There is a longer story to my otherwise uninteresting life as a VERY average guitar player and more specifically to the guitars that I have called my own. As I have now gotten to listen to my son learning to play guitar down in our basement, it reminds me how special my 2nd guitar was to me and how much I would love to have it back.

The short version of the story is this…

I had planned to always play the first guitar that I ever owned, I still have it and still play it. My son took it with him to summer camp this year, much like I did almost 30 years ago. It is a simple foreign made Martin guitar sold under the name Goya around1990. It sounds fine, I recieved it as a Christmas gift in 5th grade, but mostly left it in the case leaning against a bookshelf in the corner of my room for 4 plus years, until I decided to pick it up and try in earnest to learn to play it. I love that guitar and always said that I would only get another guitar if I found something with a story. I would have to be compelled. Maybe I would find something at a garage sale, or maybe some eventual mentor would offer for me to have his in a symbolic gesture. A story that one might re-tell in the form of a song played on that same guitar. You know, sentimental, nostalgic stuff.

During a trip home on a holiday break from college, I noticed a sign in a storefront window as I drove down a familiar hometown street. The sign said “Handmade Guitars”

No way. There was NO. WAY. that someone was making handmade guitars in my town under my nose and I had never noticed. While I was (am) neither the level of guitarist who should play a custom handmade guitar, nor was I in the financial position to purchase a handmade custom guitar, still I was curious.

I walked in to find one gentlemen sitting on a stool in the the shop that was thick with the smells of fresh wood, glue and sentiment. Hank had recently moved to Ruston after retiring from the Coast Guard. His wife had grown up in Ruston and had returned there now to be nearer to aging parents. Hank was starting a second career as a luthier, repairing stringed instruments and building guitars in whatever town he found himself. I introduced myself and explained why I felt I just had to stop by. We talked for quite a while and he told me that he makes them one at a time for particular people. That being the case I had to ask if he even had anything in his shop that he had built in my hometown that I could hold in my hands.

He pointed to one guitar on a stand in the corner, “That is a guitar that has taught me many lessons. It started out as a 12 string build for a musician in Branson, but I had to build him another one.” This was a beautiful jumbo style acoustic, it was almost blond on top with bright maple sides. Hank explained to me how making a mistake on a guitar can cost you hours and hours of labor. That is why most major guitar manufacturers would require an employee to immediately saw an instrument in half and start over if they damaged it in any way during a build. It was not just to protect the brand’s quality standards, it was because the company knows that any true craftsman they hire or train is capable of repairing a guitar to play as if it were brand new and in many cases to look and be brand new. The problem is that it takes so very much longer.

So, when Hank had accidentally dropped a file through the top of this guitar, he quickly set about mending it and fixing it until he had spent so much time, he could have rebuilt it from scratch more than once. As you can imagine that guitar hung with a great weight on that rack in the corner, a warning signal and a trophy of prodigal perseverance.
Realizing that it had been made in the place that I considered my hometown, I had to ask, “Is that something that you would sell?” (almost jokingly). Hank considered it for a moment and said he would. We talked some more and agreed that I could buy it on a few conditions. The first was that I pay for it myself, that I not borrow money from my parents and secondly that I come pick it up when I have earned the money. “I think that its better for a young man to wait for a season and to feel the cost of something that he longs to have.” My face flushed with embarrassment over the thought that had run through my mind of asking my Dad if I could use his credit card - but I immediately appreciated what he said. Sensing my unease, he said, “this is yours, I will take care of it until you can come get it.” Then he named a sum that was a fraction of what it should have cost new, yet it still took me most of my 3 months earnings as a summer camp counselor to pay for it. By the time that I could pay for it, he had temporarily moved back to D.C. at the request of the U.S. Coast Guard. I flew to Washington to pick it up and then played it for 15 years. In a note that Hank gave me with the guitar that day (which I still have) he reminded me of the beauty that can be seen not just in a perfectly made guitar, but maybe even more so in a guitar that had been wounded and healed, like Jesus whose wounds can still be seen even in his resurrected body, and like us, who are being mended as we are held in his nail scarred hands. Hanks gentleness and willingness to talk about things like this is matched with a tender tone of voice that draws you in.

There is so much more to the story to tell, but most of what I want to do today is to re-start an effort to find this lost guitar.

As best I can recall, sometime in 2018, in the process of loading things into my truck after church, I accidentally left the guitar (in its case) on the curb of the West Feliciana Library (or somewhere in West Fel). By the time that I realized it was gone, it was, well… gone.

I assume that someone found it and took it with them instead of taking it inside the building or to some authority where I might retrieve it. I asked around and looked around for months. Pawn Shops, closets in the library, people’s houses and other places that I had remembered playing it - maybe I had just forgotten it somewhere else.
I eventually had to call my friend Hank to tell him that, while I had not sold it or given it away, the guitar was no longer in my possession. I feared that he might get a confusing phone call someday from someone researching a guitar that they had just found or purchased. There are few enough of his guitars out in the world that eventually word could get back to him, and I wanted him to know that I was looking for it. Much more has taken place since then, but the fact remains that my
Baruch1 Ps150 Guitar Serial #009
is out there somewhere, and I would love to have it back. I do not need to know where it has been or why. If someone has purchased it from someone else, I would be happy to figure out a way to make that right as well. I truly don’t need to know details, I would just like to bring it home.

I have attached pictures below. Please let me know if you have seen this and please share this with you know someone in the guitar or music or resale community who might have run across it.

I saw the space shuttle today
Up close – enough to touch
But keep away
Museum rules are such

I had a space shuttle toy once
Die-cast and matchbox style
Shiny and smooth
In the crease of my hand

The real space shuttle is too big
Too big for memories
Rough like burlap
Like a child’s art project

What I was told would be shiny
Was not smooth nor polished
Burned and tattered
By transitions
Like adult things.

Todd Snider was an artist who made you feel what he feels. And he clearly felt a lot.

Snider was also the first person that I encountered and thought, “I can imagine that he finds it very difficult to go through life without some kind of chemical calming agent.” I understood how someone could end up convinced that they needed to be on drugs. I am not endorsing that as a solution to life’s difficulties, I am just saying that I recognized in him someone who was carrying more than most of us.

Todd Snider fit the definition of an artist as “one who does not look away2”. His music made me uncomfortable and encouraged at the same time. I even included one of his songs on the soundtrack that played behind the slide show at our rehearsal dinner. That is about as high of praise as you can get from middle-class-white-people.

“Heeeeyyy, Baby, I ain’t afraid to be your man, I don’t need a destination, I ain’t waiting for a plan. Let’s get out of here, I’d go anywhere with you.” (“Anywhere” by Todd Snider)

Chase (my aforementioned roommate and Snider evangelist) wrote CD3 reviews for The Daily Mississippian our college newspaper. When Todd Snider came to Oxford to play a solo show at Proud Larry’s, Chase got the opportunity to interview Snider for a few minutes before the show and to chat with him very briefly afterward.
“Chase Farmer,” he said upon introduction, “man that is an awesome name, Chassse Faaarmerr.”

During the brief interview Chase asked Snider about his songs called “Crossroads” and “Somebody’s coming.” These were two of Snider’s songs that suggest that he knew that he (and all of us) ultimately needed not just something but someone to bear our burdens. He asked Snider if he planned on playing either of them. He confessed that they were not in his set list. (I can’t imagine that Snider ever had much of a “set list”). Later during the show, he did play “Somebody’s Comin’” and dedicated it to Chase.

A number of years later Chase and his wife got tickets to see Snider in Birmingham, Alabama. This would be Chase’s first time to see Snider live since college. As Snider walked off the stage during an intermission he made eye contact with Chase for the first time and casually says. “Oh, hey, Chase”
My friend looked at his wife to make sure that he had heard what he thought he had heard. “Did he just say my name?” Shelley confirmed it. Most people would not remember that interview let alone the name and apparently the face of the overanxious Southern Baptist kid who fumbled through questions while he wondered if Snider was high or just about to be.

Todd Snider famously told stories of receiving random phone calls from singer song writer Jerry Jeff Walker. The great gonzo himself called because he needed Snider to remind him of lyrics to his own songs!

Todd Snider had a lot on his mind. He had a lot in his mind. He had a lot in his soul that spilled out in his unforgettable music and stories. He refused to look away, and seemingly refused to forget. It was no doubt a curse that became a blessing to so many.

We were in the stage of married life when date nights were as simple as sharing a combo-meal at Wendy’s and then looking at the puppies through the windows of the “Animal ER Clinic” on Hardy Street. We had no real plans to adopt one, but it was fun and free. After one of those dates we agreed that we should go in during regular business hours some day to hold a few of them. We did. All of the puppies would scramble to the front of their cages and go bananas for attention. I could not help but assign little Disney cartoon voices to the thoughts they must be having about me and their desire for us to bring them home. They all went crazy except for one. There was one who would peer out at us, rock back on his hind legs and sit down, using the deepest blackest eyes to pierce through our souls. His little voice was saying, “We get each other, right?”

”If that little white fur-ball is there next time, we should get him,” Marianna joked. She was more of a cat person, I am allergic to cats. But there was something about this little male Maltese that enchanted us. He remained in that corner cage near the window for at least 3 rounds of “if-he’s-still-there” statements. One day I came home and Marianna said “Go get the dog… I am afraid he is gone… what if someone else got him, go get him.” 2 hours later I walked in our back door holding, in just one hand, the warmest little bundle of nourishing presence than we could have known how to ask for.

We named him Woody, short for Woodstock because of his striking resemblance (around the hair and eyes) to the little bird that hung out with Snoopy and Charlie Brown.

What we did not realize at the time was that Marianna was pregnant with our first born (Benji). She went from “we don’t need the responsibility of a dog” to “we absolutely need that dog, he is our dog,” in what seemed like an instant. Add to that the rate at which she was able to prepare our modest house for a new puppy and it becomes obvious that the maternal systems in her body and soul had been activated and were beginning to fire on several cylinders.

Woody became a fixture on Marianna’s lap for the next 15 years. Woody watched over Marianna during the year after losing her mom, during the season that we lost her dad, the season that we lost my dad. Woody welcomed home each of our 3 children from the hospital. He never once bit or snapped at any of them, or anyone. When someone would pull his blanket, Woody would play tug-of-war with the gentleness of a butterfly. When one of them would pull his tail or “bonk” his head with flailing baby arms and hands, Woody would slowly look around to find an adult in the room to make sure that we knew that he was in distress, but that he was not going to retaliate.

Some days I would walk in to find Woody sitting up-ward-dog on top of Marianna’s down-ward-dog yoga pose (or vice versa). When I would come in from a run or a bike ride, I would lay on the ground and he would lick my face for as long as I would let him.

Woody never ran away, he was not a “dasher.” You could entice him to zoom around the yard or the house by throwing his tiny stuffed giraffe, but you never had to worry about him making a desperate break for it through an open door or gate. When he did go missing, it was because he just kind of moseyed away, without anyone noticing. (This led to one of the worst nights of my life, which is a story for another day).

When we would find Woody across the street or across the highway, he would look up at us with a look that said, “Oh hey, what are you doing here?” Other times we would get calls from people saying that they had him, that the vet had scanned the chip in his fur, and that they would be happy for us to come get him, but that we need not hurry. He was probably sitting in their lap, or just walking around slowly exploring their garage. Once he was returned to us after having spent the better part of his afternoon rounds with a sheriff’s deputy, lounging on the front seat of West Feliciana Parish patrol car. He was good company to everyone.

Woody did not really beg for table scraps, he would take them, he never hounded you for them. His worst crimes were in various seasons when he would lick you incessantly.

Woody was more than I could have known to pray for when God gave him to us. There were many times when I would come home to find Marianna with tears of grief in her eyes and Woody in her lap between her arms in front of her laptop (sometimes halfway on her keyboard). Woody was doing what he was bred to do… to be there for his person. He was “just all goodness” as Marianna would say often.

Right after we realized that we would be moving to North Carolina, Woody got a little sick from licking the barbecue grill grate that I had neglectfully left on the patio after a cookout. I was not sure if Woody was going to make it through that, let alone a cross country move. The vet said he was fine, mostly. “His heart is a little finicky, but its always been that way.” She said, “You’ll know.” We were not sure that we would know. Woody perked up over the next few weeks and seemed as normal as ever over the course of our move this summer.

I wonder if Woody began to discern that his time was coming to a close. Could he sense in our bodies or in our breathing that we were settling into our new home. Maybe he felt like his purpose was being fulfilled. Maybe he was sensing it before we were. We still don’t feel “settled”. But maybe he knew. Maybe he could feel it in Marianna's heart-rate or the vibrations of her voice (it had been a while since he was able to hear much of anything).

We never lost Woody’s gaze, the same gaze that drew us to him in the pet shop window. He shared his kind face and loving eyes with us even as the rest of his body began to contort and shrink with age and immobility.
Last Monday night we prayed that God would show us when it was okay to let Woody go. On Tuesday we took turns holding Woody and thanking him for being such a faithful companion, I told Benji he should give Woody a piece of sliced turkey (which Woody loved). Benji held it to his nose and Woody lifted those eyes up to Benji as if to say, “I am ok.” He declined the treat and we all knew that keeping him much longer would be keeping him too long.
On Tuesday evening, Woody went to sleep in Marianna’s arms at the vet in Clemmons, NC. We all kissed him goodbye and left him with the doctor.

One of the ways that God was holding on to us for the last 15 years was through Woody’s tender touch, his warm tongue, and the way that he smelled like corn chips after he sunbathed for too long. People often talk about their pets as one of their children. For some reason I have come to see Woody as a trusted counselor that advised me, like having a 3rd adult in our home instead of a 4th child. Woody held on to Marianna and helped us hold on to each other during some of those toughest years. For that I will forever be grateful. Rest in Peace, my friend.

Being new, my radar is tuned for signals to “jump in” with some of my highly refined shepherding skills. Maybe I should encourage this willing parishioner, maybe she is unsure of her giftedness.

“Listen,” I said, “you are really good at that. My wife and I both noticed a few weeks ago when you made the announcements. You have a gift of communicating with passion that is not distracting. We could both tell that you really cared about what you were saying, without over doing it. We really appreciated it.”

Ginny thanked me, and we went on with our day. Later that week as we reviewed the prior Sunday’s service, I asked someone what Ginny did for a living. It was then that I realized that I had (reaching for all the discernment and compassion that I had been carrying around in my pastoral backpack) told a best selling novelist to “Be encouraged, you have a real gift for communication.”

What a hilarious and humbling moment for me. I had tried so hard not to sound patronizing as I warmly encouraged someone in her communication skills. I mean, I would know, I am a “professional communicator”. Maybe our encouragement was just what she needed that day. Unaware that within the previous 10 days or so that The New York Times had sent her that same message.

In appreciation of Ginny, I will say there was never a hint of do-you-even-know-who-i-am in her words or demeanor. It comes through in her writing too. She was gracious and sincere in her response and even more so the next Sunday, when I confessed my ignorance. “Writing and talking in front of people are two different things,” she said. That may be true, but we both appreciated the irony1 of the moment.

I have since read her book. It is wonderful, and in reading it I was reminded how much Truth I have learned about myself, about community, about theology, and about life through reading “fiction” over the last 10 years especially.

Needless to say, I have a hunch about this kid, with her talent and my encouragement, who knows what heights she might reach?

Recently I tasted (and smelled) what I used to call “Green Extra.” It is the Spearmint Flavor of Wrigley’s Extra chewing gum that comes in stick form inside the foil wrappers inside of a green package. I chewed it often during my last year of high school and up through college.

I loved and can remember specifically relishing the taste of the gum long after I had been chewing it for a good while. “Extra flavor lasts an extra long time” as their jingle suggested held true to my experience.

But there is a little side memory and a sensation that I attach to this gum, this taste, and this smell. I started buying it and chewing it when I was working-out with a guy who was a year older than me. We have since become better friends, he was in my wedding, he is married to my cousin. I consider him family. Patrick had played quarterback at the big public high school while I played at the smaller private school in town. He was a year ahead of me in school and so he had gone off to play college football and returned home during the summer before I would go walk-on the football team at Ole Miss. To be clear, we were on different planes of athletic existence, but we worked out some during one of those summers. Patrick would always have a “Plen-T-Pack”of green extra that he would share with me.

The key to the memory is that he would always hand me two pieces.

“Nah, you gotta have two pieces. Don’t you think?”
I remember feeling like this was generous, but also there was something about it that turned on a light switch in my boyhood heart.

If you want two pieces, eat two pieces. Just because they make them one size, does not mean that that is the best way to partake of them. If you like to eat two pieces of gum at once, do it. He did not say all of that, but that is what I took away.

I do not know how conscious I was of it even then. BUT, earlier this year when I tasted the gum, it reminded me of when I first started chewing two pieces of gum at once, not waiting for one’s flavor to fade. Was it wasteful? Who knows, who cares? It’s gum.

I texted Patrick about it this summer.

ME:
P, Do you remember chewing that green Extra gum? You turned me on to it that summer that you and Ginny were dating and we worked out together sometimes. You would always chew two pieces at once and offered/insisted that I take two pieces. I remember a light coming on for me. “I am an adult, if I want to eat two pieces at once, then just do it”

His reply was that he did remember, and that eating two pieces was a “straight up copycat move” that he had gotten from one of his mentors. No words exchanged. He saw him do it, and thought, “of course.”

It is funny how as boys growing up we slowly realize that we have permission to do things that we didn’t know we had. Sometimes we need it said to us, sometimes we just need someone to show us.

This instruction was intended to keep you moving, to prevent one mistake from creating more problems, and to minimize the impact of wrongly executing an assignment. Taking this approach increases your chances at arriving at good endings, even from bad beginnings. For example, if you were supposed to block Player A but you find yourself moving towards Player B, then go at B with full effort. Or, if you are not sure if you are supposed to carry the ball through the “2-hole” or the “4-hole”, pick one and go as hard as you can. The worst thing that you can do in those circumstances is to stop, stand up to full height and dwell on your mistake (or wonder if you’ve made one). When you do that, you give space for your confusion to expose yourself to the worst outcome, which is to do nothing, or to do the wrong thing so poorly that it hurts you twice.

During the second round of the US Open this summer, Sam Burns shot the low round for the day (65). Based on statistics called “strokes gained” (against the field of competitors) in various categories, golf analysts suggested that this round would rank among some of the great rounds of major championship history, though it was not necessarily the lowest score ever, even on that particular golf course.

Why do I mention these things together? Junior High Football and Sam Burns beating everyone else in the field on a Friday in the U.S. Open.

When Sam was interviewed after the round, he said things like this…

“I think at times, trying to be a little too perfect around major championship golf courses, especially around here (Oakmont), honestly it kind of forces you to take your medicine because a lot of times that's the only option you have,”

“I think for this golf course, you really just have to free it up. It’s too hard to try to guide it around here. You’re going to hit some in the rough, you’re going to hit some in some bad spots, you might as well do it with authority.”

“… you might as well do it with authority.”
I loved that line. I will admit that I have a special rooting interest in Sam because he is from North Louisiana, and also because he is connected to my family through his coach, and so I have gotten to hear about Sam’s success and root for him since he was a middle schooler himself.

When you are playing in the US Open the one thing that you can count on is things not going your way. You are going to make mistakes, so make them with conviction. If it puts you in a bunker, take your medicine and go again.1

Martin Luther is often credited with some form of the phrase “Sin boldly.” I remember the first time that I heard something like that, it immediately made me think of a football coach saying, “if your gonna make a mistake, make it at full speed.”

The idea is taken (at least in part) from a letter2 that Luther wrote to another theologian as part of an exchange about whether certain actions were sins or not and whether these things should be allowed or practiced within a congregation. The last paragraph of the letter exhorts his friend this way:

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy.  If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin.  God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners.  Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.  We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides.  We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.  It suffices that through God's glory we have recognized the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day.  Do you think such an exalted Lamb paid merely a small price with a meager sacrifice for our sins?  Pray hard for you are quite a sinner. 

There is plenty more to work out here, but on the eve of final major championship of the season and some 42 days since my last post, I submit to you these ramblings with hopes to get one closer to my goal of 52 posts by August 19, 2025.

Cheers.

Earlier this week, along with piles of sheets and towels, socks and shorts, sunscreen and flashlights, we packed pairs of flip-flops and boots, Crocs and old sneakers into trunks and duffel bags. Yesterday I watched my sons anxiously lace up the running shoes that their grandmother gave them for Christmas which (grayed from 6 months of everyday use) will now take on that next level of hard-wear that only a month of summer camp can produce.

Every June I drop my sons at summer camp in shoes that I don’t expect to use again, with the hopes that over the course of a month on a mountain, my boys, just like every year, will find their feet again.

Summer camp is the same.
While it is so different from home, the power, the magic of summer camp is its sameness. Every summer we drop our sons off in the care of a handful of directors and staff, and a slew of college boys in clumsily tucked green collared shirts, and every summer as we pull our car back on to the pavement from the long slag road through the woods to re-enter the “real world” for a month without our sons, I am overcome with emotion. It is not just that I will miss my sons, although I will. The emotion is much more a mix of gratitude and longing, memory and hope.

Summer camp is the place where my sons know exactly what to expect, and at the same time they will know that the possibilities are endless. They know that almost every morning they will wake up, make their bed, sing silly songs with some of the coolest 19-22 year olds they will ever know, eat breakfast, clean-up, play hard and learn for a few hours, eat lunch again, shower, rest in screen-windowed, bunk-bedded, fan-cooled cabins and then do it again that afternoon.

It is the sameness that anchors them. Though I attended a different camp than my sons, I can still close my eyes and, in my mind, walk through the camp where I spent 26 days for 7 summers of my own boyhood. I can tell you which stairs there are the steepest, and which water fountains are the coldest. I can remember not just the trees, but specific roots of specific trees that you could use as spring board over a low rock wall on a short cut to the dining hall.

Camp is where kids can find their feet on the unfinished hard wood floors of their cabins, in the quarter inch of water in the bottom of their canoe, in the cool mud between their toes in the river bed, in their sneakers (that might go in a gas station garbage can on the drive home). They can find their feet in so many places, and begin to recognize the self that is connected to those feet in special ways. Good summer camps are those that strive to be places where kids come and belong to the place, belong to one another, and where they learn to belong to themselves.

Camp can also be where we finally understand that we belong to God. Just after we said good-bye to our boys, my wife said, “Stop” and she jumped back out of the car. She was not returning for one more hug from her boys, she spotted someone else. It was her favorite counselor from her time at a sister summer camp nearby. “Grace” was dropping her sons on the mountain just like we were. They hugged and talked, and after the comments like, “Can you believe I am old enough to have been your counselor?” I heard her say (about one of her own children), “You know, they are like you were… just not too sure if they want to be here this year.” Twenty-five years ago, my wife reluctantly went to back to camp for her 4th year, as a 15 year old. She said she was a “good kid”, but she knew she was “hard”, she felt hard, maybe even hardened. Camp was the place where a 15 year old could come in hard and be met by a 20 year old who recognizes where she is and has the time and space to fumble through it. Camp can be one of the special places, stewarded by special people, where, as the hours of sameness drag on, away from the “worries of this world and the desires for other things1” God draws us to himself. I pray that my sons will experience that this summer. I am thankful for my years at summer camp. I am thankful for God’s grace to me through summer camp and for “Grace” who not only still knows Marianna’s name and face, but she remembers her 15 year old heart who needed to belong.

This summer my boys left for camp from our home in Louisiana and will return from camp to our new home in North Carolina. This has made me especially grateful for the gravity of the place of summer camp for them. We have spent the better part of a year wondering what the world will look like for all of us. We have wrestled with so many wheres, whats, and whys and have been asking God for reminders of His constancy.

And while I knew it was coming and that I would get the same feeling as I left them there at camp, the SAMEness landed so much more with me for THEM.

Just before I left I heard another dad say to one of his son’s counselor, “I went here as a kid, but I actually worked at another camp in college and after, driving boats at a summer camp for girls, but I tell you when I came back through those gates all these years later, its the same, its just exactly the same.”

I am thankful for the magical adventures than can take place where thoughtful people work to create simple, safe, sameness where we can find our feet again, even in places that we did not know we could stand.

___

Aside: I hope that if you had a good summer camp experience as a child or as a counselor, that you will get a chance to be grateful for it today, maybe write a letter (you remember those from camp) to someone who impacted you there. Maybe you can help someone else go to camp this summer. I realize that camp is a luxury that is not available to everyone, and that plenty of folks don’t have great memories of summer camp. My summers as a camper, a counselor, and then (maybe especially) as a camp minister for two summers as a full grown married adult have shaped my entire life immeasurably.

I once heard (or read) Bubba Watson say (paraphrase) that hitting a recovery shot from a bad spot can be easier for him than hitting from the middle of the fairway. When you are stuck behind something or when you only have a little window of space through which you must hit a shot, your decisions are made. There is only one way to execute this. It frees you up. When someone like Bubba (and me) has any number of ways to hit the next shot, or the shot seems so straight forward, my mind might stay “open” such that I start thinking about the next-next shot, or what I might make on that hole, since I am in the perfect spot. It does not take a psychologist or a golf expert to know this could lead to problems.

I also remember Bubba catching flak from British media and fans for his frustration expressed as distaste for The Open Championship and European culture in general (the food, etc). In defense of people like Bubba, sometimes several days with a lack of clearly defined spaces can begin to wear on us subconsciously in ways that can bubble or burst out on others if we are not aware of it. He said something in that episode about preferring tree-lines or borders to the openness of links golf. While I love links golf courses, and I have played some of the best, there are certain courses on certain days where it has felt much less like golf to me1 and more like wandering in a blizzard. If I am on a links style course, the boundaries provided by dunes or natural grasses really make a big difference. I don’t think it is just my American conditioning, it is about my ability (or lack thereof) to focus.

This brings me of course to hardcopy-pen-and-paper-notebook-calendar-planners. I must have a notebook with my calendar in it. I don’t even buy premade calendars, I just manually draw the calendar into a simple notebook keeping all of the other pages free for notes or lists or whatever.

I often find myself thinking about how all of these aspects of my life (my brain, my golf game, my professional life, my attention) are affected by how I am “wired.”

Despite all the ease and simplicity that I truly believe electronic or digital calendars bring to so many lives, I still have to make and keep my calendar in a notebook. I know that I am not the only one, because I see them out there. I know that there are plenty of people who resist digital reign over their lives or who like the physical feel and adaptability of having a planner free from your phone. I agree with all those things, but there is something else for me.

Here (for now) is my best explanations of why it matters to me.

I realized that when I try to use a computer screen or a phone screen for my calendar, nothing seems permanent. Once you have zoomed in on any one day, it looks exactly like any other day. It feels the same. If I go from the full month-screen into the single day-screen by clicking into that day, (as hard as it is to explain) the month disappears, and I lose my bearings. I think that I need the tactile experience of turning the pages to register in my brain that these are two different months. I need to be able to see the relationship between the Sunday that is two rows up and 4 columns to the left2 from the Thursday that I am writing something into. My February and March pages especially have to feel different because until you get to the 29, all of the dates are the same in each row and column (don’t act like you haven’t gotten confused by knowing that something was on Tuesday the 11^th only to have to remind yourself that its March and not February.

I need the frames, the windows, the borders. Sometimes I still set an alarm as a reminder on my phone calendar, but I still write it into my planner. Even if it is already in the past.

When the month screen and the day screen are the same size, it affects my ability to register how it all fits together. Months are big and fill two whole pages. Weeks are rows on those pages, and the columns divide each day from the last and the next. I cannot pinch zoom into the day-squares, I just try to make them big enough to fit the important part of anything that needs to be remembered or anticipated for that day.

I think that in some weird way, when I am looking at a calendar app and zoom into a “day-screen” from a “month-screen”, the days that disappear are not real days anymore. Its hard to remember that they exist. This elimination is not a good thing, like Bubba Watson only being able to see the ONE shot that he needs. It is more the opposite, like when the one day eliminates the others, I have no frame into which I can situate afternoon appointments, or my days into my weeks. I have no frames into which I can shape my shots.

I am preparing to leave my current post as a solo pastor in a small-town church (which I have loved and will dearly and deeply miss) to serve as a member of a staff with other ministers at a slightly larger church in a city. As I have anticipated this move, I have found myself saying, “I think that I just need a lane to run in.”

I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but there is something to that idea. There must be something to how it all fits together for me, and people like me, and for Bubba Watson. Tell me where my limits are so that I can work with what I have, inside of the space I have been given.

I really get the appeal of birding. It actually changes how you look at the world. If you are outdoors, there is always a potential for discovery. It makes you notice new sounds and pick up your head and lift your eyes, even though it also caused me to scramble for my phone to get my Cornell Labs Merlin Bird ID App App-ing.

Why am I thinking about my bird list that has gone unchecked for many months? As I am sitting down to write my first post after 2 weeks of neglect, I am reminded of just how hard and fast and definitively my consistent patterns can go completely off the cliff never to be recovered. There is something about my wiring (which I have come to realize that I share with plenty of people) that allows me to dive into a pool with great interest and fervor every day for a long time. BUT when the day comes that I forget my swim trunks or my towel and I don’t make the plunge, it tends to be over.

I have actually learned to like this about myself. Why? Because it has allowed me to have entry level nerd experience is so many different places and spaces. I have met so many people that are neck-deep into things that I have dabbled in before that leads to so many fun conversations. And if “your thing” is not something that I have explored, consider me a potential convert (even if for a brief season). There is a nerd for everything, and I like to hear about those things.

If you love brand specific wrenches that fit the purposes of particular tractor models manufactured 100 years ago, I know a guy like you (you probably know him too, that’s a small set)

If you love old electric fans, I know that there are 2 subsets of you. Those who like working fans and those who like non-working fans that you can fix. If you love to ride bicycles but only those made with steel frames AND steel forks, be prepared to explain all the reasons why if we ever end up in the same place for more than 15 minutes.

If you like wooden tennis racquets, rusty old farm implements, Nikon cameras made only in Occupied Japan I have talked to someone like you, maybe even traded stories or inventory.

I once had a student in our ministry at Southern Miss who did not have a car, but he had the phone numbers for most of the landowners in 4 counties that he could see from the road. When they tilled up their land or there was a recent rain, or especially both, he would call me and ask me to drive us to hunt for arrowheads. He always promised me at least one artifact that would not disappoint me. He always delivered even though the treasure for me was watching and listening to him wax on about the process and the beauty and the history and the hunts that he had been on with his late father in the desert as a kid.

I like to talk about sneakers with sneakerheads and hear why certain fly-rods are superior to others. I own one pair of what you could call “sneakers” in the pop-culture sense and I own zero fly-rods (though I do have a first edition of A River Runs Through It given to me by my older brother who sends me photos of bass and bream that he fly-rods out of ponds near cemeteries in unspecified locations that he notices as he drives home from work).

I love hearing about what people find fascinating and why. Sometimes I will take it up for a season, but when I drop it as an active participant, I tend to drop it fully. Maybe I will come back to some of these things, but I will never grow tired of overhearing someone in public talking about how they don’t make _________s like they used to, or how they are planning a trip to see a certain band for a monumental 50^th time.

“There is a nerd for everything” was going to be the name of the podcast that I daydreamed of hosting. Someone beat me to it recently. Props to Niche to Meet You. Does it surprise you that I listened to several episodes over the course of a week and have never gone back? Of course it doesn’t.

So why am I talking about all these things? Because after taking two weeks off from posting entries here, I have felt the creeping sense and fear that I might drop this habit. I am trying hard to stay on the horse. 52 entries during my 46^th year. I am at 39 over 37 weeks, that is two ahead of pace, but I have gone at least 2 weeks without posting. There may be a better way to discipline myself as “a writer” that I can discover next year, but for now I am trying hard to keep it going. Maybe it is obvious from this very entry how hard it is to keep thinking through things that are worth offering for other people to read. I am trying to keep doing it for its own sake, for the sake of sticking with it. So, there it is, I am back on the wagon.

So I filed Bernhard in my brain as one of the good guys. I kept an eye on him as much as one could during those days, when the only time you saw anything about golf was during the majors, on random Sunday afternoons, or if you caught “Inside the PGA Tour” on ESPN during the day. 1

The most impactful moment that I recall from watching Bernhard’s career came up several times this week (April 2025). He was asked about his interviews after his Masters wins(‘85 and ’93), the second of which was on Easter Sunday. He recalls being asked about the significance of winning on Easter Sunday since he was a “religious person.” What I have not been able to find anywhere was what I recall2 during an interview during the ‘93 tournament. I believe it must have been after the 3rd round (Langer led by 4). He was asked what it would mean for him to win on Easter Sunday.

Langer responded in the most matter of fact, sensible, confident and credible tone, something to the effect of “Easter Sunday is always meaningful, it is about the Resurrection of Jesus, that is everything”
I wish I could find a clip of this. He repeated something similar after the tournament win and even referred to it during interviews this year. BUT I am (almost) sure that this statement was in my mind as he was going on to win in 1993.

We often hear famous athletes respond to questions in their moments of success, thanking God or their “Lord and Savior”, or saying how they were able to endure the ups-and-downs of the season because they knew that “God had a plan for this team” or how much their faith carried them. Sometimes we even hear people say that “win or lose”, they know that “God is in control”. Their references are always in the context of what is going on with them at that moment, and to be fair, those are the moments when the microphone is in their face, and those are the questions that are being asked.

But I will never forget the way that Langer answered the question about his faith. “Easter is about the Resurrection of Jesus. Nothing matters more than that, Easter is always special” (or whatever exact words that he used). It was the tone and the certainty with which he responded, and it was the way that he seemed to be drawn to the truth, as opposed to explaining how the truth applied to him. It is one thing to respond to a question like that and take the opportunity to explain yourself in light of your faith, but what seemed to happen in that moment was that Langer thought about Easter, thought about the Resurrection, and just sort of examined it, marveled at it, and considered what it meant, and invited anyone else to consider what it means as well.3

1 Peter 3:15 ^“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,”

I always love to hear people marvel at the Gospel. At the end of the day it is about what happened and how that shapes everything else. Why is winning a golf tournament on Easter meaningful? Because of The Resurrection. Why is getting out of bed every morning meaningful? Because of the Resurrection.

During my time in college ministry, I got to know a student-athlete for whom the gospel finally “clicked”. Having been chased down and hounded by the Holy Spirit for as long as he could remember, it finally made sense to him that he needed what the Holy Spirit had been prodding him about. He would say that he became a Christian then. Soon thereafter he began getting well-intentioned encouragement from so many people locally (and from back home) who had heard about this ‘awakening’, which he was honest and humble about. They told him how happy they were for him, but also talked about “what a ‘platform’ he now had to share his faith!” He was even asked to have dinner with a family who sponsored the scholarship for a “Christian Athlete.” He called me one day and told me that he had gotten in a fight at football practice4 and that he was feeling conflicted about how he was supposed to be acting, and what the guys thought about him, and what he thought about himself.

“What am I supposed to say to these people?
What is this platform that I am supposed to have? I don’t have a platform. I just know that I was messed up and that apparently I still am, and that Jesus loves me and that I need his forgiveness, and that I want to change, that is all that I know”

Me: “THAT!”
Him: “What?”
Me: “That is what you say to these people, that is what you tell them”

I can remember around that time thinking back to Bernhard Langer at the Masters saying, “Easter is about The Resurrection of Jesus, that means everything”

What are we holding on to? What matters? Why is Easter (and every Sunday for the last 2000+ years) worth celebrating? Because after loving his disciples to the fullest in washing their feet, after instituting the Lord’s Supper with them by breaking the bread and explaining the New Covenant in his blood, after asking for the cup of God’s wrath to be taken from him, Jesus went to the Cross and received in his body what was due to us. But, Jesus did not remain in the tomb, because the accomplishment of our salvation was all bound up in his taking our punishment and then establishing victory for himself and us in Him through his resurrection. The Resurrection means everything.

Maybe I am projecting this on Bernhard Langer but it almost seemed like he was caught off guard the first time that he heard them ask about the significance of winning on Easter, like the question that they were asking about him wasn’t about him at all.

So this past week as I watched The Masters and I thought about Bernhard Langer and his wife from Louisiana, and my grandmother telling me that she was rooting for him, and how not all Germans (or Russians) were bad guys despite all of the movies from my childhood, and as I watched him make his last competitive loop around Augusta National, I thought about The Resurrection.

In interviews this week when asked how he would like to be remembered he said “as a Christian.” For what its worth, when I think about Bernhard Langer, I think about how “The Resurrection means everything5.”

When I started listening to podcasts, there were no golf podcasts. The landscape seemed barren, a few equipment nerds and some journalists here and there. But within a few months, I stumbled into what at the time seemed like a group of old college friends on long distance phone calls asking each other whether or not maybe Jordan Spieth “stinks” or is the best player of all time, or both… along with other tongue-in-cheek observations like “tour sauce1” and the number of commercials on golf broadcasts. It was these calls that made me and so many other listeners feel like we were in their club too.

My theory is that while discussions about the loneliness epidemic among American men began to show up everywhere from medical journals to the New York times, discussions around things like whether or not white belts were still (or ever) “ok” on the golf course (or anywhere) began creating a community that felt like what so many guys were longing for.

The “No Laying Up guys” drew people in and connected them to one another. It was a true expression of what C.S. Lewis describes as the beginning of friendship.2 It is that moment when you are able to say, “What? you too? I thought I was the only one.” In the case of No Laying Up it was things like, I thought I was the only one who wanted to try to play blades for a year to see if it actually makes me worse or better.

That is a long introduction to why I would end up listening to the yearly “Goals” podcast episode that they post towards the end of each year in anticipation of the next year’s “resolutions”. It was while listening to one of those episodes that I resolved to get my watercolors back out to make a little time each week to sketch just one thing that captured my imagination. Through a series of events that ensued (which I might detail elsewhere some day), I found myself playing golf with Big Randy, Neil, and DJ at the Historic City Park Golf Course in Baton Rouge.

I ended up featuring much more prominently in the footage than I had expected and through a series a hilarious coincidences and miscommunications, I became a footnote in community phenomenon that has continued to pop-up more times than I can count.

Because of literal millimeters of space between a hand-stamped “T” and “R” …

I have shown up in the B footage of a Charles Schwab commercial.

I was contacted and subsequently interviewed by two podcasters with an audience that included an entire dorm floor of a small Christian university in Ohio (along with their parents).3

I was mentioned by name in a Golf Digest Article.

I have friends who still send me pictures of themselves wearing St. Rappeo shirts.

I was stopped by a caddie as our paths crossed on The Old Course (the 7th and 11th which share a green). He showed me that he had a St. Rappeo ball marker. He had heard from a message board friend that I was out there that day. Getting recognized by someone on The Old Course who just wants to show you that he is a fan of something you were a part of… that is surreal.

I have received a few screenshots of St. Rappeo shirts seen on youtube videos (one of them was a shirt for sale off the rack in a golf shop in Australia).

I have received requests for Strapped (St. Rappeo) ball markers from people all over the place. One guy even asked me for a matching set for him and his fiancé who both loved that episode.

I have made countless friends, one of whom I travelled to Scotland with last summer where we played golf with others who we knew through this same community.

One of my favorites might be the guy who showed up in our Sunday morning worship service. He introduced himself afterward.
“We are from Illinois, but we were in Lafayette for music festival. I always said that if I was ever close enough, I would come to St. Rappeo’s church.”
Lafayette is over an hour from St. Francisville. Bob and I have remained friends ever since. We keep up about things ranging from train travel to Big 10 football (two things that I know very little about, which is why I like to have friends like Bob). Bob also encouraged me to keep writing. He does it for a living @ALionEye on X.

I thought that those days were over, that my “star” had burned out, when last year out of the blue, in the pro-shop of the municipal course where I play most of my golf now, I caught the eye of a man in his late 60s who I would describe as a salty old muni-course fixture. He eyed me up and down and said, “You play golf on TV don’t you?”
Me: “no sir, not that I know of”
Him: “You a minister?”
Me: “Yessir”
Him: “Yeah, I saw you play at City Park on a show or something”
Me: “Well, yeah, I guess that was me, ha!”

He didn’t say anything else, just nodded and walked away, just like you would expect him too.

On the 5 year anniversary of its release, I am still grateful for and benefitting from my 15 seconds of internet golf fame.

Nothing throughout my lifetime has more predictably put a knot in my stomach or a clinch in my teeth quite like rain on the day of a sporting event. My friend Neil and I discussed this in depth when my wife and I played in a beginners USTA mixed doubles league. Our team was scheduled to play in “regionals” at a junior college an hour and a half away. The forecast was for storms most of the day. Due to the nature of these leagues and tournaments, not everyone had to show up every time. I agreed to play early on a weekday morning, while Marianna would play during a later window3. I got that sick feeling the night before, hoping against all odds that the forecasted storm system would blow through quickly or dissipate. It didn’t. We showed up and hit balls for about 5 minutes dry, about 3 minutes in that ominous mist, and then went to our cars just outside the chain-link fence. I scanned the facility for those squeegee rollers that can be used to dry the courts.

“Ok,” I thought, “If this stops by 7:45 and we start rolling the courts, and then it doesn’t rain for like an hour, then we could start by…”[crash of lightning]
“Ok, if this is the same as a public pool, then we will have to wait for like 30 minutes after the last thunder until…” [black clouds darken the skies]

We could barely see our team director through our windshield wipers as she spoke to the tournament officials. She looked at us, pointed to her watch, and then did the twirling finger in the air motion, like an umpire signaling home run. This of course meant, “It’s going to be a while… if at all”.

We drove to Waffle house and had coffee and talked about our chances of playing that day and who needed to leave for afternoon work or carpool commitments. We eventually descended into the type of small talk that comes up with people that you have only known for a few hours each week for the last month, mostly at distances around 78 feet4. These people were not nearly as unsettled as I was, this was no time for small talk.

When I played High School football, I hated the rain because I played quarterback and really didn’t like the prospect of throwing a wet ball, or worse, not throwing the ball as much because of the conditions. I refused to believe them and resented it when teammates would act excited about a rainy game, “This is true football weather.” It’s not.5

For me, the worst of the weather disruptions were those that are represented in this painting. As a kid I would have laid out my uniform the night before, donned it at first light, and waited on plastic-cleated tiptoes for my mom to drive me to the ballpark. I needed those times each week. Nothing was more exciting to me than a chance to compete “for real”.

Spring time is here. Last night Henry (my 11 year old, red headed middle child) had a soccer game cancelled due to wet fields, even though it had not rained all day. He was so bummed.

“They told us that they would cancel if it rained anymore, but it didn’t rain again, and they cancelled anyway. They shouldn’t give us false hope,” he said with a groan.

This was one of those moments when you see some of yourself in your children – in a way that makes you feel connected to them in a deeper way, but without the anguish of it being some semi-destructive pattern that you wish neither of you possessed, and that you are afraid you caused and are exacerbating in them by your parenting.

“I wish I could fix it for you, Henry,” I thought. The rain, not the disappointment. Never lose that!

I have always lived in places where rain tends to include the threat of lightning and soil tends to not drain quickly. It is a bad combination for people like me and Henry.

During our 6 weeks in Scotland (2023) we did not have much rain, for some reason. You heard me correctly. I only removed my rain gear from my golf bag long enough to put it on once during the 6 weeks we were there. I wore it for two holes and replaced it. We had a drizzle here and there, but somehow, we never felt robbed of any fun. I even joked about it with locals a few times, “We feel a little cheated out of the full Scottish experience.”

We were so conditioned by the lack of “conditions” that on our very last night in the country, it never occurred to us to grab a raincoat or an umbrella on our way out to dinner. We stayed in Edinburgh late enough to miss the last bus from the train station to our hotel in Burntisland. Not far into what would be a several mile walk, the rain came. As we walked through the wetness, I wondered if we would be able to get our clothes even semi-dry before we had to stuff them into bags for our full day of air travel.
As we rounded a corner, I heard sounds that I did not expect. People were playing soccer (football) under the lights at a city park, people were walking their dogs and sitting on park benches. People were exercising. Did they wish that it was not raining? Probably, but it was as normal to them as pine-pollen on my back porch. Does it bother me? Yes. Does it keep me from going outside, sometimes, but usually not. The rain in Scotland that night produced no lightning and maybe just a little mud, but not enough to ruin your plans.

What brings all of this to mind for me today? I woke up with the same pit in my stomach as I had last night for Henry. About once a year my shoulder hurts bad enough for me to NOT play golf. It is not usually this time of year, and it is usually not SO bad that I won’t at least try to “play through it”. But today with The Masters two weeks away, I keep having that feeling that I am going to miss some chances to play and there is nothing that I can do about it. It’s the same feeling deep in my insides. What is the feeling. Helplessness? Maybe. A tinge of resentment? Sure. But mostly I just know it as “that feeling.”

So back to the painting. Remembering that my friend Neil and I connected over the emotional impact that “Rain-Outs” had on us as kids (and as adults), I asked if he would like to hang the painting in his law office. He accepted and did for a while, until I fetched it back to give to my brother to be hung in his son’s bedroom.

Emotion is what makes good art. There are lots of paintings of baseball teams and lots of paintings of rainy weather. What happened on this canvas was the special combination of those two things in a way that somehow subtly gives me that ache. But it also occurred to me that like my dad always said, “If you have a painting of someone real, there may become a time when you realize that you are not a fan of them for one reason or another.”

I guess that is what happened here. It is not the little ball players or the coach that I associate with disappointment, it’s the other character. The rain when you don’t need it is not someone that I will ever think fondly of in my heart.

After the second round victory, conversations and text thread chatter understandably turned to whether or not someone is going to attend the next game(s), where tickets are available, and how much will they cost?

This brought to mind some of my favorite stories of people finding ways to attend big sporting events, come “hell or high water” - as they say. I have had my failures, like the time that I got $100 from the ATM and drove to Memphis with a friend, hoping to somehow get last minute admission into a Mike Tyson fight. That was maybe the first time that I used and understood the term “a fools errand”. We did not have the same level of information-share back then. Today a quick twitter search would have appropriately squashed my silly fantasy. I have never felt more out of place and uncomfortable than I did driving around the venue, we did not even get out of the car. This was not the same as strolling around a stadium parking lot holding up 1 or 2 fingers.

If you are much younger than me, your experience of “tickets” has been mostly QR codes on a screen. There was a day when the way that you unloaded extra tickets was by simply holding them up over your head until someone who needed a ticket offered to pay you cash for them. Most sports fans my age and older will have at least one story about that experience. Some stories are tragic, like when my dad and brother purchased counterfeit tickets to a Saints/Cowboys Monday Night Football game. Tim swears that he would still recognize the crook who duped him 20 years ago. “He had the most distinct silver blue eyes I have ever seen…I should have known,” he still often laments this out loud. Some stories are comedic, like my dad leaving the cash in his hotel room that he had intended to use to get into the Ole Miss - LSU game (Eli’s senior year). Having travelled from Texas with two friends, they became desperate. They decided to hang out near the player-parent gate where pre-torn tickets were scanned by athletic department so that team members families had seats each week. They each waited for a family that seemed like they might “fit in with” and simply followed them through the gate with their head down. My dad just held his phone to his hear pretending to be on a call as he hurried through amidst what could have been the cousins and neighbors of a back-up offensive lineman from Centreville. It worked. 3 for 3.

Some ticket stories defy all categories.
This one is my favorite, and I wish it would have happened to me.

It was October of the year 2000 and Oklahoma was finalizing a return to national prominence. They were hosting Nebraska who had been a fixture in the top 5 for much of the 1990s. Nebraska was ranked #1 in the national polls and OU had climbed to #2. For the first time in a long time Norman (Oklahoma) felt like the center of the college football universe. My older brother (Jim) had transferred to OU and insisted that my younger brother (Tim) and I come to the game if at all possible1. After Tim’s high school football game on Friday night, my dad filled my mom’s suburban with gas, gave us each $100 bill and pat on the back for good luck that we could get into the game. Tim agreed to use his post game adrenaline to drive the first leg of the trip, but ended up driving the whole 6 hours plus. The next morning, we both got “in” to the game. I purchased my ticket about 30 seconds before kickoff, after convincing a lady that she had two options. She could wait for the $200 she was asking for, or she could take my $75 and neither of us would miss seeing the first quarter of the game. She reluctantly agreed, but she got me back when she realized that I did not have exact change. She got the whole $100 bill. I was able to find Tim just moments after entering. He was walking away from the fence which enclosed the stadium. A graduate student from India had accepted Tim’s $100 in exchange for his Student ID, as long as he promised to immediately return it through the fence, around the corner from the turnstiles.

All of this is (unnecessary) preface to the story that we heard from another guy who had stayed with so many of us the night before, sleeping on the floor of the house my brother shared with 5 roommates, just off campus.

THE GREATEST TICKET STORY OF ALL TIME2
Don was an alumni of OU who was old enough to remember, and long for, the glory days that no one knew would disappear for 15 years. He was also unmarried at the time and, though adventurous, he was not immune to financial realities. He arrived in Norman with two tickets that he had somehow procured before we all knew what this game could mean. As he was walking around the stadium prior to the game, he realized that he was holding in his hands what could possibly amount to several months rent, and a car payment. As he considered how easily he could watch the game on television (not always the case in those days), he decided that being *in* Norman for the game was enough for him, and that if OU lost and he hadn’t taken the money, he would be in despair. He sold the tickets.

With a pocket full of cash, Don started to make his way to a local establishment where he could get a good seat and drink Dr. Pepper and watch the game with rowdy locals. The pocket full of cash and the pit in his stomach turned his mind to micro-economics. Sure, he had sold his two tickets at high demand, but what was not in such high demand was single tickets. He found a motivated seller and purchased a single ticket that allowed him entry and to remain “way ahead” financially. As Don turned again toward the stadium, his pulse quickened. He noticed the panic in peoples eyes as they held up their fingers hoping to enter the game. “OK,” he thought, “that was easy enough, maybe I can flip this ticket again and still get in.” With the comfort of already having once resigned himself to possibility of the sports bar, which didn’t seem too bad with his new slush fund for Dr. Pepper and nacho platters. He found another buyer, and made another profit.

Bound again for the sports bar, Don began to feel in the air what Tim and I had felt. Things were getting crazy. People had not felt this in Norman for a long time.
Everyone was clamoring to get into this game. Don, now cash rich, began to assess the fact that he had driven 4 hours, with two tickets, to see a game that EVERYONE wanted to see. He was now “on the outside” quite unnecessarily.

He turned again for the stadium. Like a casino tourist trying to be clever and soberminded, he kept his “winnings” in one pocket and his “gambling budget” in the other. “If I can get a ticket for X dollars, then I will go in. Nothing more than $ X.”

He found a ticket, made the purchase and considered himself done for the day. “Boomer Sooner,” he thought, “what a day to be alive!” He was drunk with adrenaline from the buying and selling. He did not know what hit him when a wealthy alum, walking near him, realized that he was one ticket short of getting all of his guests into the game. He offered Don more, much more, than he had in either pocket for his one single, last pass into the historic game. Before he knew it, Don had acquiesced to avarice, or simply lost his head. The game was about to start and he was now standing on the concrete outside of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, like a 1980s stock exchange worker at the end of a big day, he wondered if the small fortune that he had amassed over the last several hours had really been worth his now frayed nerves and emotional exhaustion.

Don made his final turn towards the sports bar, knowing in his heart that he would probably just wander instead back to the little house off campus to watch the game alone, waiting for his friends to return from the stadium.

In his malaise, he looked up to the sky as he heard the rumble of the crowd anticipating the opening kick-off. His day “on the trading floor” was playing tricks on his mind. He saw a single piece of ticker tape trickling in the wind, down, down, down from the heavens. When it was still yet 50 feet overhead, Don couldn’t believe his eyes. “That looks like a ticket!” He glanced around feverishly to make sure that no one else had seen it, and then he followed it like a child watching a butterfly, until it lighted just before him on the empty sidewalk. He snatched it up, said a prayer, and sprinted back to the entrance gate. There was no longer a line of people trying to get in, there just a kind lady who smiled and said, “you’re just in time.”

Don genuinely wondered if he might be dreaming, or hallucinating. He did not have time to ask questions, he rushed to the seat that was indicated on the stub. When he arrived, the gentleman to his left said, “Just made it! Do you mind me asking if you bought your ticket at the last minute?”

With sweat streaking down the side of his face, Don said,
“Sir, you will never believe where I got this ticket.”

The man smiled and said,
“Man, I am so glad that you came in with the ticket, instead of selling it. When I realized that I had come into the stadium with 1 unused ticket in my pocket, I walked up to the very top row and dropped it over the side. I hoped that someone who really needed it would find it and come in and not simply sell it.”

Don was flushed with guilt and gratitude, he fumbled through an incoherent explanation of how he had sold his own tickets, and then bought and sold one (a few more times over), and that he had made money, and that he was more than willing to pay for this ticket.
“Please let me pay your for this, you made my day… you made my year!”

“Don’t even think about it, you made mine,” was the man’s reply.

These two new friends watched their beloved Sooners score 31 unanswered points to triumph over the hated Huskers. OU would finish the season with a record of 13-0, an Orange Bowl victory, and a National Championship.

That is the greatest game day ticket hustle story that I have ever heard.

In most places you might say it…
“If you have dinner for 2 at 6, you should be there by 5:45.”

One of my favorite things about South Louisiana language is that ANY of the prepositions in the previous sentence could be replaced with the word “for”.

“If you have dinner FOR 2 FOR 6, you should be there FOR 5:45”

I like this little colloquial quirk because it doesn’t matter the accent, the word “for” is just much more dynamic down here. I have wondered if it is some remnant of the French language or way of speaking. I welcome anyone to explain this to me.

I first took note of this phenomenon while I still lived in Mississippi. Two of the students on our leadership team were from south Louisiana. I noticed it in the girl from New Orleans and thought it must just be her thing. It was not long however, until it showed up again. I suggested that we have a team meeting at 7 pm. Our student from Zachary suggested that we have “dinner for 6 and then start our meeting after that”. I briefly wondered which 2 of the team of 8 she would be leaving out.

She must have seen the puzzled look on my face because she quickly said, “…or 6:30?”
That was the first time that I said something about it. I realized that it must be a regional thing. Like Soda, Pop, Coke, Soft Drink.

Maybe you remember the NY Times dialect quiz1 that could tell with some accuracy where you were from based on the words that you use for different things.
Frontage Road or Service Road,
18 Wheeler or Semi or tractor trailer,
kitty-corner or caddy-corner, and does it mean next to or across diagonally?

I have alway liked these things. I think that by the time I left Ole Miss I could tell if someone was actually from The Delta by the way that they said “Senatobia.” We all know the way that people from Tupelo say “Tupelo” and the people from Brookhaven say “Brookhaven”, right?

Have you ever heard someone from South Georgia say “water”?

But this use of “FOR” is my favorite. I like noticing it so much that I have tried very hard not to use it that way. Not because I think its wrong, but in the same way that it feels like I would trying too hard to sound like I am from Lincoln county if I say “brook-HAY-ven.”

My wife does it now, and I like knowing that I need to have Henry at soccer for 4 and Missye at Tumbling for 5:15. It makes perfect sense, it works.

I think another reason that I don’t want to start using it, is because I don’t want to stop noticing it. It’s part of what I love about the way that people talk here.

I look forward to the day when I hear it out-in-the-wild, somewhere else and am able to say, “Hey, you grew up in a parish not a county, didn’t you?”

If anyone has theories on why this is the case, I would love to hear them.

If you have read my posts, you will have read of a few of the recent times in my life where something so oddly improbable or eerily coincidental has served as a context for very meaningful moments in my life. “The Fort Worth Blues” and “Can’t Make This Up”. Those moments were so profound and so meaningful that they were easy to write about. Furthermore, my view of God’s sovereignty and involvement in creation gives plenty of room for meaningful reflection and celebration of divine provision (Providence) and God’s care for his sheep (me in this case).

What I have not addressed are the other times in my life that I have noted things that defy explanation. They seem to take place in realms that we do not normally experience. Maybe they are realms that we dismiss, avoid, or cannot experience simply by the limits of our fallenness.

I will preface this by anonymously quoting a friend who I think wisely said it this way.
“We should be more honest. We believe stuff about the world that is downright crazy to any “sane” mind. Starting with the fact that we posit an entirely different realm called heaven that exists, coextensive with ours, where God and all of our departed exist. It would be more surprising if things like this weren’t regularly blowing our minds.”

Having recently listened to quite a bit of the podcast called “The Telepathy Tapes1” I am reminded of a few events that made me wonder if there was some kind of energy that we could sense without fully knowing it.

I am not claiming some sort of special sight, or ANYTHING like that, I am simply expressing what I am sure many of us think, feel, or experience, but do not have a category or reason to express them. Sometimes you are not surprised to learn something that there is no way that you could have already known. These are simply examples of instances of feeling like I knew something before I saw it.

1. When I was in middle and high school there was a referee that officiated so many of our games. He had a mustache and somehow, we all knew that his name was “Phil”. He was probably a good guy, but as a ref, we always loved to resent him and assume that he was always against us. I was at the outlet malls in Destin with my family one summer (if you know you know). I saw a guy that I thought was Phil (I whispered to my brother, “is that Phil the ref?”). When I got closer, it wasn’t Phil… for sure was not him. Within an hour I saw another guy that reminded me of Phil, though I did not for a second think it could be him. I just thought, “Ha, another slightly balding-mustache-guy with a Phil-the-ref vibe”

At the third store we visited, I was in line with my mom as I saw in her eyes that she recognized someone behind me. I turned around. It was Phil, he either recognized me and my brothers enough from so many times in our school gym, or he just knew that by our age and shape that we must recognize him from his position. My mom made small talk. Something like, “well, I guess we only ever see you at basketball games (validating that we all knew how we knew each other), how are you? Are y’all just on vacation?” (just friendly southern small talk). Had I felt the Phil-the-Ref vibe the whole day because he was there? I thought I saw him because somehow I felt him? Who knows?

2. Over Thanksgiving break a few years ago, my brother and I were in the grocery store (at the beach again). I saw a tall blonde lady that I thought somewhat resembled the wife of one of my close friends from college. We hadn’t spoken in years, I had no reason to be thinking of him, and this certainly was not his wife. She was just a lady that for some reason seemed to remind me of Kevin’s wife. I did not give it another thought as we walked out into the parking lot. I heard a voice over my shoulder, “Is that Tim Shaw?” I instantly recognized the voice, because well, I had just thought about Kevin 10 minutes ago in the store. He saw and recognized my younger brother and then noticed me walking up behind him. Nothing inconceivable, just weird.

3. Within the past 2 or 3 years my wife and I saw an ad for a very cool piece of luggage. It was the rugged waxed canvas and leather style that we always thought was cool but was usually WAY more than we would be willing to spend. The ad said $59 down from $399 (or something like that). On the spot she said “Do you just want me to get you this for Christmas? This can be your gift, I’ll order it right now.”
“Sure,” I said. And right there from the passenger seat she purchased this bag. Or so we thought. This must have been late summer or early fall, because the uncharacteristic impulse-buy combined with the circumstances and the time on the calendar, we never thought about it again. So much so that, I got something else for Christmas. The holidays came and went and we travelled here and there with the same old duffels and suitcases to different places.

On the way home from some spring or summer vacation (maybe 8-10 months later), I thought,
“Why didn’t we order that bag when we had the chance?”
“or did we order it?”...
Did Marianna put it on top of the closet with the other gifts and we forgot about it?
That kind of thing happens often.

Maybe this was one of those times when you thought you completed an internet purchase but it never really went through, or maybe we got scammed… some algorithm banner ad for a bag that had no doubt reached our screen based on our styles and shopping habits… maybe we got “GOT” –
I mean the exact style of bag that we wanted was for sale for 85% off. Maybe they just scammed us for $59 and we were just going to have to take it.

Out of curiosity, Marianna began scouring her emails for receipts, order confirmations, tracking numbers, anything. We were sort of bummed, but also laughed about how crazy it was that we had completely forgotten that we had ever ordered it.
What made me think of it? The luggage in our car? Something else that I saw? Who knows?

When we pulled into our driveway, there was a box sitting on our front step. As surely as my hands rest on this worn out Macbook keyboard, there sat the box containing the bag that had come to our mind on the trip home. I would say that we had thought about that bag for 20 total minutes in our lives, the 10 that it took to order it, and the 10 that we spent eight months later to look for a proof of purchase, as we drove home from vacation.
And there it sat in a cardboard box. According to the postage markings, it had been delivered that very morning, while we were discussing it.

I am sure that lots of people have stories like this. I am not sure what to do with them, but I have obviously kept them in my mental storyteller file.

My oldest son and I flew to Tampa this week with only 1 back pack each to beat the system on Spirit Air flights from New Orleans. We went to watch a few spring training baseball games. Though we visited three different parks, somehow in each of those different settings one of the teams competing happened to be the Pirates.

By last night as we watched them take batting practice we felt like we had to pay attention to our own emotions just to make sure that we weren’t somehow becoming Pittsburgh fans amidst so many septuagenarians wearing Clemente, Stargell, and even one Kent Tekulve2 jersey. My brother-in-law, who joined us for 2 of the 3 games, admitted that he may have already re-located a good portion of his baseball rooting allegiance to the Steel City.

Other than this weird emotional undercurrent, the most captivating part of being at Spring Training was watching and listening to the explosion of power created with every swing of the bat by these big-leaguers.

I am an amateur golfer of the skill level that I would describe as “good enough not to feel like I am never holding anyone back, regardless of their skill level”. I would describe my swing as “more light than heat”. I am tall-ish 6’1” and plenty heavy enough to give the illusion that I can hit the ball far. But as I often have to tell unfamiliar playing partners, who respond with various expressions related to how I just bombed one down the middle, I am “sneaky short off the tee.”

Which brings me back to batting practice and golf swings that look so effortless and yet produce extremely powerful results. It was the best part of my time in the ballpark. This is why I like sitting at the driving range when I attend golf tournaments, and standing just up the line from the foul pole during BP. To be able to see the swing as it coils in and then uncoils itself from a close enough vantage point that my ears and my brain can match the cracking sound to the instant of impact.

It reminds me of the little “poppers” that come in sawdust-filled cardboard boxes the size of a deck of cards. You can buy them at the fireworks stand. The loud pop that they create is not louder than other firecrackers, but I have always felt like it was a better pop because it comes from a tiny piece of twisted tissue that you can toss ever-so-softly into the air. No matter how gently you toss it over a long gentle arc, when it hits the pavement it cracks like a tiny gunshot. That is the sensation that I get when I watch the smoothest and most efficient golf swings. It can almost startle you every time, no matter how many times you see it from someone who wields their driver the way that Indiana Jones does his bull whip. The pop always takes me by surprise.

That is what we saw last night. We watched man after man step into and out of the turtle shaped batting cage sending baseballs by the dozens into swarms of wrestling children and a few over anxious adults waiting 300-400 feet away.

For me, this is the magic of sports and especially watching sports at the highest level.

That is what I will eventually say when, during the conversation about the golf clubs we played when we were younger, or that our parents or grandparents gave us, the conversation inevitably turns to the Ben Hogan Golf Company.

It does not matter which set they are discussing. Apex, Apex PC, PowerThrust, Bounce Sole, Bounce Sole 1+, Bounce Sole 1+ with aluminum Shafts, Edge, Edge GS. I had a set. Precisions, PC6, Radials, “Red Lines”, Channel-backs, Magnums, Medallions, Directors, “Black Cameos”, “White Cameos”. I had a set. Not to mention Sure-Outs, Speed Slots, and Equalizers.

In fact, I had all of these sets at one time in my garage. It was one of the most enchanted and exhausting experiences of my life. Here is how it happened.

I have always loved Ben Hogan stuff. I have read as many biographies as I could get my hands on. For my mom, my name came from the Bible, but it was more Hogan than Hebrew1 names on his mind when my dad agreed to the name. My dad claimed that during his own childhood in Fort Worth, he remembered seeing Mr. Hogan through the fence, out on the course in the evening hitting balls. I would like to believe him, but sometimes I remember seeing the same thing and it would have been 25 years before I was even born. But that is the kind of thing that happens when you are drawn in by The Hogan Mystique. It makes you feel like you can remember sometime in your past, seeing him hitting balls in the dusk through the fence or the bushes at Colonial or Shady Oaks, you can make out his profile by the hat, but the swing is the unmistakable sign that it is him, and as the sun sets you can still know its him simply by the sound of the strike. See what I mean? To be fair to my dad, the provenance actually checks out for him.

There was a used sporting goods store where I lived that would regularly have sets of Hogan blades for sale for less than $100. Often way less. The problem (their problem) was that they based their prices on ebay “sold item” prices. They did not know the difference between Radial IIs and Apex 1973. But I knew, and what I didn’t know I started to learn. On a few occasions I picked up a set of the rack on my way to work, dropped them in the industrial sink in the church fellowship hall kitchen, wiped them clean at lunch, put them online for sale and dropped them at the post office on my way home from work that same day. Selling them for up to 5 times what I paid for them.

That however is not how I accumulated these sets. Once, as I was preparing to ship a putter to an ebay buyer, I noticed that he lived just a little over an hour from me. When I shipped it, I messaged him, “Are you a collector, or just interested in this one putter?” This began our friendship. From then on, any time that I would see a set or even a single iron in a goodwill or a garage sale, I would call or text John to see if he wanted it. He usually did.

John started out simply trying to collect a full set of the original Precision Irons, the first set made by Hogan’s own company. John’s mother had given him a set when he was young. He (or someone) loaned the clubs to his cousin at some point, and the cousin did what cousins sometimes do. John never saw them again. He did not play golf anymore, he just wanted to have that set back in his hands. In his pursuit, I think he began to feel the burden of each of these orphan clubs. Maybe he felt like they had all been heartlessly shuffled through cousin’s closets and garages everywhere.

I will save the details for another time. Maybe this will be a part of my book someday. But after years of filling his humble apartment with custom built racks of clubs including 4 full sets of Precisions, John was ready to get rid of them all at once. He did not want his kids to have to deal with them some day. I found a willing financial partner and bought them from John for probably half of what he had in them. It was the best I could do. I made much of the money back on the first day sending several sets of Precisions to a man in California who has such an encyclopedic familiarity with Hogan clubs that he could cite me information on serial numbers, hosel lengths, paint fill, shaft bands that you literally cannot find on the internet, and if you can, it is very likely because someone already asked him and then posted it there.

I placed these sets in their new homes as quickly and as efficiently as I could. Once we broke even, I stopped most of my bookkeeping. If someone was willing to contact me and send me a token amount of money, I would box up these ferruled foundlings and mailed them off, entrusting them to what I hoped would be worthy guardians. I finally emptied my garage for pennies on the dollar when a school teacher from Georgia showed up with a handful of cash and a U-haul, willing to keep the dream alive.

It has been a long week and a strange season, but I in order to keep my streak alive, posting every Mondays since my 45th birthday, I submit to you the rough and short version of my adventure in collecting and selling Hogan Clubs. I am over half-way to my goal of 52 straight weeks of writing and posting *something*. Thanks for reading this far.

I instantly grabbed the bar towel and clenched it as tightly as I could, wrapping it around my fingers and back into my fist. I was so mad. I was mad because I had been careless, mad because I knew I was about to miss not only these customers but probably my shift and the extra cash that I would have added to the stadium cup on the dresser at my mom’s apartment. I was also mad because it had only been a few months since I had cut myself on the tip of the thumb on the same hand. The lemon cutting incident took place while I was waiting tables in Monroe, Louisiana planning to enroll in seminary the following August. The previous incident had occurred while I was working in the “back of house” at a restaurant in Auburn, AL.

I had lost my focus for half-a-second while I was chopping squash for the roasted vegetable medley that was served as a side to several dishes at the now defunct Vagos Cafe & Gallery. I had been working there, prepping food and making salads, washing dishes and whatever else was needed. I did not love the job, but I learned a lot1 and was on my feet for several hours at a time. I was probably in the best shape of my life simply trying to figure out how God wanted me to put to use my newly acquired B.A. in History. I worked hard, thought and read a lot, and exercised hard. My friend Brian and I would run 5 miles as fast as we could and then tread water for just as long afterward in the apartment complex pool.

I sat on the table at the Urgent Care letting the nice lady numb the end of my finger before stitching it up through the nail. (Yes! stitches through my thumbnail, but that is surprisingly not where the passing-out takes place).

I sat their thinking about my guitar and my golf clubs and how I liked using them, and how long it would take me to learn to use them minus one of my fingers. I thought about the 4 year college degree that I had squeezed into 5 years2 and how this was a bit of a wake up call to inspire me to start moving towards whatever career lay ahead that I did not expect would involve the constant employ of sharp blades.

I left Auburn, moved back in with my mom who was living in Monroe, teaching school and doting on me in between my shifts at the restaurant when I was not on one of my 2-3 hour bike rides that I relished during this brief intermission between my two stints in academia.

The bike rides are important information here because I had been on one that morning. I am not sure how long I rode, but it was enough to have that amazing shaky feeling that seems to be accompanied by a clear mind. The decision to use my 75% off meal after, instead of before my shift, may have dulled that clarity a little. I had been careless and cut my hand and was now walking back to the managers office clenching the towel and preparing to tell him what had happened.

We stood in his closet-sized office mutually assessing the situation. These were tight quarters for any one-on-one meeting and I remember that I was at least a head taller than he, and probably 50 pounds heavier (even in my cyclist days). He was not a big fella.

Me: “Hey, I cut my hand quartering the lemons.”

Boss: “Ah man, I am sorry… is it bad?”

Me: “I think it might be, but I wrapped it so fast that I didn’t get a good look, the blood hasn’t made it through the towel yet.”

Boss: “Listen, man, we have all done it. I have grown up in restaurants my whole life, no telling how many times I have cut my fingers. You can take off, we will cover your shift, let me know if you need to go get stitches”

I thanked him and admitted that I had actually cut myself not too long before then, working in the back of another restaurant… “Yeah, actually stitched it through my thumbnail.”
As guys do, we exchanged a few stories about cutting ourselves or second-hand accounts of related traumas. At some point he began to tell me about something involving a hunting knife, field dressing a deer, an oak tree, the mixture of deer blood and his own blood.

And then I hugged him. It was a hug in the way that the KJV describes the Father hugging the Prodigal Son. I more or less “fell on his neck”. The last thing that I remember was his looking up at me from his styrofoam cup of un-sweet tea (no lemon yet). His eyes got big and then very close to mine and then I was on the ground in the office looking up as him while he held the back of my head and some other waiters brought in cold wet towels.

I barely knew any of these people, and I had just taken a knee, and then a seat and then laid down in this office right in front of them. That is how I like to think it happened. Truth be told, that poor guy probably caught me and lowered me all the way down to the ground trying not to spill tea all over us both.

This was the perfect storm, a combination of a calorie deficit, the hopeful anticipation of the shift that lay ahead, the adrenaline from the lemon juiced laceration, and the swirl of shame and regret that passed over me as I clenched the towel with a thumb that was still numb on the tip from an eerily similar event just weeks prior.

I sat on the floor, pretended to call my mom, and then made my way towards the lobby where I would slip out and drive home. Just before I made the front door I looked down under the towel. Nothing. The equivalent of a paper cut. No blood, just the slightest sting of pain that may have just been my nervous system trying to cut my ego some slack. I stayed home for a couple of days anyway.

Searching for Sugarman is about a 1970s folk/rock musician who released a couple of albums to zero commercial success in the United States. Sixto Rodriguez (he goes by “Rodriguez”) worked basic labor jobs in demolition and small construction during his musical career. The first half of the film is a journey in search of this near mythical figure whose life and career met a tragic and self-inflicted end (on stage of all places). Rumors as to just how it happened were varied and fantastical.

What becomes evident is that, while he was a commercial failure in the United States, his records had garnered a measure of success in South Africa. Rodriguez had a true fanbase in the southern hemisphere, a group of people who knew his music and believed various versions of the story of his untimely death.

(Exactly) half-way through the film you realize that, well, he is NOT dead. He is not even sick. He is still working demolition and small construction in Detroit just like he was in the 1970s. The “rumors of his demise had been greatly exaggerated” to quote another folk legend, Mark Twain.

What is more, due to the political climate and his unique flavor of anti-establishment charisma, Rodriguez had not just collected an audience, he had captured the imagination of a throng of devotees. Many were searching for a voice that expressed their sense of unrest. South Africans interviewed on the film said things like,

“In that day, any record collection in any white middle class home contained Abbey Road, Bridge over Troubled Waters, and Rodriguez’s Cold Facts.”

One man said that Rodriguez was bigger than the Rolling Stones. He was “South Africa’s Elvis”.

How big was he? He was so big that when word got around that he had been found and that he was coming to play a concert in 1998, people assumed it was a hoax. Even members of the band that promoters would arrange to play with him said that they were prepared to find out it was not really him, but an impersonator, of which there was at least one in South Africa. He was so big that when he did arrive a reporter even asked his supposed daughter “(off-the-record) is this for real, its not really him, is it?”

Rodriguez had been the soundtrack of so many of their lives. His music had served as anthem for apartheid protest. Some of the tracks were even government ordered to be scratched off the vinyl copies at media companies to prevent radio play. The systematic suppression merely amplified his popularity.

The documentary crescendos with footage of his first concert in March 1998. After he and his family arrived by plane they skirted the limousines on the tarmac, not knowing the chauffeured cars were intended for them. En route to their destination they passed “light post after light post” with large signs featuring his face.

When he was introduced and walked out on the stage (to what his daughters hoped would be “at least 20 people”), he was met by a thunderous roar of thousands upon thousands of fans of all ages. “It must have gone on for 5-10 minutes, just cheering before he sang the first note,” said one observer. When they finally quieted to hear him at the microphone he simply said, “Thanks for keeping me alive”.

He played 6 sold out shows in a row, and when he sang, the people sang with him. This was the music that had helped shape their individual and corporate identities.

As you learn more about Rodriguez and his life back in Detroit you meet an extremely humble and grounded man who still loved music, but also loved the working poor. Not only was he an advocate for his community, he even ran for city council and mayor of Detroit. He wanted to be a voice of influence, and seemingly for all of the right reasons.

Why do I love this story?

Because I believe that it is a picture of something that we are all longing for. Whether we know it or not, I think that we all long for a world in which the things that you understand to be special about yourself are not only permitted but celebrated. The things that you have imagined to be your special gifts that the world convinces you are worthless or weird.

Rodriguez is a real life Harry Potter taken from the Privet Drive of Detroit to his very own Hogwarts of South Africa1. He suddenly found himself in a world where his music wasn’t just a footnote or a quirk, but it was his most celebrated gift to an entire culture. Even his frustrated political ambitions were realized in South Africa where his music had made a true societal impact in ways that he could have never imagined during his failed campaigns for municipal offices.

What would it be like to be transported to a world in which the things that made up your very heart and soul that had gone unappreciated, now drew crowds of thousands for weeks on end?

I love stories like this2 because they are built on the themes that I believe we are created to recognize. Though we labor and toil with glimpses of hope and glory to come, we oft suffer the painful friction of the lives we live rubbing up against the lives that we feel capable of living, that we feel that we might have even been created to live.

Harry Potter had lived the better part of his childhood in a closet under the stairs in the home of his resentful aunt and uncle. When he is finally told and shown that he is a wizard, all that which made him odd and despicable to his adopted family, had made him not just beautiful in the “wizarding world”, but irreplaceable.

Like Harry, Rodriguez went back to his Privet Drive (by choice). He continued to work in relative local obscurity, doing construction and demolition, making ends meet, and giving away most of the money that he received from performances scheduled from time to time for him in South Africa.

“Nothing beats reality,” he said, “so I went back to work.”

For Rodriguez, it is as if simply getting small glimpses of what it means to be realized and treasured, even just seen for his gifts was enough to sustain him in what he sensed was his other calling. To work and live in a broken community.

That is the hope of the message of Redemption in scripture.

Creation, Fall, Redemption, Glory

We need little glimpses of the Glory that is to come. The assurance that there is hope and there is a place where all that you are created to be will be recognized and made useful for some Great Purpose. Maybe we all need those glimpses from time to time to remain faithful in our current callings, to work and live in broken communities.

May the Holy Spirit give you glimpses of that Glory when you need it.