I had business in Las Vegas the last couple of days. Las Vegas is probably my least favorite city. The conference I attended was lodged in Harrah's, which meant that no matter where I wanted to go, I had to wade through rows and rows of slot machines, colonies of Keno players, and other assemblages of people who have come from all walks of life to have a good time.

The thing was, not a one of them was smiling. There were young couples, groups of gawking frat boys, middle-aged Italians, elderly singles being pushed by their offspring in wheelchairs, or perhaps hobbling along on walkers. Men and women of all ages, manners of dress, languages and dialects. All had flown to Las Vegas, the sleepless city, the city that knows how to keep a secret, the city of lights and fortunes, and every blessed one of them looked like someone awaiting execution.

Perhaps people have more fun at the shows and restaurants. But you can get better versions of each in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, heck, even Atlanta. No, what sets Las Vegas apart is the gambling, and perhaps the prostitution. Millions of people visit every year, and I wonder, does a one of them find what he is looking for?

Do they even know what they seek?

Which I suppose can be asked of us all, not just the poor souls sitting numbly in front of those cold machines with the pretty, pretty lights. The answer, I think, is that we are seeking something that will fill the great Empty.

It runs right through the middle of you, this emptiness, and though every good writer has tried to describe it, and though we all know it is there, we are most of us terribly afraid to think about it, which is perhaps why a place like Las Vegas can exist at all.

From Walker Percy's 1957 article, "The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry":

"We all know perfectly well that the man who lives out his life as a consumer, a sexual partner, an 'other-directed' executive; who avoids boredom and anxiety by consuming tons of newsprint, miles of movie film, years of TV time; that such a man has somehow betrayed his destiny as a human being."

The crisis for psychiatry, Percy went on to say, was that in treating human yearning for significance as a symptom of some underlying mental illness, it actually contributed to man's separation from creation, by alienating him from his purpose.

Not that the long line of therapists and psychologists in my own past haven't been helpful. Love you, guys. But I wonder if Percy wasn't on to something that modern America doesn't want to hear, which is that the yearning can't be entertained or purchased or medicated away.

One of last week's nights I woke to what I thought was a child crying outside our house. This is one of my fears, that my child will wander out the door in the middle of the night and walk away, more lost with each stumbling step, and I will sleep even as he calls for me, and I will sleep until it is too late.

I rose from the bed, certain one of my children was outside in the misty black. I went from one window to the next, trying to see him, until I woke more and realized I ought first check their beds. Each boy was where he belonged. Who was crying outside my home? Who is this lost child?

I know I have been hearing things at night. I lay back down, wide awake. I heard the sound again, only now I recognized it was the sound of Isaiah sighing, filtered through the baby monitor. I lay awake for a while, thinking about how sounds modulate in darkness, as if the dark itself is a material that distorts them.

This weekend I ran alone. Usually I have two boys on bicycles hovering about me, and a third in a baby jogger that I push before me, against which I whack my shins when I take overly long strides. I ran alone, and I listened to random music, and underneath that I heard the sound of my own heart and breath, and underneath these was the steady thump of my feet.

I came home, still thinking about the nature of sounds, and stripped to my skin, and dived into the pool. I pushed the air from my lungs until I sank to the bottom. I lay there motionless in the silence, until my lungs could stand emptiness no longer, and then I came up for air. I clung to the side of the pool and breathed. Above me in the trees was an enormous spider web, spun with thick silvery line. It looked like a flattened vortex, or perhaps a malevolent eye, or maybe it was just a spider's web.

Have you ever been alone, in the quiet of yourself, and been at peace? I felt that peace then, for no reason, the peace that surpasses all understanding, floating naked and alone in cool water. There are nightmares, yes, but there is also peace.

The calm was soon disrupted by William Isaac. He stood on one leg at the edge of the pool, working off a recalcitrant sock that was the last piece of clothing between him and skinny-dipping with Dad. He jumped in to me, and then we splashed about until one, then another brother, wandered out to find us. Soon we were all swimming like otters.

In his poem, "Word for Worry," Li-Young Lee writes: "When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder/ Do his father's kisses keep his father's worries/ from becoming his?" Sometimes, when I tuck a child in bed and pray, I lay my head on the pillow beside him. Sometimes he will kiss me when I do this. Whenever this happens there is peace, which is always in the smallest places. I suppose we hear it best when we listen past the noises, to a whisper that must be God's.

If you've ever had people put their hands on your head and shoulders and pray over you, then you know what it is like, sometimes, to read the words some of you write to me.

Caleb has been reading a great many history books. Last night he asked if I have ever been beaten with a whip. Not thinking, I told him I have been beaten with a belt, but not a whip. He was suddenly sad and quiet. "Really?" It was a wounded voice. I got down close to him, so that I could feel his breath on my face. "I will never do that to you," I whispered. "I know," he said.

Sometimes as a parent you feel like a wall. One side of you is hard chipped stone. The side facing these little ones is smoothed, its cracks spackled as best you can manage. Sometimes your child will run a finger along one of those cracks, and when he does this you know you can go on standing, no matter the weight, until he is strong and ready to beat back the world with his own muscle and bone and faith.

The outside of the wall that you are is always cold, but the inside, this is where there is warmth, because of them. Last night I supervised Eli as he practiced "Frère Jacques" on the violin. We don't have the words, only the music, and so when he asked me to sing it I had to improvise, because neither my childhood nor seven years of French seem to have taken in any wholesome way:

Frère Jacques
Frère Jacques
Dormez-vous?
Dormez-vous?
Some French words I don't know
Some French words I don't know
How 'bout you?
How 'bout you?

Eli giggled. I like when he giggles, because he is my wistful child.

Isaac is rarely wistful, but he knows that he has exasperated me with the constant waking. It seems I'm not the only one in the house who can't sleep. Last night, instead of coming to my bed, he went into my bathroom and shut the door. I opened the door to find him curled up on the floor. I picked him up and he settled his cheek on my shoulder. I carried him through the dark house, praying that he won't have nightmares, that he comes to me because he misses me, and not because he is haunted by something on the other side of sleep.

I placed him on his bed and tucked the sheet around him. He looked up at me, his fuzzy lamb held tight to his chest, and he smiled. It was a peace-filled smile. I kissed him, and he closed his eyes, and he was asleep before I left his room. His sleep, like that smile, was peace-filled.

Sunday night brought a nightmare, one I used to have as a child. In this nightmare you are awake, it seems, and you can see the bedroom as it will be when you finally do scream or gasp yourself from sleep: black and gray shadows, the soft frail light of the moon or perhaps a streetlight trickling through a gap in the window shade, even your hand rising from the bed, weakly pushing or pointing at the presence that you can't see but which you can feel as it approaches. In this dream there is always a sound; sometimes it is a growl, or a harsh laugh; once it was a lion roaring. This time it was three loud knocks, as if the presence wanted permission to enter.

You try to scream in this nightmare because you know the dark thing is coming, but you are breathing syrup. You can feel it draw near, and sometimes it brings a shadow, but other times everything looks the same, which is somehow worse, because the feel of it makes your skin shrivel, and you think that if only you could see it then perhaps you could scream and then you could wake up.

Then I did wake up, only this sense of something dark and malicious didn't lessen, and for the first time since I was a child, I had to keep myself from screaming even after I was awake. I closed my eyes and whimpered all the names of God I could remember, thinking the sound of them might drive it away, this darkness that forgot it is supposed to depart when I wake. The names didn't work, and so I stood from the bed, shivering and electric, and left the bedroom for fear that if I lay there another moment I really would scream.

When I was a boy and I dreamt this, sometimes I wouldn't wake, and the presence would lift me from my bed, and carry me through the dark house. It was always dark, everything dark, and I would try to twist and scream but I was always paralyzed, which is how a creature about to be devoured by a spider must feel. I used to believe that if I went to sleep in the tightest possible ball, then the nightmares wouldn't come. I would wake sore and stiff, but safe — passed over.

I don't remember when I stopped sleeping that way, or why the nightmares stopped. For the longest time I was afraid to go into a dark room, because in some of my dreams that's what would happen, I would walk into a dark room and then all the lights in the house and the world would extinguish, and then it would come for me, that darkness blacker than the absence of light. Eventually I was able to go into dark rooms, and then I forgot the nightmares for a time, though every few years they come for me.

Sometimes I wonder if there is something buried beneath my skin, and if this is how it tries to escape. Maybe all those years of curling myself into a ball was actually holding it in. But as I lay in that place between a dream and sleep, first trying to scream and then trying not to scream, I felt like prey, not a cage. Maybe things inside can devour us, so that we become the Ouroboros, feeding forever on ourselves. Sometimes I worry that the writing causes this, when I go into places that are best left sealed like tombs. In The Book of Nightmares, Galway Kinnell writes:

learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come — to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones.

I wonder if I will ever look full in the face that darkness that sometimes comes in a nightmare, and if the terror of it will melt my bones. I slept in a ball last night, my wife's arm around me. She knows that her presence sometimes keeps the nightmares at bay. I will sleep in a ball again tonight. Gradually, in days or perhaps a week, I will sleep like a man who isn't waiting for something to return for him.

Until it does. Then I will whisper the names of God, and pray that they are enough, and that whatever haunts me will only ever come to my room, to my side of the bed. You can endure anything as a parent, I am learning, because even in the worst of it you are grateful that it is you.

I've realized lately that my patience with bureaucracy and hypocrisy and politics has nearly reached its limit, which is unusual for me. I like to think that as a student of organizations I have more patience with them. But as I lay in bed yesterday morning, wishing it was Saturday instead of Thursday, pondering the immediately relevant portion of Adam's curse (By the sweat of your face you will eat bread), I remembered that I needed to put on my charcoal suit and dark tie. I remembered that I would be leaving work that afternoon to go to a funeral. I remembered that for all my self-pity, it wasn't me burying my daughter that day.

The funeral was filled with beautiful young people, a testimony to the widespread admiration for the departed young woman, as well as to the shock of death when it intrudes so early in life. We all watched the coffin carried in, followed by the family, and it struck me how a funeral is arranged much like a wedding. Indeed, her mother had prepared a wedding cake for her, to be served at the reception afterward, since there is to be no wedding for this girl on earth.

We stared, until her father left the group and walked slowly to her coffin, perhaps to whisper something to her, or to pray; I don't think any of us know, because all of us — or perhaps just the fathers — averted our eyes. Some things are too terrible and sacred to witness.

Her cousin played the piano and sang two songs so sweetly that I don't think I'll ever listen to them again, because the professionals who recorded them never sang them as well, can't impart to them the immediate meaning that he did, glancing at his cousin's coffin as he cried and sang the words.

I don't remember anything either of the presiding pastors said, except that the grieving were exhorted to rejoice. I think if I ever preside over a funeral, I will begin with John 11:33:

When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled, and said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to Him, "Lord, come and see."

Jesus wept.

The head trained in theology tells us the one we love is in heaven, but our heart and flesh cry out because she is gone. The heart learns the mysteries of God at a slow pace. Do you want to know what Jesus would do at a funeral, were he again on this side of Heaven's veil with us? Jesus wept.

Perhaps I didn't forget what the pastors had to say but simply ignored them, much as I admire each. It was the father I wanted to hear, and for whom I prayed as he made his way to the altar to give the eulogy for his child. He honored her memory and name greatly. I was ashamed, listening to him speak out of a place of heartbreak and courage, to recall that only hours before I had wallowed in my bedsheets and my self-pity, bemoaning my miserable lot in life. Any day we do not bury someone we love is a good day. This is what I was reminded of yesterday.

I realized, as I lay in bed at 2:30 a.m., my head splitting, wondering if I needed to take my feverish wife to the hospital, that I haggle with God. I don't know if God haggles back. This makes me a bad Presbyterian, that I don't hurry past those passages in the Bible about Moses convincing God not to slaughter everyone, or Hezekiah weeping until God agreed to let him live longer, with my highlighter poised to illuminate any verse that appears to imply predestination.

I don't know if God haggles back because I never live the counterfactual. Last night, for example, I was praying that we didn't both have meningitis (because this is what I do, I take the symptoms and attach them in my mind to the worst possible disease, and then I get a stomachache worrying about it). I was also praying that the children, especially the baby, wouldn't get sick. Then I remembered how I've often prayed if someone has to get sick (because in my mind bad things are hot potatoes in God's hands, and they have to be dropped on someone, somewhere), that it be me and not our children.

So there we lay, sick, all of our children sound asleep and healthy, and it struck me that maybe the haggling had worked. Then I thought that can't be right, because I'm a Presbyterian, after all, and if Presbyterians are nothing else, we are absolutely right about all the small and large points of theology, which is why it will be especially surprising when most of us are on the back row in Heaven, having been so excited about our theology that we forgot to evangelize and give up our wealth to the poor. And that will be really awkward for some Presbyterians I know, let me tell you, though not for me, because I know that in my case just to get past the gates will require a great deal of luck providential blessing, and quite possibly a clerical error predestined divine intervention.

But the point is that as I lay there in misery and fear, I realized that I only ever thank God when things are really good. This seems akin to only thanking your wife for the meal she cooked when it's a nine-course French dinner. Not, of course, that I think of God as a woman, because as a good Presbyterian I know that God is a white Republican man who opposes immigration and will condemn you to the lowest plane of Hell if you vote for Hillary. But don't let that defeat the analogy; I think you see my point: I don't often thank God, not really, for most things that are blessings. This is because I am caught up in my personal vision of extreme satisfaction and comfort.

How humbling, then, to read this by Oswald Chambers after my healthy and happy children dragged my carcass out of bed this morning:

We utilize God for the sake of getting peace and joy, that is, we do not want to realize Jesus Christ, but only our enjoyment of him.

I suppose God doesn't need to haggle. I suppose I take that view when I center myself in the universe, with him as my recalcitrant Sugar Daddy. What a miserable universe it would be, if that were all it amounted to.

We finally fell asleep for a little while, somewhere around 4 a.m. We're both still miserable, but the children all seem fine, so we'll go ahead and count it all joy, as the good book says, the sickness and the health, and remember that other glorious passage in the Bible, the one we often overlook: It came to pass. . .

The word home has a connotation both immediate and distant. A home is intimate, that place where we belong, where they let us in the door whether we deserve it or not. As something one does, home has traditionally been distant, implying that one is going to it, or that one is being remotely guided to it.

Pigeons, I have read, find home even when they don't know where they are, by relying on magnetic fields, and the sun. Some of us have a sense of not belonging in this place where we find ourselves, and of home being somewhere else, such that we can feel it though we don't know the way. We hold out hope that, like those pigeons, some mysterious force will draw us home. The pigeon has the sun, and the Christian has the Son, and I think a great many other people who don't know where they fall on the pigeon-Christian axis hold a quiet hope that something will emerge for them too, guiding them to a place that is not here, because in the old ways of using that word home, the verb implied the absence of the noun.

The verb form of house, meanwhile, is immediate and impersonal. When we say something is housed, we mean that it is sheltered now. There is no seeking in relation to house, and no intimacy either. The house is where we keep our things, including our tired skin and bones. It is what we settle for when we can't go home.

I recently learned that home has the same root, in the old pathways from which our languages emerged, dusted themselves off, and were immediately slaughtered for the sake of newspapers and corporate annual reports, as haunt. This is fitting, I think, because our home — that place we are tuned to seek — haunts us. Home is the place we yearn for even when we have never seen it, or perhaps have only seen it in glimpses or dreams.

It is best not to get too comfortable with this place, for eventually we will be called home, and how sad would it be, do you think, to cling to here for fear of there? Home is where, for some of us at least, people we have loved wait for us, which is perhaps why it haunts us. We have grown accustomed to the use of haunting as something dreadful, but it can also be something lovely and melancholy, especially when one is haunted by visions of home.

We weep for ourselves, when the people we love go home. We weep with sadness that we are left here for a time longer, and with joy that, for those we have lost, home is no longer what is sought, but what has been found.

Father's Day morning, the Wife brought me homemade blueberry muffins in bed. I sat reading short stories and eating blueberry muffins, and it was blissful. Soon I heard them conspiring outside my bedroom door, the little ones and their mother the ringleader. In marched a little troupe of celebrants, each bearing a gift. They perched themselves around me on the bed, each clamoring for me to open his gift first. They gave me a big bucket of bubble gum, some metal collar stays, a Hemingway-style pocket journal, and a cheerful little book published in 1902, titled The REAL Diary of a REAL Boy, by Henry Shute. It's written in the language of a schoolboy, and has entries like this:

December 15. Micky Gould said he cood lick me and i said he want man enuf and he said if i wood come out behind the school house after school he wood show me and i said i wood and all the fellers hollered and said they wood be there. But after school i thaught i aught to go home and split my kindlings and so i went home. a feller aught to do something for his family ennyway. i cood have licked him if i had wanted to.

I love old books, the feel and weight and texture of them, and the knowledge that they were born when people read, and when they read something more intelligent and edifying than Danielle Steele or Robert Ludlum.

We went to church and happily it wasn't a sermon about how none of us men are good enough as fathers. After that we went to our favorite Wichita restaurant, and I had a Dr. Pepper and didn't feel the least bit guilty about it. Later that day there was more short-story reading and then a run with the boys, Caleb and Eli on bicycles and Isaac in the running stroller and me doing the hard work in between wheezing at them to look both ways before turning onto a street, and to be extra careful because that SUV coming at us is being driven by a teenager, and for God's sake to look up at the road and not down at how fast their feet are pedaling.

Later that evening we had my favorite meal: hotdogs and the Wife's extra-special macaroni and cheese. As an added bonus her grandmother, who is visiting, made me creamed corn. Still later, I attempted to make The Perfect Tom Collins, according to a recipe I found in The Wall Street Journal, but I put in too much gin and then tried to compensate with more soda and sugar, but then that threw the squeezed lemon into too small a proportion and so by the time I was done it was something more like a soggy sugared pine tree than the perfect anything, but liquor is liquor and it tasted especially good because I bought the gin the next county over, because Wichita forbids alcohol sales on Sundays, unless one happens to own a restaurant or bar, which likely inclines one to contribute generously to city council members, who in turn are more likely to stick by their moral position that alcohol should not be sold on Sundays.

One day, in heaven, I'm going to sip a Tom Collins with Jesus on a Sunday, and we're going to have a good laugh about blue laws.

Still later, some friends and I watched a man movie, although it wasn't really because there was far too much kissing and love lost for my taste, but the moral of the story was good, plus more than one bad guy got skewered, so it was certainly a good use of two hours.

Around midnight I realized that while I may be an okay father, I am a very bad son, because I didn't call my father or stepfather. I'll try to remember how easy it is to be swept up in the chaos and bliss of being a father to all these young ones, so that my feelings aren't wounded when they are too busy being fathers to be sons.

I lay awake for a time after the house was completely dark and silent, thinking thank you over and over in my mind, whispering it to God. And he must say I know when we thank him for our children, because he is a father too. It is good to be a father. More fathers should try it. If I can get this right, I keep telling myself, the rest of it doesn't matter. Be a good husband. Be a good father. The rest of it fades away almost as soon as we are cold in the ground. Help me get this right. That's what I whisper to God in between the thank yous.

We've been adopted by a kitten. She's a scrawny black creature who darted out of the bushes a few days ago, mewling and shivering, afraid of all of us but desperately hungry. Now we have a dish for food and water which the boys keep full. The kitten stays mostly in the thick bushes beneath the pine trees beside our house. I suspect she believes that she's actually a house cat now, given that the boys seem to spend a good portion of their time in those bushes as well, building forts and getting covered in sap that makes their hair stick up at odd angles and leaves them smudged like they've been working in the coal mines. The kitten is still skittish, though last night she crawled into my lap as I sat outside. Not that I like her, mind you. She's a cat, after all, and I don't like cats.

This kitten has me thinking that maybe "the least of these" is different creatures for different people. For those of us who prefer the poor and wretched to stay on their own side of the tracks, the least of these fits the traditional profile. For those who bathe themselves in the misery of others, laboring in soup kitchens and shelters, perhaps the least of these comes disguised as the repugnant hypocritical religious type who wants nothing to do with the poor. Maybe the least of these, if you are a dedicated liberal, is Jerry Falwell. Perhaps, if you are a hard-core conservative, the least of these is Hillary Clinton. Maybe for some of us the least of these is a scraggly cat who promises only to scratch our children and tear up our running shoes before getting hit by a car and introducing the littlest ones in the family too soon to death.

There's no telling, is there, who or what will cross your path once you start opening your door to strays, be they cats or people. I know a few people — a precious few — who seem to have spotlights over their homes, calling every broken-down drunk and homeless single mother and three-legged dog in the county to their doorsteps. I used to think it was their circumstances that were peculiar, that they just seemed to be always happening upon those in need. Now I see it's more the case that we all cross the paths of those in need, but we've trained ourselves to ignore them. We wall them out, whether they are the hurting, socially awkward people in our own churches, or the desperately poor people south of our national border.

I'm the best wall-builder I know. I don't know why a wisp of a kitten makes me think about that, any more than I know why sometimes I start humming "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing," or why I sleep with the blankets drawn over my head, even when it's hot. Maybe I think, as I watch her lap up the dish of cool water, of all the people whom I've denied water. Maybe I wish people were easy as kittens. Maybe I see myself in the shivery black thing that hides in the bushes and shrinks from touch.

I like to think that in letting the kitten adopt us, I'm teaching the boys to care for those in need. I want to believe they will never deny water to the thirsty. These are the things you ponder as you guide their little souls to the author and perfecter of faith, praying you don't cause them to stumble before you've handed them over.

The kitten, meanwhile, is slowly taking to them. When they are sitting on the ground she prances up to them in that sideways manner of skittish creatures and pounces on their hands or shoes. For their part, the boys are learning not to practice their manly animal-trapping skills on her. Instead they make kitty noises and stroke her sap-covered fur. I think they'll make good protectors one day. Good givers of water.

Caleb is learning to play chess. I realized this weekend that he often thinks three moves ahead. I will not lose to a seven-year-old. I played in a tournament once, and lost to a fourteen-year-old. That was humiliating enough. The first time I realized there are people smarter than me — people who simply have more horsepower in their brains — was in graduate school. My roommate, Jay, was a Harvard math major, and had perfect GRE scores. We would play chess, and he would ponder every possible permutation, and make no mistakes. I couldn't beat him. His brain worked that way with everything. I've met students and professors from numerous universities since my graduate school days, but I've never met anyone smarter than Jay.

Some people seem smart, because they've read and retained a great deal. That speaks more to an encyclopedic function in their brains, I think; they are like human filing cabinets. They can tell you in what book Herodotus describes the cold-hearted Xerxes as he surveys his men sailing to their destruction, they can even tell you what Xerxes is reported to have said, and how he wept at the grandeur of that sight. But they can't tell you what it means, the pathos and sentimentality and repugnance of it. They can only tell you when and where Xerxes met his defeat, and what scholars have written about what the Hellespont meant for Greek civilization and military power. They are parrots less than thinkers.

Jay was one of those people, however, who could not only retain information, but process it. He was an original thinker, armed with a sheer computing power that I realized I could never match. It is a humbling thing, to have pleasant illusions about oneself so decisively dispelled. I'm reminded of that humiliation as I play chess with Caleb, and see how quickly he absorbs the concepts, how in a short time he has already learned that he must control the center, and use his pieces in combinations. Toward the end of a game yesterday, as we sat head-to-head on lawn chairs in the late afternoon sun, after he had lost so many pieces that the end was beyond question, he made a sudden bold attack on my king with his bishop, supported by his knight.

This is how he will be, I think, smart and dangerous and surprising. It gives rise to a new fear, not that I will be shown less intelligent than I thought, but that I will fail to help him temper his intelligence with wisdom. Jay had wisdom about the ideas and concepts floating about the intellectual world in which we dwelled for a time, but he lacked wisdom about the deeper things, as I did, as did everyone I knew in graduate school, as do most of the people I know today whom the world considers intelligent and wise.

It turns out that horsepower alone isn't enough, that wisdom, and the discipline that flows in part from wisdom, are required. These are learned things, and my job is to help my sons learn them. That realization in itself is more humbling than living with a genius, or three little boys who show every sign of emerging smarter than me. It's humbling because I realize I'm simply not up to the task, if imparting wisdom means giving them what I possess.

What is the extent of my wisdom, thirty-nine years into a life in this world? That the heart of man is dark, that I know nearly nothing, and that I can't trust my instincts to do anything but betray me. My wisdom is in knowing how little wisdom I possess, and sadly, that in itself is more wisdom than what is held by most men I know, at least those outside my church.

But where can wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
Man does not know its value,
Nor is it found in the land of the living.

But that is where we look, isn't it, in the land of the living, meaning within ourselves and our lives, in the little things that we think we learn by accumulated experience, which likely as not serve instead only to confirm the delusions we have cherished from the beginning. If it's left to me to dredge up the wisdom my sons will need in order to be something more than intellectual processors, then I will fail.

Then He saw wisdom and declared it;
He prepared it, indeed, He searched it out.
And to man He said,
'Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,
and to depart from evil is understanding.'

This is why we pray for our children, those of us with enough wisdom to realize how little wisdom we possess. This is why we read the second chapter of the book of Proverbs and speak it to our sons and daughters, pray it into their skins if we have to, because we know that what they need is beyond our power to give them. This is why parents, if they are more than simply humans who have procreated, are humbled creatures, because only in humbly seeking wisdom at its source can we help our children obtain it.

This is a portion of the art and labor of helping our children become something better than us, part of the generational effort that those in the covenant understand, while those outside it have trouble even making sense of these words. It is why we say that when we are fools we are wise, and where we are weak He is strong, and why all of it seems like nonsense to those who are lost but think they are secure, while we who are secure work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

So are you working it out today? Your children are watching, and they will do as you do. What do they see? I hope in me my sons see the unwisest of men seeking after wisdom that will never come from within. I hope they learn humility more easily than I have had to learn it, am learning it still.

The two younger boys crept into our bed in the black morning, driven by a snarling storm. They curled into me, shivering, as if I am a safe harbor. There is no keeping out the storm; this is what I thought. The cool peaceful evenings line themselves up between the vibrant days, and we forget the storm until it is upon us, and then we remember that there is no hiding from it, because it knows where every living one of us dwells. These little ones have not been so long removed from the raw stuff of nature to forget the primeval violence of the world. We chuckle at how they cower, but they are right to fear the storm. We are the foolish ones, to think our roofs and walls protect us.

They shivered into sleep beside me, thinking I have some magic, and me full of wakeful fear, knowing too, before a shave and a newspaper help me forget, that only magic will keep the storm at bay once it comes in all its fury. And we have no more magic, none of us, so we chuckle when these children cringe at the thunder, and tell ourselves that we have conquered the storm.

We lay in that bed, and I listened to their breathing, their peaceful breathing, and counted the seconds between the flashes and booms, as if math will make the storm disappear. The storm drifted away, but it is always just on the horizon, perhaps doing its own counting. Maybe it has some final number in mind, and we, meanwhile, think that this number is infinity, when it surely is something much smaller, much closer, with only our children sensing how close it really is.

No man can hold back the storm, little ones, not even your father, shivering as he is beside you. You'll read this before you truly know, because you can only know it when your own children lay shivering beside you, thinking you possess magic that has left the world. Then you will know it, deep in the bones that forgot, until that moment, the primordial fear, and you find yourself whispering a prayer only half-believed. You whisper that prayer, and in whispering it you know that you have no magic in you to protect them. This is why we pray so seldom, and often weep when we pray, because we've lost hope before we've begun.

So you whisper that prayer, little-ones-now-fathers, and the growling storm thunders louder, and your soul cringes, attuned as it is to the destruction of the flesh, forgetting its own eternal nature. The heart and the flesh cry out because their days are ending, but this soul, this cringing, faithless soul, is made of some resilient matter that even the hungry storm cannot devour.

There is no stopping the storm when it is finally unleashed; this is the reply to the prayer you will find yourself whispering one black morning, as your trusting children sleep beside you, believing there is magic beneath your skin. But there are only the strange equations — loss equals gain, death equals life — and they are founded in a math deeper than that with which you counted back the flashes and booms.

This is the conversation you will have with God, as your own children curl into you, not knowing that once you curled into me, and that in all the years between, you have not found the magic to hold back the storm when it comes. This is what comes to you for your whispered prayer, this quiet promise that the storm cannot destroy all. It is not the answer you will hope for when you whisper your prayer, but it is more than enough.

So sleep beside me now, little boys, and I will fight back the storm until my flesh fails me, as all flesh does. It is a blessing that all flesh fails, because otherwise our souls might never struggle free. Knowing this I protect you nonetheless, because that is how fathers are made. That is why we die one day, so the world can go to work on you in its turn, that you might learn the painful lesson, which is simply that all flesh fails, and that this is good, because there is something underneath the Lord has made. You cannot see it, but I think I catch a glimpse as I watch you sleep, and I think it must be inside me too.

One dark morning, when you hold your own children, and are filled with fierce love for them, know that I have loved you the same way, and that this is why God calls us his children, that no matter how many heresies spill forth from preachers and priests, we might remember he loves us with more ferocity than any storm, even the storm that bides its time.

She would have been eleven today. I would have made her favorite meal, which is spaghetti, and we would have had cake, probably something with pink frosting, and I would have eaten a slice even though I gave up sugar for Lent, because if God understands anything about us, he understands this. I would have looked at her across the table, an island of grace amidst her unruly brothers, and maybe caught a glimpse of what she would look like as a mother. I would have kissed her goodnight, the way I always did, and perhaps I would have lingered in my hug, breathing in her smell, because I think something in me understood, before we lost her, that you never know how many days you will have with them.

Eleven is a curious number, if you look at it, if you sit at your desk and scratch it on a pad and stare at it because you can't find any words in yourself. And if you think about how you can't find the words, you remember what the writer you admire most said to you, that writing is actually very easy, that you just open a vein and bleed. And so you rip the bandage off the wound, and through the sting of it you see that the shape of 11 reminds you of two people standing, a mother and a father, perhaps, and they are waiting. They are looking into a future they cannot see, and they are waiting as if in a line, as if in both their small minds is the question, "How much longer here?" They wait in line and they quietly ask God this question, but very quietly, because to want it to be finished, so often and so fiercely, is a sign that you are broken.

The shape of 11 reminds you, if you look at it, of two people, a mother and a father, maybe, who have a space between them, a space that once was filled, only now it is empty, and though they reach out in their numbness, it is such a great distance to cross, the emptiness called she was here, or only daughter gone, that you wonder if they will ever close the gap, these separate ones. And when for a time the space disappears, and they are one again, it is indeed a miracle beyond the powers of any mathematician, to make one out of two divided by nothing.

And the shape of 11, if you look at it, is like a lonely 1, staring at himself in the mirror, like a father who shuffles into the empty room and cries out, only no matter how much he shouts there is only the mirror, and he standing in front of it, remembering that this is where she would stand, right here, and he would put clips shaped like butterflies in her hair, and marvel at how she could look like him, and still be so purely different and lovely.

The shape of 11 is the empty box, it is arms raised to heaven, it is the repeated number on the walls of the prisoner scratching out his existence, denoting one more day, and one more day, each carrying him closer to the opening of the door, the end of the separation.

The shape of 11 is two flags staked into the bloody ground, side by side, and two people, a mother and father, just maybe, who say, "this is our life, all of it, the blessing and the curse, and here we will stand until it is finished." And if you look closely, you see that it is good ground, this place where they stand; it is sprinkled with blood, but it is overgrown with life, and so it is good ground. It is proof that joy and tribulation can co-exist, life and death, peace and suffering, and only because there is something on the other side of that mirror, the life more abundant, the reunion, the setting right of all things wrong.

But mostly, today, the shape of 11 is the two dreams, what might have been, and what is to come. Happy Birthday, Caroline.

Parents Waiting

It is strange,
In the face of this hungering dark,
That we persevere
In giving life to these lambs,
Who don't know better than to accept with hope,
Having yet to understand what awaits.

This is not our home.

If they knew, they would rejoice,
And perhaps ask why
We celebrate their arrival,
And weep when they depart,
Returning to sleep, awaiting the call
Of what is better than we know,
Where they wait for us, until the dark has fed,
And we learn that it was they,
Not us,
Who first found life.

Tony Woodlief

The date began delightfully enough. We went to a healthy restaurant specializing in Mediterranean dishes, meaning that there was a three-minute wait, as opposed to what would have been an hour wait at the wretched Olive Garden. At the end of a wonderful meal of Orange Roughy stuffed with spinach and other good things, the waitress informed us that another table was paying for our dinner.

I knew who it was, because we'd run into him and his wife on our way in. Along with his former partner in crime, he is the best leader and manager I have ever met. You've never seen his name in a paper or a Harvard Business School case study (which may well be proof that he's competent), nor has he received an ounce of recognition from the upper management of his own company, but I've seen him work miracles with manufacturing facilities, simply by harnessing the knowledge and passion of the employees.

Suffice to say that he and the other person I won't name (for fear of sending trouble their way), are my first and only business heroes. I've learned more about management from them than all my other sources of education combined, and for some reason they seem to enjoy my company as well, even though I take much more from them than I give.

So, my friend and hero paid for our dinner. On top of that, the way the waitress announced our good fortune made us sound like celebrities to the people sitting near us. An excellent way to begin the evening.

Then it was on to Barnes & Noble, which proved to be a profound disappointment. I've realized that I just don't care to pay top-dollar for a hardcover book any more. I found the book I was set on getting (see the previous post), but who wants to pay $24.95 for a big ugly hardcover book (especially when it's retailing for $16.47 and free shipping, provided your order is more than $25, at Amazon)? So I put it at the top of my Amazon wishlist, where I will salivate over it until it comes out in paperback, at which point I'll buy and likely read it in one sitting.

There is one exception to my newfound no-full-price-for-books rule, and that's when it comes to books in the Everyman's Library collection. I could try to describe them, but just look at this vivid (and true) description from Knopf:

"...printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines."

Do you remember Tim Allen's show, "Home Improvement," and that ape-sound he would make when he got worked up about tools? Insert that sound here.

So, I'm in love with the Everyman collection, even though I only have two: Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and George Orwell's complete essays (this last courtesy of my beloved mother-in-law). When I strike it rich I'm buying "The Everyman's 100", but until then I will peruse and covet and drool over and occasionally actually buy them, one at a time.

With that in mind (the coveting and drooling), I asked the nice lady at Barnes & Noble how many books they have in stock under the Everyman imprint. "One," she told me.

"Are you sure?" I asked. She swiveled her computer screen around so I could see for myself. It listed one: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Oh well, I thought, Barnes & Noble is trying to push its own, cheaper, paperback classics series, so I can hardly fault it for choosing not to entice the buyer with the clearly superior, albeit more expensive, Everyman option.

So I began to wander the stacks. Right away, I found the Everyman edition of Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Then Bleak House, by Dickens. Then another title, and another. How could this be, I wondered, when the Barnes & Noble computer had only just snidely blinked at me with its one recorded Everyman title in stock?

So I took up counting the number of additional Everyman titles in stock in their adult literature section (because the Everyman collection, you see, encompasses religion, philosophy, and children's literature as well). Final count: 15 titles. The Barnes & Noble computer was off by a factor of 15. Fifteen hundred percent variance.

I think you see the problem. It made me think, how many of us even trust information given to us by the computer systems, websites, or personnel of large organizations any more? When was the last time you actually believed the "on-time" status of a flight listed on an airline's website? Who trusts the Home Depot employee when he tells you over the phone that they don't have that much-needed router bit in stock? I don't know about you, but I don't even bother to call a store any more, because my experience is that it's a coin toss as to whether what they tell me actually holds true.

And yet, organizations spend billions, collectively, on information systems every year, from the lowest end (the idiot teenager picking his nose by the phone), to the highest end (my favorite trend: fancy new government websites that are loaded with everything except answers to questions like, "How much, really, do we spend per pupil?" or "What are all the offices I need to get permits from before I start my business?"). All that money for information, and nary a lick of it seems to go toward providing what it is that we really need, which is reliable knowledge.

But I guess that's a critique of more than just information systems, isn't it? We are surrounded by sensory inputs, and yet we seem to be losing our grip on the things that lead to wisdom.

In the end, I came home without buying a book, but I already had two lovely books that were far better than what I'd set my sights on. The wife, you see, had slipped them onto the seat of my truck. The first was a hardcover book of English poetry classics. The other was a small hardcover early edition of Robert's Rules of Order, inspired by my recent failed bid to throw a monkey wrench into my homeowners association juggernaut.

And isn't life that way, sometimes? We think we really want one thing, but once we get close to it, we realize that we didn't really want it so much after all. And only then do we realize that we already have something far more precious. It's not necessarily as flashy or exciting or new as what we thought we wanted, but it's precious nonetheless, because it's bound up in the things of our lives that matter most to us.

I didn't get what I wanted last night. Instead, I received the kind gifts of people who are far better than me, and who care for me nonetheless. I don't see how it can get much better than that, do you?

P'u-Hua Fei Hua

Po Chui
Translated by Duncan Mackintosh
Rendered into verse by Alan Ayling

I found myself on a train to the Atlanta airport weeks ago. There was an aggressive panhandler in my car, the kind who stands right up in your personal space and holds out his hand while mumbling about money for food. He walked like a chicken, his head bobbing and feet shuffling as he went from seat to seat, pecking with his outstretched hand. Unlike in, say, D.C., most of the people, themselves dressed little better than him, dug into their pockets to offer change. His right pocket acquired a hefty chink, chink as he walked.

He stopped next to a young man of maybe 25, dressed in jeans and work boots. The man had a baby boy in a stroller with him. The young man offered the panhandler his work gloves.

The beggar's face registered what a rooster must look like when he confronts a raccoon. "What's that for?"

"So you can get a job."

"I been looking for a job."

"Well you ain't looking hard enough," and with this the young man gestured at his fellow passengers in their work boots and fast food outfits and hospital scrubs, "because all of us have one."

"I been down at the temp agency since six o'clock this morning."

By now everyone was watching, most with amusement. The young man looked at his watch. "It's four o'clock. How come you ain't still there?"

"It ain't easy to get a job. I need to eat."

"What you need to do is stop drinking." There were chuckles and nods and some of the black women made that "Mmmhmm" sound that captures life and truth in all its splendor and sadness. The beggar had lost his home-field advantage to this man with work gloves and a little boy.

"Well, yeah, I have a problem. I'm not perfect. Ain't nobody perfect."

"You don't got to be perfect, you got to stop drinking and get a job and stop asking all us for our money."

There was laughter now, not ugly, but the kind you might encounter at a family reunion, provided you have the kind of family that won't hide the fact that they think you are a fool or a mess but who will easily tolerate your presence regardless. But the beggar wasn't going to get any more money in this car.

He reached out his hand to the little boy, to give him a little fist bump. The boy responded, and then the panhandler shook his hand. The dad pushed his hand away, as if whatever had afflicted the bum was contagious. It was an easy gesture, like brushing off a fly, or wiping a nose or one of the thousands of movements a parent makes in a lifetime to guard and guide a little one.

The doors opened, and the beggar shuffled out. Everyone returned to their quiet conversations or looking out the window or, for many, tilting their heads backwards or forward or against a window and closing their eyes. The young father played with his son's hands, calm and gentle and bone-tired.

I wanted life to go well for him, and for his little boy. I found myself praying for them both, praying for the first time in too long, asking God to give this man every blessing I have received and squandered, every kindness I have repaid with indifference, every strength I have parlayed into weakness. I prayed as if the good things are limited and I had been given too many, because I have, and here was someone who maybe would do more with them than I.

I don't know why God persists with me, and sometimes I wish He would stop. I wish He would just move on, rush into someone else's life with the storm or the whisper and shake the dust of this barren garden from His sandals. And still He is here, on a fool's errand, leaving me no ground to claim hopelessness in anything, for He remains, with the absurd grace of Heaven, hopeful for me.

We find grace at the bottom of our shame, once we have wept at our own transgressions until we have no more tears, past the silence that follows, into the laughter at the sheer lunacy of it, this knowledge that there is no separating, that He of infinite knowledge is infinitely, mercifully forgetful.

So the prodigal son returned, scarred by the world he pursued, to a father who saw only the broken flesh of his flesh limping through the gate. The son, hoping to be blessed with the lowest servanthood, was instead to be the guest of honor. Rather than recrimination there is restoration and beyond this, a celebration.

It makes no sense, to the point that I marvel how anyone who knows shame could imagine we have manufactured grace to soothe our souls, for a fiction must be, at some root, believable. Grace, however, is inexplicable, wildly at odds with nature, thoroughly unbelievable.

And yet I believe, to the point that I ask Him to stop, as if I could cause one less stripe on the bloody back, shorten one of the nails by putting an end to this impossible venture when He in stubbornness will not.

I remember squeezing drops of nourishment through my daughter's clenched teeth after the doctor told us to let her starve, not out of faith, but because I could not give up on her life. I suppose it's something like that.

There's a reason Christ told us to call His father "daddy." Any man can father a child, but only a daddy persists past reason, binding himself to his child even though it lead unto death. Only a daddy sees the son return after shaming him and thinks not of comeuppance but of killing the fatted calf, for the presence of his child makes his home complete.

So He pours the living water through these clenched teeth, and I know that He will no more stop than I would, than that daddy in work boots would leave his son on the train platform, even if you told him the boy will only break his heart. It's how daddies are made.

William Isaac's namesake passed away Saturday night. Sergeant Major William Stroup lost both parents as a child and spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and foster homes. He parachuted into Normandy at age 24, killed people who needed killing, saw his friends cut down around him. He raised four children, one of whom was kind enough to have my future wife.

My wife has always been a good judge of character (with one exception) and he was one of her favorite people. As we prepare for his funeral I find myself wondering: how did he capture the heart of a little girl so completely, the heart now in my hands, the heart I've often mishandled? The answer, I think, is that he always believed her, he always made her feel safe, and he never let her leave his sight without telling her she was loved.

It's humbling to think on, and it's my prayer, in between prayers for the wife and children and grandchildren and friends now mourning him, that the same can be said of me one day. And Lord please give me the time to get there, and forgive the time I've wasted.

In her grandfather's final weeks my wife and children spent a lot of time with him while I worked in DC. Though he was worn down and in pain from the cancer that finally took him, he would sit at the organ and play and sing for the boys. Isaac was responsible for some of his last smiles, and he was responsible for many of Isaac's first smiles. I have no idea what they'll look like when we're all on the other side of the veil, but I'm sure I'll recognize them from the crooning.

Every few years he would drive across country for a reunion with the survivors of his battalion, and now their dwindling numbers are one smaller. He never had a big house or expensive car, and like most of us he had no fame. But he did his part to banish some of the darkness from the world for a time. He will be dearly missed by everyone who knew him. Would that the same could be said of all of us once we've departed this earth.

Go with God, Bill, rejoice in your new life. And try not to hog the piano up there.

Fourteen years ago this evening, the Wife became, well, my wife. She could have done better, though I don't think she knew it at the time. I've certainly given her cause for buyer's remorse. Talk about perseverance -- that seems to be the theme this week, no?

I remember her coming down the aisle, in the loveliest, classiest wedding dress I had ever seen, and have ever seen since. Her eyes sparkled, mostly because she was crying. This was touching at first, but it pretty much continued for the next two days, so perhaps it was a down payment of sorts, on all the hurt I would cause in the years to come.

But she came up to that altar, and she gave me her hand, and even though I had only an inkling of how undeserving I was I took it, and we were made one. She was so beautiful that day. Since then we've laughed, screamed, cried buckets, and often just . . . endured. Life hasn't been easy for her, for us; fourteen years can put a lot of scars on the soul. So I was amazed when I watched her sleeping this morning and realized, as if seeing her for the first time, what fourteen years has somehow become on her face, in her most unguarded of moments.

Somehow, despite the struggles, despite the worry and hurting and just plain working our way through the years, she is more beautiful today than when she walked down that aisle fourteen years ago, my angel in white.

I keep finding tender purple pansies growing in corners of my yard where they were never planted. Stubborn and fragile, cheerful without cause, they remind me of Caroline. Purple was her favorite color. She used to help me plant the pansies every fall, or at least I think she did, because too many of the good memories are so faint now. In a storybook a father would remember everything, but it's not true; you lose things no matter how desperately you cling to them. In a storybook there would be new memories replacing these fading ones; in a storybook she would still be here.

When the wind hits the leaves just so, I feel her hair blowing against my face. When the sun touches the ocean in the late afternoon, I see her smile. When her brothers giggle, I hear her laugh, and in their prayers I hear her whisper. She is still here, just not in the way I would like.

I can wait. I'm stubborn too, like those flowers out of place. I can wait.

On its surface, the Terri Schiavo battle is a tangle of conflicting histories, medical opinions, legal opinions, religious opinions. Beneath the surface, it is the latest skirmish between those who want to stop our practice of terminating inconvenient life, and those who want to sustain the right to do so. It is also a tribal conflict, and some are engaged not because they care deeply about the outcome, but because they see an opportunity to spew vitriol at the other tribe.

I'm not a neurologist, I don't know her husband. I can't claim any legal expertise that would allow me to discern whether this is a bad case that could make bad law, as Molly Ivins writes (which presumably means someone else wrote it first). I don't think I'm "incapable of making moral distinctions," as Ivins paints some opposed to the slow starvation of Terri Schiavo. It's a good line, to be sure, especially funny coming from a plagiarizing hack who would denounce the Almighty himself if she thought it would help her tribe at the polls. Perhaps her accusation is true of some on the Hysterical Right, but I don't think it's true of me, or many others who believe that what's happening in Florida is a shame and a tragedy.

The shame stems from the fact that Michael Schiavo betrayed his wife years ago. That's an ugly truth, and I don't say it with self-righteousness, because many men far better than me have fallen away from their wives, under far less stressful conditions. But that truth remains, and it is relevant, because the entire case for starving Terri Schiavo hinges on the post-abandonment remembrance by this man that his wife -- the same woman on whose behalf he sued to secure money for long-term care -- actually doesn't care to live in such a state after all. The heady willingness of many on the Left to embrace this contention unquestioned, simply because it serves their end of thwarting nefarious pro-life forces, redounds to their shame.

I'm struck by how cavalierly we throw about this notion that death is so easily chosen. Perhaps it's an easy choice in abstract, and so it becomes simple to project such a choice onto others. I suspect that many of us who bravely declare the many conditions under which we'd rather be put out of our misery, however, would in fact cling more desperately to life than we realize.

The unshakeable fact is that we'll all get to find out for ourselves one day, no? If you were to be Terri Schiavo's place, on which side would you like the world to err?

The tragedy is that Terri's parents simply want their daughter back from the man who promised to care for her, but who backed away from his promise. It appears that they can't have her.

It must be horrible, it must be maddening, and everyone who approaches this debate should keep that fact fixed firmly in his mind. Neither this, nor any case of euthanasia, nor any abortion, is directly about any of us onlookers. It is first about the life that is deliberately extinguished, and second about the wounded who are left behind. It is only about us in the indirect sense, insofar as our action -- or more likely inaction -- contributes to the state in which we find ourselves.

There will be many tears when Terri Schiavo breathes her last. Some will be genuine, some will be fake, some will be hysterically generated by people who have overly invested their emotions in someone else's tragedy. Then most of us will move on. You and I will go back to our lives, Michael Schiavo will go back to his new woman and kids, his attorneys back to their other clients. But Bob and Mary Schindler will be left without a daughter, and they will know that it might have been different.

A few things. First, a logic check for the guy who tried to muscle his way into my lane this morning. Despite plenty of opportunities to merge like the rest of us, you chose to wait until the last possible second and then jerk your car at me like we're jockeying for position in the Daytona 500. You're driving a shiny new Porsche Boxster. I'm driving a 1992 Honda Accord that I've driven so long I can thread it between the lies in an Al Sharpton speech. Who did you think was going to win that battle?

Second, if any of my readers are ever feeling low on hope and energy, I encourage you to acquire a copy of Third Day's Offerings, and crank up the live version of "Consuming Fire." A warning -- it's not soft and soothing. But do you think in Heaven we're going to be singing "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" like a bunch of bloodless white Methodists?

Hell no.

Yes, I'm feisty today. But in a righteous, let's-burn-this-motha-down way.

So while I'm in this mood, let's talk about something, Christians. My agnostic friends, please just come along for the ride -- it may offer a little insight into this wacky cult of minivan-driving, homeschooling, getting up early on Sunday morning tribe that horrifies yet fascinates the sophisticates at the New York Times. Plus it helps us Christians remember that the world is watching.

A popular reference in evangelical Christian circles is Proverbs 27:17: "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." We want this, for the men in our community to help one another stand strong in the face of a world that either mocks our faith or demands that we mute and mutate it into a harmless hobby.

But consider this, Christian men, as you think on your small groups, your book clubs, your mentoring relationships. What are you sharpening for?

Here's the thing -- we spend a lot of time reading the right books, learning the right verses, having our 6 A.M. accountability group meetings, all of it to get razor-sharp for . . . what? If you believe that the scriptures are truly theopneustos -- "God-breathed" -- then you have to consider why the Almighty settled on this particular imagery. Iron sharpening iron. Why do we sharpen iron?

To cut something. To kill something. To separate one thing from another.

It seems to me that too many of us -- and I am at the top of this list -- spend our precious free time diligently sharpening, sharpening, sharpening, and we never look up from our grindstones to ask where the battle is.

I've got a terrible secret to share with you. The battle is right here in our midst. It's the child who has been seduced into believing that his self-worth comes from the praise of the ungodly. It's the single mother who feels only the scorn of the very same Christians who would have cursed her had she aborted. It's the wife who reads the end of the fifth chapter in Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and wonders why her husband is blind to the words. It's a world that equates our worth to our income, and to evaluations from people who won't be singing "Consuming Fire" beside us in Heaven.

But we're too busy sharpening to fight.

Here's another secret: if we wait until we're sharp enough, we'll whittle away the years until there's nothing left. We have armor, and we have a sword.

You know of what I speak, and you know that this sword is sharper than anything we could manufacture. It is the sword that separates light from dark, truth from falsehood, clean from unclean. It's been granted to us, and it should be an awe-inspiring gift. So why don't we use it?

Try this today: look at the world as a raging battle. Now survey the tragedy of an entire army of men professing to be on the side of light, yet all of them too busy earnestly sharpening their swords to engage the enemy. So are we surprised that our churches have become places that bore our young men to sleep and distraction? They are hard-wired for battle, and we give them a safe, perpetual training camp. No wonder they turn their passion to sports, one of the few remaining idols not only tolerated but nurtured in Christian circles.

Isn't it better to be beaten down than never to fight? Do we really believe that when we are weak, He is strong? Do we really believe any of the things we hear on Sunday morning? Beyond belief, are we convicted?

Don't talk to me about sharpening iron any more. Tell me about your battles.

Sometimes when people learn that I have three boys, they say something like: "don't you want a little girl to go with all those boys?" I remember when we thought we were in the worst of Caroline's dying, after she couldn't speak but before the pain made her scream for hours, I would stare out the window at the cars driving by. I would look at the people inside them, some smiling and talking, some yapping on their cell phones, some simply placid and alone. They drove to schools and baseball games and restaurants, and to homes without sick children.

I hated all of them. How can they go on like life is normal, I thought, when our life has been torn from us? It was a silly, selfish thought. But I don't blame myself for having it, any more than I blame strangers for not suffering in that moment. We think silly, selfish things when it seems like the world is bent on crushing us.

I read somewhere that most people are never more than eight feet from a spider. Spiders are ubiquitous and secretive. Suffering is like that, everywhere and hidden. We have lost people we love, we have frittered away time and dreams, we have discovered betrayal where we expected love, we have been abused, we have been despised, we have been suffocated by indifference.

Suffering is often a very personal thing, and in a world of acquaintances and transactions we grow blind to the fact that all but the most unfeeling or narcissistic among us endure it. But they do. Often it passes, sometimes it lingers.

Sometimes it returns for a visit, and I've learned that if you don't let it in for a while it lurks outside your door, peeking in the windows, whispering things you don't want to hear, until you've medicated yourself with distractions and blocked out every good thing just to keep from hearing, from seeing.

So it's best, I've found, just to let it in. Then you learn that time has dulled its sting, and you can actually bear the company. And then you discover that while you were keeping it at bay, you were keeping away the very best parts of life as well. It is the last trick in suffering's bag, the last thing it can rob from you -- the blessings you have now, your time to drive down the street and smile because life, for all it can take from you, brings gifts of grace and sweetness.

Caroline would have turned nine years old today. We would have had a party, with cake and ice cream and presents. Her little brothers would have been underfoot, singing "Happy Birthday" at the top of their lungs, hopelessly, desperately loving the beautiful girl with brown curls and eyes like chocolate, eyes like her daddy's.

Hopelessly, desperately, the way I love her, the way I miss her.

Happy birthday, Caroline Elizabeth. You are beautiful.

I've been sick, the kind that lingers and begins to make you wonder if you will ever feel good again, or if instead something ghastly has hold of you. Nothing does, says the doctor, just a combination of fatigue and virus and various peripheral complications. I hate the feeling of physical weakness; it puts me out of sorts. I suspect I will be quite graceless at dying.

I was afraid because the weakness wouldn't leave me. I imagined I had some disease of the heart or blood, and that soon I would be the subject of hallway whispers and conversations between doctors quite unable to help but constitutionally incapable of admitting it.

I used to be afraid of death. Every visit to the doctor was tinged with fear that he would find another lump in my throat that didn�t belong, only a lump unlike the first one, a lump not so easy to cut out. Every clean evaluation was like a reprieve.

When we lost Caroline I began to look forward to death. Then we had a baby, and another, and another. I guess ancient fears have ways of re-attaching themselves. Now I don't fear my death for me, but for the family I would leave behind.

It's funny -- a family has a way of forcing spiritual maturity on those capable of such a transformation, and this maturity is a precursor to courage, and yet family can make such cowards out of us. Missionary trip -- are you crazy? I have children to look after. Go deep-sea diving? You must be out of your mind. Go pester one of those ubiquitous, shiftless, childless college grads for a partner. I have a family to protect.

No wonder so many men are increasingly comfortable with sending young girls to do our fighting for us -- all of us with families are too fearful of What Might Happen.

If you believe that death is the absolute end of you, then you do well to fear it -- more so than you will realize until that day. But many of us proclaim something very different, and yet look at how we arrange our lives. Nearly every waking thought is bent on either eliminating risk or cultivating distractions from it. We who believe in a Creator profess a dependence on Him, but we don't behave as if it's true.

Or maybe it's closer to the truth to say that we know it's true, and we hate it.

I remember sitting in a jet sent by my former employer to fetch us back from the clutches of Children's Hospital in Chicago. Our last real hope, they almost killed Caroline before telling us what they knew before we arrived, which was that she was going to die. Our pastor had flown up so that he could fly back with us, and I remember telling him that every hope had been removed one by one, so that now we sat in the palm of God.

"There�s no better place to be," he said. I knew I was supposed to believe it, but I didn't.

When we have no other hope, we face the possibility that His plan won't be ours. Sometimes He lets worldly dreams go unrealized, and tragedies happen, and illnesses rage. To trust Him is to abandon your plans.

This is a hard thing to do. It is doubly hard when you have been wounded, and you know that He could have stopped the wounding.

I think of my children, and how they trust me so completely. Sometimes that trust leads to wounds, and not all of these are for their good. Sometimes they are hurt by my stupid words or actions or inattention. And yet they trust me with abandon. With complete abandon.

"For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." I've been thinking about that, as I reflect on how I run to Him when I am desperate, yet when I am wealthy and well I devote my time to building a kingdom where He isn't needed. I find that I become Peter in the hours before the crucifixion, knowing Him but pretending otherwise.

So I am praying now that I will be Peter on the Sea of Tiberias. This is the chastened, broken man, the one who carries the knowledge that he abandoned his friend in his moment of greatest human need. And then Peter sees his risen Savior waiting on the shore, and rather than cling to safety this time he plunges into the sea, to be with Him all the sooner.

We leave much behind when we do such a thing, but maybe that isn't so bad. In fact, maybe it's the best thing we could ever do.

I want to find out.

With a sigh she was gone, five years ago tonight. Somewhere in these last years it became true that the time since we lost her is greater than the time we had her. I've come to measure the years by this date -- what has happened since she has been dead four years? And five? I find myself doing an inventory, an accounting of how I've spent the months. Am I better or worse? Are we past holding on? What's still broken?

I stopped screaming at God this year. I don't believe anymore that he killed her to punish me. I don't worry that if I'm not good enough he'll take my other children. These thoughts all sound crazy to most of you, and they feel crazy to me as I write them. I can't explain to you how I could have believed them so deeply in my bones, yet I did, and now I don't, and to me that's a miracle I never expected.

My wife taught me what grace means this year. My children helped me see how God's love really can be unconditional. I don't deserve them, and they certainly deserve better than me, especially my wife.

But here we are together, and another year has passed. I'm going to go downstairs now and make blueberry muffins. Then we'll dress the children in warm layers, load up our hiking gear, and set out for Old Rag Mountain. At the base my wife will put Isaac in a sling across her chest, and I'll put on a backpack into which I can place Eli when he's tired of walking.

Then we'll set out for a place where we planted flowers a year ago, just off the trail, at a turn in the path. We'll say a prayer, and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and remember. Somehow I went down the wrong trail last year and got lost in a thicket of my own design, and with my precious family I aim to go back and find the right path once again.

Ever put off writing a letter until you have the time to make it really special? Then the next thing you know, eight years have gone by, the person you were going to write to hates you, and you can't remember what you wanted to say in the first place?

So I've been meaning to write a long post about the new boy, post a picture, and so on. It ain't happening any time soon. So let's just hit the main points for now.

The child is like a teenage boy -- he parties all night, sleeps all day, and is obsessed with breasts. Given that I'm an up at five in the morning kind of guy, this doesn't wear well on me. The wife, on the other hand, has some kind of estrogen Superwoman thing going on that enables her to nurse him every ten minutes at night, reorganize the garage and work in the yard all day, and still look breathtakingly beautiful when I get home.

Everyone asks us: "how are the other boys adjusting to their new brother?" The answer is that they are France and he is Lichtenstein, which means that they mostly talk to and about themselves, but occasionally remember he exists and stop by for a visit.

Eli has struggled a little, however. The second day we had Isaac home, Eli came into our bedroom where my wife was sitting on the bed nursing the baby.

"Mommy, will you hold me?"

"I can't hold you right now, sweetie." Quietly he turned and left the room. A minute later I peeked into his bedroom and saw him curled up in his little rocking chair with his blanket under his arm and his fingers in his mouth, listening to music.

"Are you sad, Eli?"

"Yeah. I can't fit in dat bed."

"Come here, baby." He toddled over to me and I cradled him in my arms. He sighed, that long low sigh we all make when we finally get to hug someone we love and have missed terribly, or when we slip into bed after a miserable day.

We talked about the random things that occupy a child's mind, him looking up at me with his cheek against my chest, and for a little while he was the baby again. Then he wiggled out of my arms and tackled me, ready to give the little boy thing another go.

I worry all the time that I'm not giving them enough of me. They crave my time; they soak it up like thirsty plants. Caleb still talks fondly about when we spent a few days putting flooring in the attic. It was a hot and miserable job from my perspective, cutting boards, dragging them up the stairs, and gluing and nailing them down. But Caleb had a blast in his little tool belt and yellow construction worker's hat as alternated between whacking boards with a hammer and decorating them with his little brush and watercolor paints. I wish I could see the world through his eyes more often.

The other night one of the boys started a rumor, which spread to the other one, that I was going into work in the middle of the night. I know this because they opened my bedroom door at 11 p.m. and marched to my bed like a delegation from some tiny country of wee people, demanding to know whether I in fact was getting ready to go to work.

"Do I look like I'm getting ready for work?"

"I don't know."

"I'm sleeping, babies." They just stood there quietly in the dark, but I could feel them staring at me suspiciously. "Now let's go back to bed." Of course this required a Daddy escort, because while they were brave enough to come down the hall to check on me, they couldn't quite muster the courage to make the return trip on their own. Then there was the tucking in, the requests for sips of water, the additional questioning about exactly when I planned to go to work, why I have to work at all, and whether they could have chewing gum in the morning.

"Daddy," Caleb asked me a few weeks ago, "why do you have to work?"

"So we don't have to live in a shoe box."

Fast forward a few weeks. "Daddy?"

"Yes, buddy."

"Do you have to work tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"Daddy?"

"Uh huh?"

"I want to live in a shoe box."

They are an observant, literal little crew with keen memories. Just the other day I caught Eli chomping on something at eight in the morning. "Eli, are you chewing gum?"

"No, I'm Eli."

It's often frustrating in the moment, but it makes me smile when I write it down. I should smile more often, because one day all I'll have left is what I've written, and what scraps of memories remain in my mind. But I'll be able to watch them, God willing, experience what I'm enjoying and enduring right now. I hope I prepare them well.

It was Nana to the rescue this weekend, thanks to the impending William Isaac's desire to see the world sooner than fits the doctors' schedule. With two boys, a wife on bedrest, and an upcoming board meeting, let's face it: I need back-up.

Thank goodness for my mother-in-law. Now, I understand that's not a sentence uttered frequently in English, or any other language. Go ahead, Google it. I'll wait.

Like I said, it's not a common utterance, especially among men. But most men don't have my mother-in-law. She cooks, she cleans, she plays with the kids, and she only fusses when I try to bus the table after dinner. She even makes me chocolate chip cookies.

I love Nana. With her riding shotgun, I was able to keep the wife relatively immobile, which is difficult to do even when the doctors give strict orders, which my wife interprets as "loose guidelines," or perhaps more literally as "impossible rules delivered by pinheaded compassionless automatons whose overriding concerns are prompt payment and lawsuit avoidance."

She says "to-may-to," I say "to-mah-to." In any event, we survived the weekend. Caleb pitched in, too, helping me make beds. Now, my philosophy of bed making is that it's a clearly inefficient use of time. You figure five minutes to make the thing and two to unmake it, and you're on the h