Related by Choice

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Doc Arnett

The man who underestimates the power of blood to draw a clan together had better steer clear of eastern Kentucky. Some of those folks are mighty peculiar about such things. They might get in a fight and try to break a cousin’s arm off on a Saturday night but if you so much as spit in that cousin’s direction the next week, they’ll come right after you. “Blood’s thicker than water,” my grandma used to say, which I figured must be why grandpa was always pouring water into that leaky ole radiator on his tractor. I didn’t think buttermilk would work very well.

That family thing can be a bit tricky for an outsider to figure out. Sometimes it’s just plain impossible. I read an article last year about Kentucky’s homicide rates. Kentucky has one hundred-and-twenty counties. Take away the two urban areas of Louisville/Jefferson and Lexington/Fayette and there’s a ten-county section of eastern Kentucky that on average accounts for eighty percent of killings in the whole state. What’s even more intriguing to me: eighty percent of those murders are committed by family members. Yep, right there where the family ties are so strong that they’ll go to war over a stray pig, the person most likely to kill you is someone to whom you are related.

Now I’m all out, sure ’nuff, tee-totally, all the way from here to Sunday in favor of family members, siblings, cousins, in-laws and out-laws supporting one another, loving one another and helping one another out. The Bible even says that any dude who won’t provide for his own is lower than an infidel. So, yes, I believe that families should take care of each other.

If we’ll all be honest, though, there are lots of family members, and not all of them are stuck in some hollow in Kentucky, who seem to focus a lot more on using blood-relation as an excuse for violence and vengeance rather than as an obligation to show the love and compassion of Christ. I suppose for people such as that any excuse to kick somebody upside the head is as good as another and doing it “for my blood” just sounds downright honorable.

What sounds a lot more honorable to me and what impresses me a lot more are the people I’ve known who made family love a choice of will and purpose rather than a consequence of pedigree. Step-moms and step-dads, step-grandmas and step-grandpas, aunts and uncles by virtue of friendship rather than shared genetic material. I’ve known such people as this to spend countless hours fishing and hunting, teaching skills and hobbies, traveling together, reading books together, tramping across the country, going to ballgames, building stuff in the backyard and otherwise just hanging out together.

What’s really cool to me is that quite often in these relationships, people get so used to the love that they forget they aren’t even related. “Well of course she’s my real grandma!! She ain’t artificial!”

What really defines and constructs our strongest relationships is caring, concern, helping, sharing, working together, pitching in and sometimes, just being there. Regardless of the amount of shared DNA.

But, yes, I do recognize that blood is thicker than water. So is buttermilk. Some folks think they’re both easy to spill.

Love? You can’t cut that stuff! It’ll outlast everything on the planet. And that’s what really defines “family.”

H. Arnett
1/29/15

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Ordinary Heroes

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Doc Arnett

I’m rarely impressed by the rich and famous. I don’t care when Kim and Kanye’s next baby or next fight is due and I’m not all that worried about whether or not What’s Her Name will return for next season or if she’ll get killed off in the last episode of this season. There are several actors, musicians, performers and even a couple of politicians that I respect but I do not live my life through their accomplishments, escapades, peccadilloes, fiascos or Fritos. I think celebrity worship is frequently wasteful and generally distasteful. Some people talk about the rich and famous as if they are personally connected and mutually invested in one another. As for me, I don’t even really care one way or the other who wins the Super Bowl.

What I do care about, what does concern and impress me are the ordinary people I know who bear up under the toughest licks of life and yet continue to live their lives. The current Flavor of the Week breaks a nail or gets into a fight or has to give her Shih Tzu up for adoption on some ludicrous “reality show” (now there’s an oxymoron for you) and five million fans plus the Flavor act as if it will take a million dollars’ worth of meds along with an entire squadron of counselors and interventionists to get Flavor safely to next week’s show.

In quite different fashion, these common folk endure the most hell-awful tragedies and yet continue to love their families, work their jobs, tend their farms and help their neighbors. “Just part of it,” they shrug and bend their shoulder back to the wheel. They cry for their lost loved ones, they feel the keen pain of grief and they have their times of night’s black sorrow, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon. But they keep on, putting one foot in front of the other and pushing it toward the next day, the next hour, the next step.

I admire their spirit, their heart, their determination, their lack of pretension, their ruggedness, their persistence, their devout stubbornness for life. Another thing that I admire about them is that it would never occur to them that they’re doing anything that anyone would even notice, much less admire. They are full well aware of their own frailties, their own shortcomings, their own bad habits and maybe even a vice or two. But they have no idea how special it is that they continue to go about earning their daily bread, finishing their chores, caring for their families, doing the same ole same ole day after day after day.

They carry their own loads and help others with theirs. They do not curse the darkness nor rail against the injustice of their lives. They simply live them.

They are my heroes.

H. Arnett
1/28/15

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To Honor Those We Lose

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Doc Arnett

When it seems that all of life is hell
and heaven but a dream,
when it seems that your wretched heart
has been wrenched at every seam,

When every breath feels like a burden,
every thought a racking pain,
when it seems that all is pointless
and loss your only gain,

When your dreams have turned to torture
and your waking endless hurt,
when the things that were so precious
now seem like so much dirt:

Do not let your pain define you
nor your days extend your night,
even when your eyes are dimmed,
do not rebuke the light.

Though the loss holds deep within you
and its weight is hard to bear,
there are others close around you
with hearts that long to share.

Though none can know the pain
exactly as it feels to you,
they know keenly that you feel it
and the ache they share is true.

May your grieving yet be guiltless,
and your crying without shame,
may you savor every memory,
and keep precious that cherished name.

If your tears be shed openly
or held till lone within the woods,
forgive every fault and falter,
give true thanks for what was good.

Honor those you loved
by loving those they leave,
keep the best of what they were
and in your heart will always be.

H. Arnett
1/27/15

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A Sharing of Grief

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Doc Arnett

I still remember the sense of shock and awkwardness I felt forty years ago in my first official duty of helping a church family deal with tragedy and loss. I was preaching at Drakesboro Church of Christ in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Herb was my age, with a wife and baby. We’d gone to school together for one year as freshmen at Sturgis Junior High in Union County. He was a cheerful, friendly fellow, well-liked as a kid and as a young adult. He worked as an electrician in the coal mines.

One day, he got confused about whether or not he’d shut off the power on a 600-Volt line. He started back to the breaker box to check, snapped his fingers and said, “No, I already shut that breaker off.” He went back to where he was working and cut into the line. His confusion killed him; the power had not been shut off and he was electrocuted as soon as he cut into the line.

What do you say to grieving parents and sister? What do you tell a twenty-two-year-old woman with a baby that she will now raise alone? What comfort do you bring?

Over the space of the next forty years, I continued to deal with similar questions in a variety of situations that all shared one commonality: the death of a loved one. In some cases, the death was a blessing, the release of a soul imprisoned in an aged body racked with pain and agony. In some, it was sheer tragedy: for instance, a young man whose ultra-light plane crashed in the backyard and view of his parents. To lesser degree, a man who’d talked fondly of retirement for several years and died of a heart attack less than three months after his retiring.

Many of those who passed on were more than casual acquaintance, some were close friends. A few times, I tried to help others deal with the aftermath of suicide by loved ones. I was sometimes called on to do funerals for people I’d never met.

In all of those situations, I tried to honor the memory of the deceased and ease the pain of those who grieved them. This week, I will try once again, though in completely unfamiliar territory: death by murder.

As always, I feel keenly the sense of inadequacy, though more deeply in this case. I cannot trace out the finer good in this, no notion of sparing, no sense of higher purpose. All I can see at this point is the brutal impact of an ex-husband’s vengeance, the stupidity of hatred. The confessed shooter will likely spend most, if not all, of the rest of his life in prison. His own wife and his family are already scarred by his actions. His own young children will know, for the rest of their lives, that their father tried to kill their mother, leaving her bleeding and disfigured in her own home and her boyfriend dead.

How do I make all of that make sense to those who loved Andrew and who love Amanda and her children?

In the end, it has never been my primary purpose to make sense of the particular timing of loss and death. That is often a fool’s game, I think, and doesn’t really do that much to make grieving people feel better about things. It’s not lack of faith on my part; I absolutely believe that God is at work in all things for those who love him.

Rather than trying to convince Andrew’s mother and father, his sister, his friends, his relatives that this is what God desired for him and them, I will try to honor the memory of this gentle giant, point out to them what a great number of people share their sorrow and care about their grief and pain. I will pray fervently that none of us give in to wrath and vengeance, bitterness and hatred.

In my own inadequacy, I will count upon that far greater Strength and Wisdom upon which I have always relied. I will pray and believe that God’s Holy Spirit will continue to minister the comfort and consolation that I have witnessed again and again over the six decades of my life thus far. Even to people who don’t believe in that ministry.

H. Arnett
1/26/15

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Christmas Miracle-Part Two

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Doc Arnett

After learning of the little social experiment which showed that something as simple as asking a different question from Santa could lead children to be more considerate and generous, I thought I’d try the idea out myself.

So I says to my self, says I, “Self… Yo, Self. Over here, it’s me, dadgummit,” in my very best Walter Brennan voice with a little bit of vernacular thrown in from each half of the previous century. I’ve found it best to sort of sneak up on myself whenever I’m about to propose one of those self-improvement projects. The ole badger is getting pretty cagey about such nonsense. I cornered the rascal on the recliner with a cup of coffee in his hand.

“Self,” I says then, says I, “how would Christmas be different for us if we just totally forgot about getttin’ and focused on givin’ this year?”

Boy Howdy, did that send a shock wave across the living room. It bounced off the flat screen TV and hit Self right in the chest. Coffee spewed across the carpet, spattering the glass panes on the French door that opens into the mudroom. A few minutes of a paper bag smooshed against his face calmed the hyperventilating and generally muffled the profanity. A quick elbow to the stomach ended the attempt to flee the scene, and further helped with the hyperventilating. It’s pretty tricky to hyperventilate when your lungs are suddenly and decisively voided of air.

It took most of the evening but I got the idea across and a plan laid out.

I decided that even though it was a bit chilly in mid-December and our garage has no significant source of heat, Self and I were going to surprise all of my daughters with a handmade Christmas gift. It took a few days, a bit of shivering, several breaks inside the house and a lot of dust and elbow grease but I got them all made and shipped in time for Christmas. Well, nearly all of them. Apparently, Key West, Florida, is only technically part of the United States. UPS’s delivery schedule treats them more like a land-locked country near the lower portion of one of the southern hemisphere’s continents.

I didn’t include a note explaining the intended purpose of the hand-made gift but one of my daughters-in-law had it figured out almost instantly. By eight a.m. on Christmas Day, I had received a picture of the cherry and poplar rack with a freshly baked casserole still in a 9 x 13 baking pan sitting right in the exactly intended position. All of the daughters apparently were just pretty darned pleased with their gifts. And their perceptive mates seemed to figure out that anything that encouraged and rewarded home cooking was a good deal for them, too.

Throughout all of the work cutting, shaping, drilling, boring, sanding, gluing and finishing and continuing right on to the packing, hauling and shipping, I was just pretty darn pleased with myself, thinking that nine women that I love were going to be pretty well pleased with me and my Self, too. In spite of his celebratory inclination, Self just had to point out, “Counting all the daughters, I only come up with seven.”

Self was always better in math than I was but less proactive in personal matters. “We have a wife and she has a sister-in-law who lives close by here. They both are mighty fine cooks.” Even Self understood that proximity and culinary talent is a very powerful combination.

And Self, well in spite of his original lack of enthusiasm for the idea, he had just about the best Christmas he’s ever had since setting the neighbor’s Christmas tree on fire back in the 50’s. Including that lesson about pine needles and Roman Candles and the general drawbacks of indoor incendiary celebrations, we’ve both learned a lot over the years.

This wasn’t the first time we both learned something from kids, either. The best lessons came from one born in a manger a couple of thousand years ago. I think he’s the one who was quoted as having said, “It is better to give than to receive.”

H. Arnett
1/23/15

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Christmas Miracle-Part One

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Doc Arnett

For a few different reasons, some of which I am aware, I will have to say that I enjoyed this Christmas more than most. Right at the start of the season, I read about an experiment conducted with two groups of young children. As the first group visited with Santa in pairs, they were asked, “What do you want for Christmas?” The second group, also in pairs, were asked, “What gifts are you planning to give for Christmas?”

The first group all responded very quickly with the typical lists, some of which were a bit lengthy. The second group had many who seemed confused by the question. “What do you mean?” some asked. Some assumed Santa misspoke and began giving the list of what they wanted. This was a persistent Santa, though, probably a moonlighting third-grade teacher, and he didn’t turn the little brats loose until they at least attempted to identify some gifts they at least wanted to give someone.

Immediately after leaving Santa, the pairs of kiddoes went to one of his happy little green-clad helpers.

“I have two surprise gifts,” Master Green Everything announced, lifting two pieces of packaged candy. One package was about five times as large as the other piece. “I only have one of the large ones and one of the small ones. Who wants to choose first?” Although the competition was often very close, MGE could always identify a winner. “Which piece do you want?” he asked the winner. About eighty percent of these kids in Group One chose the big piece for themselves, leaving the pitiful little losers with the runt piece of candy. Facial expressions were pretty telling on both sides of the big piece.

With the second group, the results were dramatically different. Over sixty percent of these little scampers opted to forego the large piece and instead took the small piece for themselves.

Isn’t it just downright inspiring to see how a very simple bit of prodding kids out of their usual preoccupation with selfishness can so quickly change their predisposition toward sharing and consideration? Just think what several years of parental example might do!

Lord willing and Paul Harvey estate not suing, tomorrow I’ll give you the rest of the story. My little story in which no elves are exploited, no candy changes hands. But there is a small miracle near a dusty backstreet.

H. Arnett
1/22/15

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Blessing in the Messing

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Doc Arnett

It sometimes seems like the bottom is falling out, so many things going on and going “wrong” that you just feel like throwing your hands up and surrendering to whatever it is that’s coming up next. Even in our small congregation and even smaller Sunday morning Bible Study group, there are so many friends and family facing health challenges: cancer, terminal disease, chronic afflictions, surgery and other hospitalizations, and other tragedies. Our prayer list gets longer each week.

And yet, even in the midst of that, there are still encouragements: family healings, reconciliations, improved financial situations, good visits, new births and so on. Somehow, we often tend to separate the events and circumstances of our lives into “good” and “bad.” Certainly, there are many things that are more pleasant than others. It’s kind of hard to imagine how the death of a grandparent and getting a job promotion could be seen as fitting onto the same list.

In reality, it’s a bit more complicated, I think. Sometimes, unpleasant and undesired events bring couples, families and friends closer together. Sometimes, what seems like good fortune, say a job promotion for example, actually brings more stress and/or the loss of relationships. I had a good friend many years ago who went blind at the age of forty or so. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” he confided many years later. Even though I would never have wished it on him, after listening to his explanation, I understood what he meant.

He’d gained insights, understandings and a level of faith he could not imagine having happened any other way. As I look back at disappointments in my life, I can see benefits that came as a result of circumstances I would never have chosen. Even in the events from which I could not determine the good gained, I still believe that there was good.

I’m not suggesting that we embrace every calamity, tragedy and horror as something good, nor proposing that every perceived blessing be rejected for some potential drawback. Instead, I think that I should be less prone toward too readily dividing life’s events into my quick little lists. All of it is life. It seems good to be cautious about the things we desire, recognizing that the same fire that brings welcome warmth could also burn down the house if we get too careless with it.

I think it’s good, too, to view the challenges and even the heartaches as part of the fabric that makes us who we are. If we make wise choices and deliberate focus on God’s good work, we’ll see that even those things can bring unexpected good. Hearts that have together endured life’s most painful weatherings are bound together in ways that the fairest days can never bring.

Even though we never seek those darker moments, we might be a bit slower to curse them.

H. Arnett
1/21/15

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Winter Invocation

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Doc Arnett

A quarter moon hangs high
in an infinite sky infinitely blue
except for the slight hue of rose
rising at the rim of the ridge
that runs mostly east along the creek.

A narrow band of bottom land
spans the few miles from here to the river.
The distant shapes of cottonwood and sycamore
raise black branches above the base
of other trees.

They stand stark against the morning,
leafless and bare in the clear frozen air.

Above and across the entire span
of all the land a man can view from one place,
not a single cloud can be seen;
the sky is as clean and clear
as mountain air on a northern slope.

We live in hope of days like this:
endless, vast as dreams and strong as love,
shielded from every evil wind
and spending this one still moment
in deliberate consciousness.

There is precious promise
in days begun in silent praise
of what is good, pure, lovely, honest and excellent.

No matter what endings they hold,
such beginning
is worthy of gratitude,
worthy of adoration.

H. Arnett
1/16/15

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The Evil of Religion

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Doc Arnett

With each new atrocity, each new arrogance, each new monstrosity, there are those ready to re-voice their deeply held convictions about the evils of religion. “See,” they growl with great fervor, “the world would be better off without religion.” Indeed, it seems there is an abundance of evil rooted in religion, or more accurately, veiled in religion.

Personally, I don’t see much more virtue in the Crusades than in the Russian purges or Islamic jihads but I suppose the courageous knights perhaps targeted fewer women and children. At least, as far as our version of that history goes, they mainly focused on armed combatants. Lost upon them, and upon many current claimants of faith is the incredible irony of killing in the name of the Prince of Peace, who quite plainly told his disciples to put down their swords, turn the other cheek, return good for evil and even to love their enemies. As far back as belief can be traced, we find followers who quite easily ignore all inconvenient aspects of whatever doctrines they claim to believe. Religion has long been twisted to purposes more private: greed, power and sadistic satiation.

While radicalized followers may indeed claim that their cause and care are born of deep devotion to their finest beliefs, it seems much more likely to me that it is more about vengeance and hatred. Those twisted qualities transcend all religions, even those that most plainly condemn them. While the most severe sects of Islam clearly accept and even exalt murderous and cowardly actions of terrorism, there is no shortage of Christians, Hindus, Jews, and even Buddhists who are quite ready to shed the blood of those they perceive to be threats to their way of life.

Strangely enough, if we accept the simplistic explanation of the anti-religion quadrant, there has never been any lack of murderous evil among those most opposed to religion, either. To the best of my knowledge, Stalin wasn’t a born again Baptist.

Whether its inflictors are pagan or atheist, fundamentalist or agnostic, the true root of violence is far more universal than a particular religion or even religion itself; it is the desire to dominate, control and annihilate whatever threatens or interferes with ambition. Its home is in all those willing to exalt the most base of human emotions over the finest of our divine desires. Strip away the shrouds and masks and we find that Boko Haram, ISIS and the KKK all serve at the same shrine.

Nonetheless, those of us with less radical beliefs must take caution ourselves. It is often in our moments of greatest condemnation of the actions of others that we ourselves are at greatest risk of violating our own beliefs.

H. Arnett

1/13/15

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Gifts of Perception

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Doc Arnett

I think one of the challenges old badgers like me face at Christmas-time and other gift-giving occasions has to do with the shifts of time and age. In other words, what we nearly-educated folk used to call “the generation gap.” I’m guessing my parents thought the gap was mighty huge when we kids started rolling cigarette packs up in the sleeves of our tee shirts, puttin’ stick-em instead of slick-em on our hair and wearing tenney shoes even when we weren’t going anywhere near a tennis court. I can’t imagine the wrath and fury of harsh looks that swiveled their way toward that first teenager who wore blue jeans to church.

Actually, I can imagine it; I went to church bare-footed a couple of times just to see what people would do. I was very disappointed, actually. My revolution never got off the ground and a church elder whose wisdom and gentleness far out-matched my youthful rebellion had me back on the straight and narrow faster than you can say “Power to the people.” Back to the generation gap…

I used to wonder, ever so briefly, what it was like for folks raised on “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” when I’d drive by with my 8-track blasting out “Born to Be Wild” or “Born on the Bayou” from my 20-watt stereo speakers cheerfully bouncing on the rear deck of my 1967 Opel Kadette. I think I got a pretty good idea of what that was like for the old folks in Browns Grove, Kentucky, the first time I went to the grocery store in Gower, Missouri back in the late Eighties and heard a couple of kids boom-boxing the whole cotton-picking parking lot with some rancid rap CD. It’s hard for me to believe that CCR or Three Dog Night or even Steppenwolf could have affected my dad the way that putresance affected me but I suspect the culture shock was pretty close on both seismic registers.

Since both of my parents grew up in the direst, deepest and darkest parts of the Depression, they believed that store-bought socks and underwear were the height of blue-collar luxury. And so, that was a key part of every Christmas when I was growing up. I said “key part” not “highlight.” Being the spoiled little brat that I was, I kind of thought that socks and underwear ought to be pretty much a given rather than be given on such a special occasion, particularly in a family that bought a brand new automobile every three or four years. You can imagine how spoiled my kids were by the time they reached middle-school age.

Some sixty years after most people believed the Depression had ended, two of my kids were discussing presents on Christmas Eve out at my parents’ house in Coldwater, which is only a few miles from Browns Grove.

“What do you think we’ll get from Granny and Pappaw?” the eighth-grader asked the sixth-grader. The younger one replied without any hesitation and with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, “Probably socks and underwear.”

What neither of them knew at the time and I didn’t know until later was that Granny overheard their conversation. None of the six kids ever got the socks and underwear she had already purchased for them. She returned everything to the store and never brought any of them another Christmas present again. Never whispered a word of why to any of them.

Funny thing is, those same two boys were talking about the incident about twenty years later. The younger one said, “You know, ‘socks and underwear’ sound like good presents to me now.” “Yep,” the older one agreed, “sure do.” But not those tidy-whiteys, I guess.

At any gift-giving time, I think it’s good for the givers to try and understand the wants and wishes of the giftees and to at least consider the possibility that times and tastes might have changed a bit over the past two or three generations. Heck, you might even just come right out and ask, “What sort of inexpensive and useful gift would you like to have?” On second thought, you might just delete the adjectives and come up with a better question.

It’s also good for the getters to try to consider the intent and perspective of the givers. Regardless of which side of the generation gap we happen to find ourselves on, a bit of mutual effort can help us all at least stay within hollering distance.

H. Arnett
1/6/15

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