Fearing Judgment

December 28, 2010

Disclaimer: I write this post because I struggle with the teaching, not because I’ve conquered it.

This afternoon a friend told me about how the Christian members of his family ostracized one of their cousins from the family and family events because he is gay. This family led my friend to faith. He’d often used them as role models to help guide his path towards becoming the kind of person he wanted to be, but my friend was appalled and confused by their professed application of Christ’s teachings.

I hope that there’s more to the story. If there isn’t, then the issue is between them and God to sort it out. I bring it up as a glaring example of the easy way that evil can slip into the thoughts and actions of people that are working to follow the path that a higher power has laid out before them.

A less cringe-worthy example recently played out in churches across the world as the regular churchgoers looked down their noses at the “Christmas Christians” that filled the pews to overflowing. It’s the same act, just a matter of scale. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been on both sides of that judgment.

Christ could not have been any clearer about His stance on humans judging humans. In Matthew 7:1, Jesus said, “Stop judging, that you may not be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

Again in Luke 6:37: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.”

This simple, point-blank teaching is hard to follow on this side of Eden. The world can be a horrible place. The men and women in it do horrible things. We have the right and even the duty to stop oppressors from taking advantage of and injuring the weak. There are people who are so scarred by life and wrapped up in evil that they can never safely be released from prison.

Beyond the extremes, what is a sin in the eyes of one person can be an act of love in the eyes of another. How can a person of faith weigh that balance? Or what about in the case of a brain injury or serious mental illness when the person’s injured brain makes decisions that they never would have made when they were healthy.

The short answer is that it’s hard and we are going to get it wrong sometimes. The fuller answer is that we must be truly afraid of our urge to judge in the same manner that we fear our urges to kill, steal, or maim. The fact that it is easier to go through life without killing someone, than it is to going through life without judging others doesn’t change the burden that we bear to avoid judgment.

“[T]he measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” The warning could not be any clearer.

We have to struggle to come to grip with the basic tenet that it is not our role to determine who is good or evil any more than it is our role to make the sun come up or the tides dance back and forth across a beach. Measuring the good deeds and sins of others is too difficult of a task. Thank God it is not a task that we’ve been given.

A Late Night Lesson from a Screaming Baby

My daughters are only sixteen months and two and a half years old, yet I think they’ve already taught me more than I ever will be able to teach them. It’s not that I’m not trying. I know that teaching them about life, faith, and love is my biggest duty. It’s just that some of their lessons to me have been so powerful that I can’t help but doubt my ability to match them. This is one of those lessons.

The majority of my life has been spent making plans and working to complete them. From elementary school on through West Point and law school; my teachers taught me that you had to define your goals or you would never achieve them. My coaches said that those goals should be taped up on my mirror so I would see them each morning as I brushed my teeth and each night before I went to bed.

I dutifully taped up the goals and eventually achieved some of them. But time and time again my best-laid plans shattered upon the anvil of reality. The complex world swirled by and around my fixed goals. A military career ended by injury at the moment that my country needed me. A business career stymied by technical problems in the product we were bringing to market. A writing career stunted by the brutal realities of the evolving publishing industry. A law career crippled by the fact that I didn’t care enough about the end state of corporate legal battles to ever master the field.

Then tragedy struck, I was in the right position with the right skill set to make a bigger difference than I ever could have imagined. If I had succeeded at any of those other fields, then I would not have been ready when I was truly needed. If I hadn’t had tried and failed at so many random occupations, I would’t have had the diverse skill set necessary to weave my way though the military bureaucracy and legal pitfalls that needed to be overcome along the way.

I had to face the stark reality that I was put in all of those positions by a higher power. My plans were destined to fail before they’d even been concocted. It’s a humbling and terrifying feeling to understand that you’re a pawn in a larger game and that it is a game beyond your comprehension. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters said in The Brothers Karamazov, “since I can’t understand even (Euclidian Geometry)…, I can’t expect to understand about God.”

So much of the world doesn’t seem to make sense. How can we not help but question the greater plan. In a world where a father is killed by an IED on the other side of the world from his children… Where illness or abuse can inflict a child before they’ve even said their first word… Where a man can spend his whole life trying to build up a company only to have it dashed by a world economic collapse… Where people will blow themselves up in a marketplace crowded with their neighbors in an effort to please God…

How do you try to navigate through a world that complex and disastrous?

I received the answer from my two little girls.

I was not prepared for parenthood in general. I was even less prepared for the long nights spent trying to get an overtired baby to quit screaming and go to sleep. I read the books and followed their tricks: everything from setting a sleep schedule, to swaddling, to rocking them in the same room as a running clothes dryer.

Some of these tricks worked to a degree. But they didn’t change the fact that I spent a lot of time with screaming infants in my arms. The longer they stayed up, the madder they became. I felt their frustration at their inability to make themselves feel better. They would struggle to move this way, then that way, then this way again. None of their attempts to improve their plight helped.

I knew that they were just tired. That the only way for them to feel better was for them to go to sleep. I wished that there was someway for me to impart that to them, but their young minds couldn’t comprehend what was really going on.

Each night, they would struggle in my arms until they finally went to sleep. Then I would walk them over to the bassinet and lay them down at total peace. The exact peace that they had wanted all along. They just didn’t know what they had to do to get it.

One of those late nights, I realized that we are all in the same position with God. We don’t understand what role we are supposed to play in this world or what good things can come out of our failures and miseries. We struggle, fight, and rant to try and accomplish the objectives that we think are critical.

We rail against the situation and lose ourselves in doubts, but eventually we have to give ourselves over to the knowledge that there is a higher power and that higher power will eventually drag us kicking and screaming to where we are supposed to be.

Our job is to do our best not to be a complete disaster along the way. I still have a lot to learn before I figure that trick out.

A Fool's Fool: Stop Thinking and Swim

Early Spring 2001

I sat down in the dark surf and put on my freediving fins. My spear rolled with the wave against my waist. A full moon cast its shimmering light through the inky water.

“You ready?” Jimmy Davis asked.

We were on the beach just behind his backyard on Oahu’s north shore. I’d fallen in love with freediving over the course of the past two months. I’d SCUBA dived before, but it didn’t compare to the feeling of strapping on massive fins and going as deep and far as you lungs could take you. This was my first night dive.

I flipped on the dive light, said yes, and followed him into the Pacific. The first hundred yards of water was shallow. At points, we had to scramble over the sharp volcanic rocks that lined the bottom. Then the ocean opened up.

I wasn’t ready for how dark it was. Surrounded by salt water with nothing to guide my way but a four-inch diameter dive light. Black water pushed against the little stream of white. I couldn’t help but think of the tiger sharks that frequented the area.

I couldn’t see Jimmy’s light. I panicked and surfaced. Remembering the mantra of “never separate from your dive buddy.” He was twenty yards away. I swam in his direction.

Eventually, I got more comfortable in the water. Swimming along the bottom. Fish of all sizes darted back and forth through the lava rock and coral. A massive sea turtle lay in a sandy patch. I floated over the serene relic from the age of the dinosaurs. Feeling at one with the living planet as never before.

Jimmy and I separated three more times before finally separating for good. It wasn’t on purpose, but it wasn’t possible to explore the dark waters and keep track of each other at the same time.

I breathed the tropical air through the snorkel and then launched myself down through rocks below. Silver fish shimmered past my light. Octopus tentacles danced away from me. I could feel the water rush by my skin as the long fins propelled me through the depths.

My lungs began to ache, crying for more air. I arched my back and swam upward. The top of my head slammed into a lava rock. A mix of pain and terror sparked through my body. I raised the dive light. It illuminated a rocky ceiling above me. My lungs screamed for relief.

My mind scrambled to assess the situation. It was clear that I’d swum into an enclosed rock formation. I didn’t know if it was a tunnel that would open up or a cave that would dead end. I didn’t know deep I was in the formation and therefore if turning around and trying to swim out would mean certain death.

I quieted my mind and swam forward. Fighting the fear that would devour through the remaining oxygen in my system. My fins moved left, right, left pushing me through the rock formation.

Eventually the rock above me opened up and I launched myself toward the air. I broke the surface and gasped the air into my screaming lungs. After twenty or so breaths, I realized that I was alive and started laughing with joy.

After calming down, I went back down. I was careful to stay above the rock formations. I dove for another half hour, then began to swim back towards the twinkling lights of shore. I swam and I swam, but the lights only seemed to get further away.

I caught my breath and tried to figure out what was going on. It was only after I’d stopped completely that I felt the tug of the current, pulling me away from shore. I dropped down again and began to swim with all had, trying to free myself from the current.

I surfaced. The lights were even further than before. I was trapped. The way forward had nothing to offer. I had to swim parallel to the shore with the flow of the current, hoping to swim out of the current.

I swam for ten more minutes and then tried again for shore. Still stick, being pushed out further. It was time for a decision, Keep pushing ahead towards shore or drop my weight and begin to float with the current. From what I heard anyone stuck in the current had bought themselves a one way seventy or so mile trip to Maui. If you didn’t have the strength to swim into the Maui shore, then you were headed to the open ocean.

I filled my lungs with air and dropped down in the water. I kicked and prayed, kicked and prayed. I surfaced and then went down again. Over and over. Eventually, I felt the fins gaining traction in the water. I pulled the air in through the snorkel and kicked.

I don’t know how long I was in the current, but I broke free and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sight than the flicking lights from shore growing closer and closer.

I learned two lessons that night. The first is that there is a thousand ways for a fool to die on dry land and ten thousand in the water. The second is that sometimes you have to just keep going, beyond fear and beyond reason. There’s always a way back to shore as long as you don’t lose yourself in the situation and give up.

Ranger School and the Ugandan Orphanage

May 2000

The Georgia sun climbed higher in the morning sky. My squad had just finished up our first patrol in the first phase of Ranger School. Of the three leaders, one received a go. The other two got no-go’s.

I was one of the no-go’s. I was the team leader of the team in charge of land navigation. Anybody that knew me probably would have made good money on my no-go. Putting me in charge of land navigation was a little bit like putting a fish in charge of a footrace. Unfortunately, my number two wasn’t much better. We were lucky to stay in Georgia, much less get to our objective on time.

The three of us walked down a dirt road from the grading area back to our patrol base. I was telling a story about high school when one of my buddies found his grandpa’s hang glider in their garage. I checked about a book about hang gliding from the library and we were off. I was just about to the part where the hang glider flipped in the air and dropped Chet into a cactus patch when we got to the trail that led back to the patrol base.

One problem, the Ranger candidate who led the squad the night before didn’t turn down the path. The other team leader and I followed behind asking him what he was doing. He didn't answer, not wanting to tell us that he'd forgotten his rucksack on the ground before we established the patrol base. The other clueless member of our party and I got more and more confused. I didn’t know whether it was worse to leave a fellow Ranger candidate alone or follow him off into the middle of nowhere.

Before I came to the right conclusion, a truckload of Ranger School Instructors pulled up in a Humvee and made it very clear that both options were wrong.

Half an hour later, I dug my firing position and tried not to think about what the Company Commander was going to do to me and my two squad mates. It was going to be bad. The only question was how bad. In the peacetime Army, it didn’t get much worse than being an Infantry lieutenant that got kicked out Ranger School. Being forced to restart the phase was the better option, but still miserable.

I hacked the little shovel into the ground over and over again. My brain drifted through prayers. Ranger School could turn even the moderately religious towards piety, although the effects usually didn’t hold after the candidate’s first sighting of a woman or beer. I was tired and hungry. I couldn’t believe it could be over.

I asked God to show me something positive: something to carry me through the chain of command’s upcoming decision.

I was answered with an image of an old black woman standing in front of a dilapidated brick building. She had a broom. I could tell it was Africa. There was no sign of kids, but something told me it was an orphanage.

I felt my chin hit my chest and woke up. I went back to digging. Thoughts of the old woman and her orphanage had replaced the feelings of impending dread.

August 2006

I sat in the passenger seat of the SUV as Peter Francis Luswata drove through the streets of the small Ugandan town. I’d been in Africa for two days and I was about to get my first view of the Uganda Rural Fund’s (URF) projects in AIDS-ravaged countryside.

Peter was talking about how a priest had bought a building and turned it over to his sister to run an orphanage. URF provided some of the resources to help keep the orphanage going. I tried to listen, but my mind kept drifting to Mike.

I’d begun volunteering for URF as a tribute to Mike MacKinnon. I’d been friends with Mike since I was five and followed him to West Point. He died in October of 2005 when his Humvee was hit by an IED in Iraq. At his funeral someone from the unit said that they were delivering toys at the time of the ambush.

I was still to gimpy for the military, but somehow I’d fixated on the idea of working with AIDS orphans as a way to honor his sacrifice. An internet search led me to a home-grown Ugandan nonprofit that was desperate for volunteers.

I didn’t know if I was ready for the reality of that pledge. I got out of the SUV in front of an old brick building.

Peter was ahead of me. I heard him say, “This is Josephine. The house mother.”

I looked up and into the eyes of an old woman. She was the same one from the dream that I’d had in Ranger School six years before.

Josephine had tears in her eyes. She said, “I prayed that you would come and now you have.”

I wish that I could say that I turned into some powerful force for good in Uganda. I did what I could when I was there, but I haven’t been nearly as helpful as I’d hoped when I got back to the U.S. The one thing that I did do before I left was to hire Caroline, a twenty year old girl who grew up in the orphanage to help Josephine attend to the children.

It’s been four years since I left Uganda. I still sit on the URF board, but I'm not a stellar contributor. Each month, I send money for Caroline’s salary. It’s a meager sum and I’m embarrassed that I don’t give more. But from all the reports that I’ve gotten back of Caroline’s stellar work at the orphanage, I believe that the old woman’s prayers were answered.

If you’d like to see Josephine and her Nazareth Orphanage, here is a film clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpTVTp2C-pc. The organization’s website is now http://www.ugandaruralfund.org/ not the one that is listed in the film.

URF is now in need of monthly donations for teachers’ salaries. At $150 a month, it’s a great opportunity to make a difference in a lot of incredible children’s lives. If you're interested in donating, you can find out more at http://www.ugandaruralfund.org/.

Five Minutes

I haven’t shared this story with more than one or two people. I don’t know if I’d be sharing it today, if someone battling mental illness hadn’t challenged me for hiding my own struggles with depression.

End of November, 2000

I pulled the knot tight in the green rope and then secured it with an overhand hitch knot. I put my weight on the rope. It held strong around the rafter.

The white chair wobbled beneath me. I opened the noose and tested the length of the rope. It would be about an eighteen-inch drop. Perfect.

I shifted my leg brace down and stepped off the chair. I went downstairs to write a note.

A rational mind struggles to comprehend suicide. Those of us with depression or another mental illness struggle not to comprehend it. The sick brain self-destructs by sending out waves of overpowering chemical and electrical signals. It’s similar to how the bone marrow of someone with leukemia creates abnormal white blood cells bent on destroying the body.

My world had collapsed over the course of six months. An injury in Ranger School shattered my military career and left me crippled. My fiancée had betrayed me while I was at the Office Basic Course and Ranger School. It seemed that everyone I knew on the island had kept that betrayal from me.

I’d suffered from depression before and this combination of events more than set it off again. I couldn’t see how I could make it through another day. It felt like being trapped in a dark room where suicide was the only door. I fought not to open it, but eventually the darkness overcame me.

I stopped on my way down the stairs and prayed. “God, I love you, but I just can’t do this any more. If you have some reason that I should stay alive, I’ll give you five minutes to show me a sign.”

I didn’t expect an answer. I hobbled around the kitchen and pulled together a paper and pen. I wrote and then threw out two suicide notes. The final one just said, “I’m sorry, Matt.”

That summed it up. I hung the paper on the wall and went back upstairs

I stepped up on the wobbling white and blue chair. I slipped the noose around my neck and had a few final thoughts. One thought wouldn’t go away.

I needed to pay the rent. It would probably take a week or two for my unit to send the police to my apartment. It would probably take two or three weeks to clean it up and get rid of my gear. There was no way that they could have it rented again before the first of the year. The least I could do was pay them for the month of December.

There was one problem. I didn’t have any checks. I’d ran out of checks the week before and was still waiting for the new ones to arrive. I’d tried to take the money out of my ATM the day before, but had hit the daily withdrawal limit well short of what I needed.

I’d looked through the checkbook multiple times for a spare check that I may have missed among the duplicates. There was nothing. My irrational mind was battling with my irrational mind. Go look again versus get on with it. Go look again won.

I took the noose off my neck and got down to look through the checkbook again. I flipped through the duplicate checks once, nothing. I flipped through them again, nothing. I flipped through them one last time and found a check.

I filled it out and then walked outside to drop it in the mail. The mailboxes were in the center of the complex. On my way there, I said hello to my neighbor Jeff who was sitting on his porch.

I said hi. Jeff said hi back. We were amicable, but hadn’t said more than a few words over the two months that I lived there. Jeff was a Hawaiian native and I was a lily white haole from the mainland. The insider and the outsider. A cultural barrier left over from the island’s colonization.

I dropped the envelope in the mail slot and turned back towards my apartment. I heard a soft whimper from across the street. Jeff was crying.

I walked over and sat down next to him. We began to talk and didn’t stop for the next two hours. Jeff thought he was about to be laid off. His marriage was already on the rocks and he was terrified about what that meant for his children.

I didn’t have any answers, but we talked until he felt better. Somewhere along the way I began to feel better too.

We hugged and I went back to my apartment.

I’d forgotten how much peace can be found through trying to help someone else. It was a lesson I’d learned as a child while trying to help Darcee battle her eating disorder.

It was another door out of the darkness. A door that I wouldn’t have found if something higher hadn’t planted the idea in my brain that I couldn’t say goodbye to this world without paying the rent.

The Fiasco That Was Part of a Bigger Plan

April 2005 through August 2010

When I moved back to Montana from Hawaii, I started swimming rivers to get a freediving fix. I brought the hobby to Oregon when I went to law school. After a couple of trips down the Willamette River through downtown Eugene, I tried to swim the Rogue River. The Rogue was a good teacher. It taught me that swimming face-first down serious rapids with nothing more than a bike helmet for protection is really not a good idea.

Somewhere on the Rogue, I became addicted to whitewater. I’d learned my lesson about swimming rapids, but could never afford the cost of a kayak or the time to learn to ride one. Someone overheard my wailing about the predicament and said that they saw a video filmed in New Zealand where they ran brutal rapids while riding flat on some type of plastic board.

It took some crafty Googling and some serious begging of the local river equipment retailer, but eventually I was floating down the MacKenzie River on a rented riverboard. All it took was one Class III and I was obsessed. I bought my own board and took it back to Montana to play for the summer.

The obsession evolved to the point where I decided that I needed an inflatable riverboard. There weren’t any on the market. I contracted with a company in Colorado to build me a prototype. It was awesome. I took it off a fifteen foot waterfall and tested it in rivers from Oregon to Africa.

I placed an initial order of twelve boards and shipped them to river rats around the country to build the buzz for a spring shipment. I was stoked. It was a pretty awesome side gig and a lot more fun than lawyering. What I didn’t know was the market for riverboards was about to collapse and adventure sports companies were about to bring out a fleet of inflatable riverboards that retailed for as much as it cost to make our board.

I toyed with another design, but couldn’t get it dialed in to the point where I felt comfortable bringing it to market. Eventually, my wife made it very clear that the money I was sinking into this goat rope probably needed to go towards raising kids, paying for the house, etc. As much as I hated to admit it, she was right.

I looked at all of the work I put into the project and all of the money. What a waste. According to my view, nothing had come out of it but a few cool river toys, some youtube videos and a funny bullet on my resume.

I was wrong. Four boards off my initial order of twelve ended up in the hands of J Dubb an owner-guide for Bearpaw River Expeditions. After taking them through the Grand Canyon, J Dubb decided to stash one of the boards on the floor of his raft during trips down the Lochsa the following summer.

Jesse, one of J Dubb’s yearly regulars, had just returned from an intense tour in Iraq as the combat medic. He was battered by injuries, PTSD, and addiction. All you had to do was look in his eyes to see that the war had followed him home.

Sometime during the trip, Jesse conned J Dubb into blowing up the inflatable riverboard so Jesse could try it out on the massing swells and raging hydraulics of the Lochsa. (For anyone reading at home, please do not try riverboarding for the first time on this potentially deadly river). Jesse got battered, whipped, and tossed. He found enough breath to survive the ride and he found something else – peace.

Jesse came back the following day, and the next; reclaiming his life amidst the whitewater and pines.

I met up with Jesse and J Dubb after the season when Jesse was in Helena to go to the VA. Jesse had heard about my step-brother’s PTSD-induced suicide and some of the work that I did after his death. Jesse talked about his own struggles and then said, “If it was for riverboarding, I’d be dead right now.”

I made him explain. Jesse told me about the mix of the adrenaline, the healing power of the river, and feeling like a badass again.

It was an amazing story. I told Jesse that he had free boards for as long as I could get them. We said our goodbyes, but Jesse’s story lingered in my mind. Was it just him or could other returning veterans find the same kind of peace in the churning water.

A few months later, my sister Janna was trying to come up with a project for her doctorate work in Occupational Therapy. We talked about a couple of potential ideas and then I remembered Jesse’s story. I gave Janna his number.

Over the course of the next five or six months, Janna and Jesse laid the groundwork for a therapeutic program that would involve taking veterans riverboarding. They partnered up with the Missoula Vet Center and Montana River Guides.

The program succeeded beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I’d been involved with PTSD and reintegration issues on a national level and I’d never heard of anything remotely that successful at plugging vets back into life and traditional forms or therapy. Before long, they’d started up a second session.

Rave reviews came in from as far away as Washington, D.C. for this unconventional treatment that was so popular that they had to turn interested veterans away due to a lack of spots. It's hard to imagine a program with a higher potential to help our men and women returning home from combat.

Jesse stopped by my house last August to pick up another board for a trip up to Alaska’s rivers. We sat on the porch and talked about riverboard design.

I looked across the table at Jesse and realized that he had found a deeper peace. The trauma-induced tension had left his face and he was excited about the future.

At that moment, I realized that the purpose of my whole riverboard building fiasco was so that there would be an inflatable riverboard sitting at the bottom of the raft on the day that Jesse needed it. My obsession with the sport left me as nothing more than a domino in the chain reaction that put the board there for Jesse to use to find his own peace and develop a model that would bring his comrades peace.

Some would call it a coincidence, but I’ve seen enough of these coincidences to know that it was more – much more.

Here's is a story and video on the group.

http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_bc722694-8726-11df-94ed-001cc4c002e0.html

http://www.nbcmontana.com/video/24352095/index.html

Something Went Wrong

I didn’t plan to cover this part yet. I wanted to describe about ten or fifteen episodes when I was fortunate enough to see things that I couldn’t explain in a rational manner and then pull in other stories to complement them. After describing all of these events that I couldn’t justify rationally, I figured that I’d write about what conclusions I’ve drawn from them.

That idea went out the window sometime around five o’clock this evening. The devolution of my writing process may have begun when I spent forty minutes this morning talking with a woman trapped in a deep psychosis. Her brain is so sick that she can’t realize she’s sick. The woman is lost in a nightmare of delusional immune diseases and conspiracies. Over the years, she’s lost her husband, her kids, her career, and her home. Our society values her “civil rights” too much to force her to take the treatment that will keep her brain from further breaking down. Montana doesn’t have the combined legal and medical framework to help pull her out of that psychosis. As she spoke, I tried not to think of her chances of making it through the winter.

Or maybe it began yesterday, when I talked with a mother of two about her husband’s bipolar disorder-induced suicide in order to help her deal with her unnecessary guilt. Or maybe it was this afternoon, as I mumbled into the telephone trying to find the right words to help comfort a mother grieving her teenage daughter’s suicide. Or maybe it was some of the personal challenges that I’ve faced recently.

Either way, I decided it was time to bring up the biggest question of spirituality. If there is something beyond what we can see that ties us together and even has the power to affect our individual lives, then why can the world be so horrible and unfair?

If this spiritual realm had the power to warn me to catch Shane before he slipped of the building, why didn’t I get the same voice telling me to take Darcee to the hospital for a full examination when I last saw her two weeks before her death? If this spiritual realm had the power to send me a miracle to pay for my family’s bills, then why didn’t it just cure my wife of her devastating illness?

I don’t have those answers and I don’t think any person has them to the level of specificity that would please me.

The best explanation that I’ve heard came from a former Army sniper with PTSD and TBI. He was haunted by his past and struggled with addictions in the present. While we had coffee one morning, he told me about the simple spiritual revelation that helped him make sense of the horrors he’d seen.

“God didn’t create evil. God didn’t create death and He didn’t intend for us to suffer.”

The veteran’s simple and common sense explanation put the paradox in perspective. It was too deep for me to ever understand, but all that I really needed to know was that something went wrong.

Fundamentalist Christians would point to Adam, Eve, and the snaky Devil. To other denominations that story acts as a metaphor that passes on the basic truth that humanity strayed from the path our Maker intended. Either way, the message is that something went wrong in between creation and the present.

To me, it’s the only explanation for how the spiritual world that I’ve seen do so much good can coexist with a natural reality where there is so much suffering and evil. While that explanation leaves a multitude of mysteries about what actually went wrong, it does provide enough of an intellectual framework to help us look beyond some of the horrors of our everyday lives to something much more powerful and good.

Without that framework, it's pretty hard to see the bigger picture.

For anyone looking for a deeper explanation of what might’ve went wrong. I think that Jesus left another powerful clue in parable of the Tenants and the Vineyard. Luke 20:9-19.

Guest Post: A Final Goodbye

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I felt that others had had similar experiences that didn't have rational, scientific explanations. I knew that there is nothing special about me and therefore others must be having similar experiences. I hoped that by sharing mine that others would share theirs. I am amazed that it only took a few weeks for the first guest post to arrive

This guest post is from a childhood friend Stephanie Sampson. It's an amazing statement to how a few kind deeds can bond souls beyond the limits that we see every day. If you've got a similar story that you'd like to share, please send it to me. The only requirements are that: (1) it must be true, (2) it must be 1-2 pages, and (3) it must be generally well-written or close enough that a little editing can get it there.

Thanks Stephanie.

A Final Goodbye

A new family moved into the apartment next to me and my mother in April of 2000. They were from Kazakhstan and spoke Russian. I could tell that they were poor, but my heart broke as I watched them take abandoned furniture from the complex trash and pull it into their apartment.

I knew that I wanted to do something to make them feel welcomed. I was pregnant and single. I had a good job, but I wasn’t about to go buy them a Mercedes. I went to the bookstore and picked up a Russian dictionary.

After learning some of the basics, I knocked on the door. The family looked at me nervously.

I said, “Preeviet.”

That was all the introduction I needed. From then on, the family and I spent the nights on the steps of our apartment complex going over translations from Russian to English.

When it was time for the kids to go to school, I made sure the little girls had a new set of clothes and shoes. They acted like little princesses with their hair ties, little girl lip gloss, and jewelry. The outfits didn’t cost much, but the presents were enough to light up their eyes again.

The boy’s shoes had duct tape wrapped around the toes. I took care of that on his birthday. We picked up a bike that was for sale in the neighborhood. I sunk some more of my waitressing tips into spoiling the kids with a Playstation and covering some of their groceries until they got on their feet.

After three or four months, we may as well have been a family with the tides of people going back and forth between the two apartments.

I would sit with the old sick grandma and the children would translate for her. She was worried about me being pregnant and alone. I tried to convince her that it was going to be ok.

The old woman looked at me seriously and said, “You are my family’s angel.”

I didn’t know what to say.

She continued, “Watch out for my family.”

I didn’t know what she meant. I had a bad feeling, but I vowed to do what I could.

I gave birth to my son Jade and it was the Russian family’s turn to be angels. As a single mom, there are few things better than an extra set of hands. They had nine sets and each one was more than happy to tend to Jade.

One night I dreamt of the Russian grandmother. I awoke to someone shaking my bed. I glanced around the room and there was no one there. The shaking stopped when I sat up.

The phone rang beside my bed. It was one of the little girls from next door telling me their grandmother had passed away. My tears fell upon the covers of the now-still bed.

I don’t have a natural explanation for what happened that night with the dream of the grandmother and the shaking bed. In my heart, I know that she came to say goodbye.

Learning of Darcee's Death

Summer 1997

I walk out of the door of the Regimental Command Center at Camp Buckner. I told staff that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t an excuse that carried much weight around West Point, but I was training to take over for the second detail which wouldn’t start for more than a week. I was redundant this week and today I wasn’t in the mood to be redundant.

I’d woken up the night before in a rage, grabbing my knife before I realized where I was. The adrenalin cranked through my blood as I tried to talk myself down. That wasn’t like me and it wasn’t like me to wake up despondent, drained of all energy with a pit in my stomach deep enough that a someone digging at the bottom would strike his shovel’s blade against the roof of hell.

It didn’t make sense. I was dating a beauty queen that I was wild for and I was about to take over my first major organizational role at West Point. Yesterday I had a bounce in my step and a nervous energy about tackling a job that I wasn’t sure I could handle, today I couldn’t feel my legs as they carried my burdened body away from work and into the woods.

I had a book of Hemingway’s short stories in the cargo pocket of my BDU’s. I would get away and read it in hopes that that Papa’s words would pull me away from the invisible ledge. I trod the trail around Lake Popolopen to a rocky outcropping where I’d fished from during some of the down hours during my summer training the year before. I lay down upon the flat gray rock and began to read.

Three pages beyond my bookmark, Hemingway’s character described a girl that he’d been friends with as a child. A wave of grief ran over me. I set the book upon the granite. I couldn’t move. Despair seized my limbs. I lay motionless for ten or fifteen minutes before fighting my way back into the reality of the warm New York summer’s day.

I walked back to Camp Buckner. The grief hit me two more times along the way, dropping me to a knee. I didn’t know what was happening.

I avoided the Command Center and continued on towards the guard station. I knew that I couldn’t work, but thought that I might be able to catch a ride with the duty driver back to the campus to retrieve some of the gear that I would need the summer. A simple productive task¸ something basic to get me moving.

The cadet on duty looked down at my name tag. He bit his lip, then said, “Matt Kuntz, you’re father has been calling for you. I’m sorry, but a close friend of yours has died.”

I felt the blood run out of my face. My dad hadn’t said who it was. I can’t remember what I said before leaving the guard shack and making my way towards the pay phones.

My stepmother answered the phone and told me it was Darcee. The tears rolled down my face. I hung up the phone as sobs shook my chest.

Darcee and I had been friends since grade school. We swam together on the Lion’s Swim Team as children and through high school. I’d done my best to help her with the anorexia that attacked her midway through her freshman year. I’d written letters to her every day that she was at the treatment center in Arizona and did my best to help her make the transition towards wellness when she returned home.

Darcee lived another handful of summers after her stay at the treatment center. She fell in love with the man of her dreams. Two weeks earlier I’d cooked her breakfast as she talked about moving to Missoula to be with him, hoping to eventually get married and start a family. I’d never seen her happier.

I didn’t know that the anorexia had transitioned into bulimia which was poised to overwhelm her gentle heart. My grief continued through her funeral in Montana and in the years that followed. Darcee was an unbelievable friend. I will always miss her and struggle with questions of why the Lord called her home so soon.

Beyond the loss, I realized for the first time in my life that I’d been shown proof that the universe was more complex that the reality I could perceive with my natural senses. I’d woken up in a rage at the exact time of her death over two thousand miles away from where she’d passed. The grief crippled me before I’d heard that she was gone.

It was my first sign and it was horrible. My only solace in feeling something both bigger than all of us and completely all of us was that I knew she wasn’t really gone. Darcee was gone for today, gone for tomorrow, but whatever I’d experienced had convinced me that the ones who loved her would see her again.

Side Note: On the plane back to Montana for Darcee’s funeral, I swore not to ever fight against mental illness again. It was too complex and horrible. Looking back at my naivety, I can’t help but think of the phrase, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

Drop Your Hammer

February 2002

I lowered a spinning saw blade down through gray siding. It was cold and I had no idea what I was doing here.

For all of my life, I’d generally thought that God had a plan for me and if I waited long enough it would become apparent. I watched the excess siding fall into the snow and decided that it was pretty clear that that was no longer the case.

An injury in Ranger School had led me out of the Army and my military resume was a square peg in the round hole of the civilian job market. I was the weak Number Two Man in a two-man construction crew. To be a successful carpenter requires an innate understanding of how material objects can fit together in a beautiful manner. I couldn’t even find the puzzle, much less put it together.

I was the cut-and-carry guy while Shane, my boss, worked his magic. One look at my hammer made it clear how bad of a cut-and-carry guy I was. It was monstrosity of gleaming metal and dull wood. The metal gleamed because it was so huge that I could barely swing it.

The clerk at Big R Ranch Supply who was helping me picked out tools had asked me how big of a hammer I swing. My cocky reply of “as big as you’ve got” left me with a brutal tool that would have been more useful prying someone out of a crashed car than framing a house.

Four years of West Point in order to be the worst construction worker in Helena, Montana? I’d given up on a divine plan, but I did need the ten bucks an hour. I picked up the cut of siding, walked over to the house, and raised it up to Shane.

Over the next two days we finished up the siding. The snow had melted then it froze and snowed again. Shane was up on the roof sweeping off snow so it wouldn’t melt and send water down onto the still-new masonry.

I was busy trying to look busy until Shane gave me another task. That generally involved carrying things from one part of the construction site to another part where they might be more useful.

I set another bundle of siding down by the saw. I heard a voice say, “Take off your hammer.”

I looked back at Shane, but the voice wasn’t his. He was still sweeping the snow off the roof. I glanced down at my hammer and then looked forward at the saw.

“Take off your hammer,” said the strong feminine voice.

I looked around again, but the voice wasn’t coming through the cold air. I protested internally. I can’t take off my hammer. I’m a bad enough construction worker anyway. I don’t need to point it out by gallivanting around without a hammer.”

“Go to the ladder.”

I didn’t want to disagree twice. I walked over to the metal ladder and looked up at Shane swiping the little green broom back and forth. The fresh snow tumbled off of the roof and onto my face.

I silently cursed the voice and wished my knit cap had a visor.

“He’s coming down.”

My head snapped up. I watched Shane stretch the broom wider then he grunted and slipped. The grunt turned into a yell as his body slid over the icy shingles. This lower body launched into the cold air. Shane grabbed for the edge of the roof, hoping to stop his fall. The feet pendulummed down towards the house and he fell again, now headfirst towards the concrete below.

I took a step to my right and lifted my hands, remembering the words of a military climbing instructor – brace don’t catch. I planted my hands against his dropping shoulders. I somehow remembered the hammer and shifted my right hip away from his falling body. Shane’s full weight hit me and plowed us both into the concrete.

I thought he died. Shane was unconscious. Blood soaked out of the hood of his sweatshirt. I called 911. Shane started breathing again. I tried to comfort him as the paramedics came. “It’s going to be alright. You’re going to be alright…”

I broke down after the ambulance pulled away to take him to the hospital.

Shane ended up with a concussion, broken collarbone, and a few broken ribs. They said he probably would have died if he hadn’t landed on me. Shane’s wife still has a husband and his kids still have their father.

I didn’t know how to say it at the time without sounding crazy (clearly I’m not worried about that anymore), but I knew that it wasn’t me that saved him. If anything, I probably botched my role. In better hands, Shane might not have even hit the ground. Thank God, I remembered the warning about the hammer. If I hadn’t have turned my hips, it would have went right through him.

I’ve wracked by brain for almost nine years trying to figure out the events of that day, why I received that warning, and why I haven’t had the same warning for other loved one that I’ve lost. I don’t have any hard answers, but I do have my own conclusions and hopefully I’m more courageous about telling them than I was about telling the truth about what happened then.

The only undeniable conclusion that I’ve come is that if a voice ever tells you to take your hammer off your tool belt - do it. Keeping your job is about to become the least of your worries.

Jesus and the Amazon Kindle

“Jerry said no,” Tom said. “CBS is out.”

The words burst out of the cell phone and hung in the warm October air. They were followed by others, but the cards were already on the table. My back had been against the wall and that wall had just collapsed.

I left my job as a corporate attorney three years ago. I believed that I was following that path that God had laid out before me. The path that began after my step-brother’s death from a PTSD suicide. I started fighting to force the military to take better care of our returning heroes’ traumatic stress injuries. I ended up in a challenging position for lower pay trying to improve the lives of people who live with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and PTSD.

While it was the right path to make a difference in people’s lives, it was a major blow to our young family’s finances. The effect was exacerbated when my wife became ill and had to cut her hours at work. Our house construction went over budget and my attempt to start a business on the side backfired.

Every month the debt grew deeper, but I was working with a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter-director to sell a television series. What had seemed like a long shot a year ago looked like a lock for the past three months. Today it went away.

I was devastated. My wife was back in the hospital again and the bills were stacking up even further. I cooked the kids’ dinner and tried not to think about losing the house. I put them to bed and lay in my own. I pray every night, but usually just prayers of thanks, requests for forgiveness, and asking Jesus to help me take the path that He wants me to take.

Tonight was different. I told Him that I didn’t have the power to fix my family’s finances. I’d done my best to follow where I thought He wanted me to go, but I had failed. I admitted that I couldn't fix this financial situation myself and begged for help.

I woke up that morning in a horrible mood. I checked my email a little bit after eleven. One of the messages was from someone named Jason who claimed to be from Amazon. Jason said that he was talking to a handful of the most successful self-published authors on the Amazon Kindle and he would like to talk to me. It was a blatant scam. I was a lot more likely to be among the Kindle’s bottom five authors. I had never figured out how to market ebooks on Kindle and my nine or ten sales reflected that.

That made me curious about exactly how low my Amazon Kindle sales had been. I knew that they were bad, but I wanted proof of how wrong this “Jason” was for our later conversation. I opened up the sales report for the past six weeks. I had a sale five weeks ago and another two scattered over the next few weeks.

Then my eyes popped. Two weeks ago I had over six thousand sales. The following week was about the same. The total royalties for those two weeks’ sales almost matched my regular salary for the past year.

After taxes, the royalties would be almost to the dollar how much we owed.

I talked with Jason from Amazon later that day and he told me that Amazon had run a major Kindle marketing campaign this month. They dropped some titles down to nothing in order to get people reading on their Kindles. Amazon would pay the authors and publishers the royalties that they would have been due for the sales.

Any of my thoughts that maybe writing was finally getting the attention that I thought I deserved evaporated. This wasn’t me. It was Amazon and Jesus.

To top it off, I had been all but giving the books away in an attempt to draw in readers until just a few weeks ago when a book reviewer recommended that I raise the price from $0.99 to $9.99. If this woman that I’ve never met hadn’t told me to crank up the price, the bumper crop of sales wouldn’t have made any difference in our family’s finances.

While others may be able to come up with justifications for how this chain of events may have occurred without divine intervention, I cannot.

I was begged for help and it was provided. All I can say is thank you.

I'm Not Qualified to Write This

Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes can list a handful of things that I've done wrong. If they've known me longer than that, then they'd better get more hands. I thought about providing a list of some of those things, but I've got a feeling that most of you will believe that I've got more than my fair share of flaws and that many of them run deep. Anyone who doesn't believe that yet will eventually.

That flawed existence has scared me from telling a broader audience about some of the spiritual things that I've experienced and seen. I was afraid that my ability to transmit the message would be obscured by my own sins and I know that many of you will not be able to look past my faults. I cannot argue against that judgment. Your heart should always be your guide and if it tells you that I'm full of it, then you're probably right.

This week I had another amazing experience that I cannot attribute to anything other than the act of a higher power. It was powerful and life-changing. After a lot of thought, I've decided that it's my duty to tell the stories about how I've been blessed and what I think I've learned. Although, I'd be lying if I claimed to have even one millionth of the answers. I'm just searching for Truth with dirty glasses.

I know myself and this world well enough to be certain that I'm going to fail and sin throughout the writing of this blog. I ask that you please try and overlook my continued failings to focus on the meaning of what I've seen and experienced. It is more beautiful than the teller is not.

Thank you,

Matt