it was almost admirable, the way the congregation waited the proceeding out as to not offend anyone by getting out while the getting was good. first, let's take a look at what went wrong...

1) so, in all of the preparation for this mash-up of a service, not one person wondered aloud, "so, if we translate every part of the service, we'll be here twice as long, right?" i mean, no one? it didn't cross anyone's mind??? that seemed to be the case. as chris, more or less, apologized for the length and thanked us for our patience, he, more or less, admitted that this was the case. and that...that is poor planning. that is the lack of awareness that i speak about. that is the type of mistake that i told julie that we couldn't afford to make. that is what makes us laughable at times. and not ha-ha laughable but "i would rather laugh than cry" laughable. just sad. so, we ran late. just under an hour late, which in the grand scheme of all of our lives is not that much time. the painful part was not being alerted to the possibility of it beforehand. but that was out of the question, because our worship leaders didn't realize it until it was already happening. and that's too bad.

2) when putting together worship services that were out of the ordinary while i served on a couple different church staffs, we tended to practice them. a lot. we didn't practice a lot just to put people out or have an alternative to a regular sunday night program or to waste time. everyone needed to be on the same page. when common ground in huntsville joined forces for a home and home worship event with another huntsville church plant, it was a great idea for our worship teams to play and lead worship together, but had we decided that we could have just gotten together on sunday morning, pull something out of our ass and do our thing, it would have sounded like crap. this past sunday, figuratively, sounded like crap a lot of the time. not the individual elements necessarily (although, wow, could we get just one more verse of that offertory?), but the fact that our translator was never sure what he was supposed to translate, the offertory team used most of the offertory time to set up and then they sang or the technical difficulties that delayed the start of the service and were present throughout. practice doesn't always make perfect, but it does help make a person feel like the worship leaders were given their part before the morning of the service.

3) i have never spoken to a group with the help of a translator, and sarah tells me that it can be quite awkward and unnerving, so i will give julie the benefit of that doubt, but wow. i wasn't sure if she was so loud and animated for the sake of our guests or because she was nervous. to me, though, the entire experience was like listening to twenty minutes of a crying caroline having a conversation with nails on a chalkboard.

4) i don't know if i mentioned this, but the service was really, really long.

what went right?

1) frank. that's it. that's the list. our translator extraordinaire. frank stole the show and hopefully gave everyone something posititve to remember the experience by. it did me. he was at the beck and call of both of our pastors and handled every one of their requests beautifully. he was humble. charming. and very respectful of his place in the service. good job, frank.

like i mentioned earlier, this is not to say that the individual elements of the service were all bad. the hispanic music team did a fine job with the offertory. to quote my brother-in-law, the connection of the two parables was "soft", but the message was fine and relevant to the day as a whole. communion was had and was good, even if the memory of my "body" falling on the ground before i ate it paled in comparison to jack's "blood" being ripped from him so that a couple folks could drink directly from the cup. mmmmmm....backwash. this is to say that something championed as a wonderful day of togetherness and overcoming obstacles should have been more intentional about being put together so there would be fewer obstacles to overcome.

i mentioned in sunday school prior to the service that i have been struggling with feeling a connectedness to our hispanic "ministry", and i don't know if that changed sunday. it's not like it was that congregation's fault that we weren't prepared. and i do think i now have a man-crush on frank. but if we are to make a difference in this community, whether it's with hispanics or blacks or whites or purples that are not currently connected to us, we have to be better than we were sunday during worship. we have to be more thoughtful. more polished. and more aware that our room for error decreases with every misstep.

we have to be aware enough to not set ourselves up for failure and announce that we will be expecting 500(!?!?!...really???) people to our building the sunday before halloween (after taking two years off, the random figure we came up with to set our bar was 500?) . we have to refine before we screw up and not after.

sunday, in theory, was a good day. and in practice, there were positives to build on. there could have been more, though.

WATCH PUSHING DAISIES!!!

it's ok. i blame myself. maybe i just started my campaign too late. did i watch the little piece of heaven that was arrested development from the start? yes. yes, i did. but did i start imploring everyone i know to begin watching the greatest comedy in the history of television from the very start? no, because i was an idiot. because i loved the show and no one else was talking about it, it felt like my own little secret. i used the same retarded logic that some music elitists (myself, at times, included) subscribe to when they find an indie band on some obscure label that rocks their world. it would make sense for them to share the musical goodness with all their friends. encourage them to go buy the cd in the hopes that the indie band will make enough money to make another record. but, that's not how we do it. we keep the band to ourselves and then wonder why we never hear from them again (r.i.p. - bearvsshark, mu330, link 80, any band on asianman records, etc.). and that's how i was with arrested development. finally, it become too much and i wanted to talk about it with folks. how funny it was. how laugh-a-minute it could be. but i ran into a problem. people had kind of heard of it, but no one had seen it. if they had, it was only the commercials that ran very randomly on fox. and then it went away...because of me.

but not this time. not with pushing daisies. i start my solicitation today, two days removed from the series premiere. please, PLEASE give this show a chance. why, do you ask? what is it? it's a fairy tale. it's edward scissorhands. it's romantic. and sad. and clever. visually, it's quirky and beautiful. it's playful. it's smart. it's all of these things, all at the same time. and quite to my surprise, it was the best hour of television, lost excluded, that i have ever seen. i had this feeling of joy and anticipation from the very first scene and it lasted throughout the entire episode. in short, the story is this. our hero is ned. and ned has a unique gift/curse. he has the ability to touch a dead person/thing and bring it magically back to life. he discovers the gift as a child and, through practice and loss, learns the rules of his gift the hard way. the hard way, it turns out, is that the second touch to someone/something once dead will return it to the next life. as an adult, he learns that his childhood sweetheart has tragically met her end. he goes to the funeral home with the intent of learning how and why she dies, but when he wakes her, his heart takes over and our ned cannot convince himself to touch her a second time (which ned usually does after learning how the deceased met their end so that he and his partner may then collect whatever reward may be waiting for such information).

and that decision, the decision to let a girl named chuck be "alive again" raises the romantic question that i assume will be the lifeblood of the series. what would you do if you could not touch the love of your life? could you do it? could i do it? for the sake of the heart and the life of this show, for the sake of this post, i am going to say yes.

i guarantee you this. if you watch the first episode of this show (i am sure you can find it online), you will come away feeling that you can. that if you saw that one person, that one love of your life and nature always placed an invisible wall between you and your chuck, it wouldn't matter. you could still see their smile. hear their voice. share their company. and that would be enough.

you should watch pushing daisies.