Before, after and in-between...

                                  The truth is, I don't really know much about being a dad...

                                                           I'm just faking it.

                                        That statement is certainly true, the whole " faking" thing, but it doesn't quite cover the confusions hiding behind all the coffee and donuts; it doesn't adequately address the few things that sometimes go well in a parenting style more in tune with unchoreographed Caribbean water spouts than binge watched episodes of Father Knows Best...

                                  I think I know where I'm trying to go with this, but I'm not entirely sure that is where we are actually going to end up....

                                  If you've read the blog before, you know what I'm talking about; if not, maybe a couple Excedrins might help the transition...

                                        An extra cup of coffee?... I don't know...

                             The day before Father's Day, I awoke my eldest McMonkey from a deep and well earned sleep, on the last weekend before the last days of school. 

                                                           At 6:00 am...

                                  Nick hates getting up early, but he loves his dad, so he got up with much less goading than he usually requires and with almost no threats of frozen marbles being poured under his covers. I promised hot chocolate and bacon, to motivate.

                                   Our Church has a "Men's Advance" every three months or so, a little pancake breakfast for the guys, both in and out of our congregation; a partial bribe with bacon and real maple syrup, sided with a bit of Bible and organized comradery... That's not how the flyer puts it, but I lost my copy of that, and have to wing it...

                                               A friend and mentor who organizes the breakfast section of this, asked for volunteers to man the griddle. 

                                           Of course, I volunteered my son...

                                  Like I said, I don't know much about being a dad.

                                         It was easier when they were little; a few funny noises mixed with copious amounts of potty humor, and you get the best dad trophy every single day. They forgot the "No's" pretty quickly then, the giggles and laughter seemed to follow them around like happy confetti clouds. 

                                         No pimples, no hormones, no angst...

                                   I never thought you had to raise teen boys; supply them with chips and meat and just let them run. Like dandelions, they will raise themselves...

                                          Then again, I have vast arrays of personal cautionary tales to disprove most of the brilliant ideas I'd ever thought, thruout most of my life...

                           My kids think I'm a pretty decent father and the Wonderful Wife has reviewed me much better than I deserve. I'm faking it at this stage, with a lot of whistling in the dark.

                                   An old proverb  says that it takes a village to raise a child; I think that they have that half right. I watch my kids, teens, really, and see in all of them a foundation that started when a frazzled mom made long trips with infants and toddlers to a place that gave her a few moments of peace, and a few Godly women that let her know she was going to be alright...

                               Who gave suggestions, help and support.

                         You see, I would have used crazy infants and kids as an excuse to miss Church; she used them as a reason to go. I wanted to cuddle with my complacency, not challenge myself to be better; coasting was ok with me...

                            But I saw what happens when a women loves God, loves her kids, loves her Church and becomes part of it by showing up, serving and making a few dear friends. I saw the contrast most every morning, looking at myself in the mirror as I would brush my teeth, measuring myself by uncomfortable convictions that haunted me every time my mind quieted. Never once did this amazing lady guilt me or even point out my discrepancies...

                                  She was overjoyed when I started men's studies at our Church.

                          I am so blessed to belong to a Church that supports men in their struggles to get this "Christian ", " dad" and " husband" thing right, that corrals us all together on mornings it would be much easier to sleep in. 

                               So on the day before Father's Day, I am not thanking God for a village...

                                                I am thanking Him for this Church.

                                      I am thanking Him for men and women who are worshipping Him, building each other, while at the same time putting down bricks on bridges to eternity, for feet they most likely will never see...

                                 Before we can help make the next generation better, we must insure that we, ourselves are walking rightly; we can't teach what we don't know or can't do...

                               That is what I'm working for, shooting for, and mostly faking.

                                       The best gift I can give my young men is to show them my stumbles, bumbles and bounces in trying to increase my obedience by smidgens...

                                         And walk beside them as they enter into the best struggle ever, on days they would rather sleep late...

                                         

                                    

                                  

     

Facebook, Silly Circuses, and Printed Tickets...

                                                   I want to dive into the fray...

                                 The Internet has exploded with half of its population calling for expanded gun control and the other half quoting statistics and opinions of exactly why doing just that would destroy the entire world...

                                        I fight every fiber of my being to just stand down and not alienate people I otherwise care for and respect.

                                                   I have my opinion; oh yes, I do...

                                        Throw that into a blog and let the chips fall where they may, that is how I want to react. I hear an old hippie Pastor asking me quietly, in my brain, if plastering this contrary opinion all over my corner of the Internet is worth more to me than keeping people in my life that disagree with it.

                                        Will I silence my opinion to keep them?!?

                                              I'm tempted to infer that I had no difficulty at all, in answering that question, but I struggled with it terribly, weighing my need to be " right" over all else.

                                                       I so want to be right...

                                               My answer was simple, look for something to distract me from the silly circus I printed tickets to; find something else that might actually add a tiny positive to a terribly divisionary and useless battle...

                                           I tried to find that place, but instead, I found myself in a conversation today, that troubled me to no end.

                                               An eighty year old man I know kept repeating to me that it was a " gay club" that was shot up.

                                                            I told him I knew that...

                            " But it was a gay club", he kept repeating, with a strange smile,almost as if that made what happened ok....

                                                   Hearing how those words were spoken, and all that was inferred by them, made me want to completely ignore my Pastors advice about offending people with my opinion...

                                 As I began to open my mouth, angered by the ignorance speaking before me, I understood that sometimes we must confront what we disagree with.....

                                         Then I looked deep into his eyes, and I realized that nothing I could say would change almost a century of programming...

                                                I wanted to argue anyway.

                                      I closed my eyes and took a deep breath; 

                    For a completely different reason, a day after tragic violence, 

                                                     my heart broke again...

                                             

                                                     

The Magic Kingdom...

                                      His eyes were almost hypnotized...

                         I had snuck into their room at 4:00 am and crowed like a rooster. All three of the McMonkeys awoke, perplexed and frustrated. Eventually, they all laughed, jumped out of bed and excitedly grabbed the bags they had packed the night before, for the big trip to Disneyland...

                           We pulled in on the bus about eight hours later, dragging from the stop and go merry go round of standing in lines for airports, planes and the eventual bus we just had walked off of...

                                     When we got to the Magic Kingdom, that was when I first saw that hypnotic gaze, so amazed and overwhelmed by the fairy tale world that surrounded him; he was lost for that moment in the exquisite unreality of that small section of time...

                                            Fast forward about six years...

                                 My father is talking about Orlando, a mass shooting, fifty dead and fifty three injured, as my now almost eleven year old sons mouth drops open, his eyes glaze over a bit, as he fights to understand that this really just happened.

                     An eerie kind of replay, of that day long past...

                                       It was not a movie or video game; it was tragic and real and almost unfathomable to his loving and innocent little mind...

                                        Miles away from where we had been, but not many.

                                             This was not the stuff of Disneyland...

                                 So Facebook loads up with all the people to blame, just as it did when a black church was shot up, when a Colorado movie theatre, an Army base and an east coast elementary school listed those murdered, to the press.

                               Homophobes, racists, Muslims and NRA gun nuts...

                        We have this crazy inherent need to define the ever changing enemy, in a useless attempt to pigeonhole some segment or group responsible for all of these tragedies. In hopes of illusionary control, we trade an uneasy feeling of brotherhood for any profile that fits our present fears...

                         

                                 My son will soon ask " Who are the bad guys"?!?

                                              I struggle for an honest answer.

                                    He will want a simple answer, just like all of us do, standing here today, crying for justice, want. He will want a picture, a face, a characteristic, that will fit all those who commit such atrocities...

                                                Me too, kid ; me too...

                                              I can give it to him, I think...

                                     Not one race or society has ever been free from atrocities. Jew, German, English, Native American... All the way back to Cain, the list goes...

                               No religion is free of crackpots, doing awful things in the name of a God they have no understanding of. No philosophy, exempt...

                                           Sadly, the one thing in common to all these killers is a DNA sequence called " human".

                                         I know many people of many faiths; I know deniers of God, doubters and devoted followers. 

                                      All of them shared broken hearts for every victim of these shootings.

                                         I think that's common in all our DNA, too...

                                              We are both a mess and a miracle.

                                                 So we can search for bad guys...

                                                    Or we can let that inborn spark of common decency and love, that we all share, unite us and bring us together...

                                          I can give him that picture we all want in our anger, or I can reframe it by changing my own viewing perspective, and focus on the best it has to offer, the best we all have to offer...

                                             So often, we humans find the ability; are Graced with the ability, to step over all that evil would use to separate us, and use it to unite us, in love...

                                Sometimes we screw that up big-time, and we release our worst.

                                      It feels like a crap shoot, sometimes.

                                                           But it's not...

                                                It comes down to a simple choice.

                                     We mirror the evil or we let God heal our souls, and allow Him to right our misguided instincts..

                                                        It can't be that simple...

                                                                 But it is...

                                                                     It is.

                                         

Out of time...

                             My middle McMonkey set up our PlayStation remote, yesterday...

                    As he was explaining it to me, I pressed the TV button to switch the input, but mistakenly pressed the wrong TV button, the power button to the TV...

                                                        The TV turned off.

                          He had previously instructed me three times not to press THAT button, and gave me a hopeless look of exasperation, not so quietly wondering how I could be so slow witted and technologically challenged...

                   " I thought you were an electrician, dad", he said with an irritating smile.

                              I started to explain to him about how in my day, we had no remotes; that we WERE the living remotes for the family TV set, describing the world of three channels and rabbit eared antennas that we sometimes had to take turns holding in place, to keep a strong signal...

                                        He gave me that same look I gave my father, forty or so years ago.

                                             The only difference between then and now, is that I didn't swat him beside his head, for his attitude.

                                     Ah, to have the freedoms parents had, back then...

                                                              Just kidding.

                                                                   Sort of....

                                                         At least I wish I were...

                          I tell people that your first colonoscopy is proof of being old.

                                                          I am wrong, on that count...

                                               Sometimes it transpires when you, who have always been the "techie" of the family, watch, as your wise acre twelve year old primate, breezes thru stupidly complicated set ups, with his tiny bionic like, opposable thumbs, and you just stare, mystified, trying to figure out exactly when the doctors snuck into your bedroom and labotamized that part of your brain...

                                                  Yep.  That's when it happens...

                                            Or maybe that's just when you finally notice...

                                  

                                        I am officially an anachronism, a man out of time...

                        My dad calls me into his room at least once a week, aggravated and perplexed that some how he pressed the wrong button on HIS remote, and nothing works anymore.

                                                  But he's eighty.    He's...old....

                                   

                                        I don't understand the society we live in, anymore.

                             I don't get the politicians that we have running for office, I don't understand the judges that we have in our courts, and I really don't get the media we have, that defines this unreal " reality" we are living in today...

                             I want the old days, the days of Reagan and Carter, the days of Morrow and Cronkite...

                            I don't want to have to explain to my pubescent McMonkeys about the things that happen behind dumpsters, and why it is such an important topic. I want to skate the issue, dodge and deny that it is so prevalent in our lives and culture...

                                     I don't want to have to talk to my boys about rape.

                          I don't want to describe the ways it can happen or their responsibilities and our expectations of them , to be the kind of men that will do everything they can to try to stop it from happening to anyone...

                                     Fathers shouldn't need to have a conversation explaining why this is wrong, but evidentially there are fathers that completely miss that themselves; fathers that justify and defend this awful act. I don't want to have to drag this topic into the open, but I do...

                                                                  We all do.

                                                 Hiding from it and ignoring it, unfortunately ends up communicating a condoning of it, in the minds of those who commit it. We must be clear and vocal and loud...

                                              Rape is never ok, never excusable...

                               I ache for a simpler time, one where I needn't forge these topics.

                                            I almost wish for the ignorance of generations past, and a naive innocents that never needs to face such darkness. Sadly, this was happening just as much back then, but it was not spoken of; it never was discussed outside of criminal courts...

                                   In one way or another, it always worked its way back to the victims, what they had drank, how they were dressed...

                                      I guess unfortunately,that part has followed us forward into this generation. Maybe, just maybe, we can call it the bullcrap that's it's always been, and obliterated the myth of its existence...

                                                          But we need to face it, first...

                                

                          What I really, really want, is to feel some form of trust for any human authority in our country, again. I want to be proud of.... Someone. 

                         Someone that is supposed to be leading us ...Somewhere...

                                                                     But I don't.

                                 I feel a country lost and abandoned by every earthly power and influence. 

                                        

                            Maybe this is a good thing. It forces us to place our trust in the only real Authority this world has ever known; it makes us insure that we are petitioning He of True Wisdom, Strength and Power...

                            This circus- like debacle, this Kafka-esque parody, is the perfect exhibit to contrast and prove our complete inability to govern, guide or even positively affect each other, outside of a Loving, Divine influence...

                                    There are people that see this all transpiring, and are joyous, because they know that Jesus is coming soon...

                                                           Me too, but I'm not in such a hurry...

                                   I would like to see my children become the men I already know that they can be, and maybe get to meet the children I'm hoping they will eventually have; I would like a few more romantic walks with my Wonderful Wife, and maybe gaze into her eyes a few thousand more times...

                         But I can't wait for this insanity to be finally and completely replaced, either...

                                         I have hope today, a hope that is real and guaranteed by the Ultimate and Perfect Authority...

                        I just need to keep my eyes where they always should have already been...

                                                                         On Him.