The Limit

 

I love Netflix on many different levels, not the least of which being the 381% profit I have made off of it’s stock. But, what I really love about Netflix is the concept, a company which serves as a portal through which a universe of entertainment is brought into my home cheaply and efficiently. Their original programming is superb. So, yeah...I love Netflix.

But, not everything that comes streaming into my living room via Netflix belongs there. Last night provided a perfect illustration of this truth.

Recently, Pam and I were in a show hole, that miserable state of television purgatory where you finish binge watching a really great show and suddenly find yourself with nothing interesting to watch. We stumbled on a new British detective show called Marcella, the premise of which was quintessentially British...a brilliant but deeply troubled detective battles her own inner demons while tracking down a vicious killer. It’s not the best show we’ve ever seen by any stretch, but it was well written and well acted and we made it through the first season pleased enough to give season number two a shot. Last night was the first episode of season two. 

Almost from the first five minutes I felt uneasy. Something felt wrong. But if I’ve learned anything from watching British television it’s the fact that you have to be patient. Sometimes it takes a while for a show to get interesting. But, if you hang in there you’re almost always rewarded. Thirty minutes in, it became apparent that season number two of Marcella would feature our hero tracking down and catching a sadistic pedophile serial killer. Ten minutes from the end of this first episode I thought to myself...Why am I watching this? When it was over, I turned to Pam and said...No. We won’t be watching this show anymore.

Censorship is a horrible thing when it is practiced by governments, but for individual human beings it is an essential function of mental health. Years ago I heard a non-religious speaker say something that I have never forgotten about this subject...Stand guard at the door of your mind. His point was that each of us has to serve as the guardian of what we allow inside our brains. If you want to lose weight, you probably shouldn’t flip through a donut magazine. If you have a gambling addiction, you probably shouldn’t move next door to a casino. And if you want to maintain your sanity in the midst of an increasingly dysfunctional and evil world, maybe you shouldn’t invite a story about men sexually abusing young boys into your home.

Despair is an addictive drug. It’s easy to fall into and difficult to climb out of. The news that gets filtered down to us through the news media is often overwhelmingly depressing. Watch enough anguish and injustice every night and it’s easy to lose hope. The solution isn’t to retreat into a pollyannish world of Leave It To Beaver and Andy Griffith every night. Sometimes, we need to be confronted by the world as it is, in all of it’s evil glory. But, I believe there is a limit. That limit is probably different for each person. But, it is essential that each of us knows what that limit is and that we have the wisdom and courage to say...No.  Not that.  Not here.

Last night I discovered that limit. I will not organize a boycott. I will not call for Marcella to be taken off the air. I will simply exercise by rights of free agency by not watching. While standing guard at the door of my own mind, I have discovered something that I would rather not expose it to. I wasn’t placed in this world to limit what my neighbor wants to watch on television. But I better be careful what I watch. 

Dad’s Greatest Hits

This week of Father’s Day has me thinking of my own Dad. He’s been gone four years now. Life plows forward at its breakneck pace. Most of the time I’m too busy to think about him. But then an anniversary will come along...his birthday, the day he died, or Father’s Day, and it will all come roaring back. Luckily for me the majority of these memories are good ones. My Dad, unlike many, didn’t leave a legacy of bitterness and regret in his wake. None of his children turned out psychologically damaged by his indifference, or scarred by abuse. All he left us was a thousand stories to tell, stories of his peculiar habits, Herculean strengths, and impeccable character. This week, I’ve picked out a few of my favorites, a Dad’s Greatest Hits, if you will. Like this one....

My Dad has been in the hospital for five days now. He has heart palpitations that haven’t responded well to several medications. My brother, two sisters and I have taken turns sitting with him. I have been with him last each night, so I see him after a long day of hospital drudgery. Some nights have been better than others, for him and me. 

I arrive around 7:30. He never fails to smile at me as I walk in. He looks tired. I tidy up his covers, get him something to drink and ask him about his day. He tells me that he had a good day. Every day is a good day. He hesitates to provide anything that sounds like a complaint. He speaks glowingly of his nurses. He tells me that he got a visit from Chuck Ward or Mark Becton, and what a blessing they were to him. He tells me about the food and that it isn’t very good, but it’s OK because Linda brought him some homemade soup and Paula snuck in some wonderful cookies. 

When he tries to tell me a story he forgets his words, then apologizes for being so forgetful. My heart breaks a little that he feels the need to apologize. We watch Huckabee. He loves that show. Tonight Huckabee isn’t there and there is a pretty blond in his place. Dad informs me that she is Dana Perino, who used to be President George Bush’s press secretary. Dad likes her because she is very smart, and pretty too. He listens intently to a story about very bad parents. He can’t imagine how any father would provide kegs of beer for his sixteen year old son’s birthday party. “What’s this world coming too?” he asks me. 

I watch the night nurse come in to give him his medicine. She is perky and smiles a lot. She gently places each pill in his mouth and then gives him ginger ale. There are so many pills. She is very patient, and jokes that she should probably have given him the sleeping pill last since he might fall asleep before he makes it through all his pills. Dad smiles. 

After Huckabee is over Dad struggles with the remote and finally asks me just to turn the television off. We sit in silence for a few minutes. Finally he tells me what a good job his kids have done taking care of him since Mom passed away. 

We go through our nightly ritual when it’s time for him to go to sleep. I turn out the light and tell him I love him. I pull the curtain and then shut the door to his room. He’s right across from the nurses station and he tells me that they talk too loud. Sometimes he feels like yelling out to ask them to be quiet, but that would be rude. I walk down the long hallway towards the elevator past rooms with open doors. Terribly sick men and women, all of them alone. There’s a portrait of former Governor John Dalton right next to the elevator. Every time I pass it, I become irritated for some reason. Is there no place on earth where we can escape politics?

I arrive at my car in the mostly empty parking lot and sit there in silence for a few minutes. I think about my Dad and marvel at what kind of life he has lived. After losing his wife of 65 years and after five days in a hospital bed, he still finds things to laugh about and still finds people to be thankful for. 

“What kind of day did you have Dad?” I ask him. 

“A good day, I had a good day,” he answers.

Russ’ North Star

Yesterday from the pulpit I heard this statement...What we spend our money on is a reflection on what we value. The point of this was to get us to examine where are hearts are when it comes to how we spend money. For example, if you flip through your checkbook and discover that you spend a thousand dollars a month on makeup, you might value your appearance too much, etc...A quick examination of my spending habits reveals several interesting things:

- Over the past year, my largest creditor, by far, has been the Internal Revenue Service. This reveals the fact that I value my country and my freedom. It also reveals my sincere desire not to be sent to prison.

- Next comes my mortgage. I value the roof over my head. Five more years and she will be paid for!

- Then, something interesting...a category that surprises me. I spend a crazy amount of money on something that my wife refers to as things that bring our family together. I hadn’t really thought about it, but she’s right. 

All parents spend money on their kids. Even when they grow up and move away, we can’t help ourselves. I’m told that it gets even worse once grandkids arrive. Here’s the thing, when you’ve spent twenty something years raising them, then suddenly they’re grown up and independent, it’s hard to break the old habit of buying them stuff, ok? Anyway, I think it’s especially difficult when they move far away. That’s where vacation spending comes in. In my case, it’s all the fault of my father-in-law, Russ White.

Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I got invited to go along with her and her family to Maine for their yearly pilgrimage to a place called Dummer’s Beach. It was a dumpy little campground in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a magnificent mountain lake, the likes of which this Virginian had never seen. The place was magical. I soon learned that this lake had been the summer home of my wife’s family for their entire history. Each and every summer, starting in a tent, the Whites would live at the lake. Russ would make the thirty minute commute to his job during the day for three months...from a freaking tent! As the years went by, they graduated to a pop up camper, then to an RV, but the one thing that didn’t change was...the family was together at Dummer’s Beach. Russ had placed a North Star in his family’s firmament that was as dependable and reliable as the sunrise. They would be together in this place, every summer.

I had never had anything comparable when I was growing up. My family never really took vacations. There were a few here and there, but nothing like the White compound in Maine. While I managed very quickly to fall in love with Maine, what I really fell in love with was the idea of a fixed place and time that was set in stone for...the family. 

I would wind up making at least 25 Dummer’s Beach trips. Russ and Vi can’t make the long trip as often anymore. So, ten years ago, Pam and I discovered MidCoast Maine, and have started our own tradition. Now, it’s gotten almost ridiculous...this year we will spend six weeks up there. There are no tents...we rent fabulous lake houses large enough to accommodate my kids and our friends. It costs a lot of money, money that could be spent perhaps more wisely elsewhere. But, each summer, there’s a place for my family to gather. All the kids have to do is...get up there. We provide the rest. It’s something that they have always been able to count on in their lives...summers in Maine. As long as I’m alive, it will always be so. When grandkids arrive, they will be introduced to the wonders of Maine.

It’s not just me and my family. Russ’s North Star has also inspired my extended Dunnevant family to establish our own summer vacation traditions. Many years ago, inspired in part by Pam’s Maine stories, the Dunnevant’s started going to the beach for a week in the summer. The first such beach house rental was a hell hole dump in Sandbridge. Now, each house is a multi-story mansion with eight bedrooms and a swimming pool. Twenty of us descend on the place for a week every other year. It has become its own tradition and holds a special place in the family lore. It’s crazy, chaotic and cramped...and great fun!

So, when it’s time for me to write those staggering checks to the rental company in Maine, I blame Russ White. He’s the one who first set down this marker. He’s the one who demonstrated what it means to prioritize family, and create lifelong memories that revolve around not just family, but...place. I will forever be in his debt.

Naming Your Small Group

If you’ve spent much time in Church recently, you’ve been introduced to the organizational tool that has swept practically all of Christendom...the small group. Actually, precisely what to call the thing isn’t exactly clear. Small group. Life group. Family group. It’s all over the map. Essentially it serves the same purpose as a Sunday School class used to, only it meets during the week in someone’s home instead of at church... and food is involved.

I’ve been a part of one of these groups for over a year now. It’s Pam and me and four other couples. Sadly, I am the oldest of the ten members, a sad and irksome fact of life I have reluctantly come to accept. However, ours is not one of those multi-generational small groups we keep hearing about. No...there are no young couples with toddlers running around, nobody on Social Security. We are all in pretty much the same stage of life. We all have either grown children or children on the cusp of independence. We all take turns hosting  our gatherings, and during most of the year we meet three or four times a month, during the summer, a bit more sporadically. We communicate with each other via a nifty little private chat room app called GroupMe, which our fearless leader, Chip the Engineer, accidentally referred to as “Grope”Me one night, and the name has stuck! Anyway, we get on there to organize meals and whatnot, and also just to keep in touch during the week. Well, last night was a GropeMe highlight. One of our members brought up the fact that she doesn’t know what to call...”us”...home group reminds her of a nursing home, small group sounds like kindergarten, and life group sounds too pretentious. We need a snappy name, she said! 

Chip the Engineer’s wife sent us a link to an article which offered potential names for small groups...so apparently we aren’t the only ones thrashing around for snappy names! As the oldest member of the group, I found all of the names in this article highly offensive, since they were all derisive of older people...Geri-Actives and sizzling seniors. Somebody threw out...Hope Geezers, and The Pacemakers. Then it degenerated rapidly from there. We have several golfers in the group, so someone suggested, The Swingers...which I kinda liked because it seemed just questionable enough to make it interesting! After thirty minutes of this, no decision was made, so at this point we remain nameless.

So, our last meeting was just this past Thursday at our house. Our rule for the summer months is that whoever hosts the meeting is responsible for leading the devotion, or bible study portion...so this one fell to me. I decided to lead a discussion on the significance of the Seven Deadly Sins vs The Cardinal Virtues... a sort of compare and contrast kind of thing. I gave Chip the Engineer a heads up about the content so he could prepare some power pointish slides for illustration purposes. So, after dinner, I start in with the lesson and his first slide pops up on the screen...

The Seven Daily Sins

Set aside for a moment the fact that our fearless leader is now responsible for two epic Freudian slips. More importantly, this second one gave me a great idea for a proper name for us... The Dyslexics!!

Just in case some of you are wondering just how theologically sound and doctrinally vigorous our studies are, the following slide is illustrative... 

Postpartum Depression

Have puppies, they said.

Build a legacy, they said.

It will be fun, they said.

This photograph is either the best ever illustration of postpartum depression, or the perfect representation of exactly how public school teachers must feel during the last week of school...

So, I sent this photograph to my daughter on this, her last day of the school year with her students, and immediately we began a back and forth competition on who could come up with the best caption...

Kaitlin: Why in the heck are we having a meeting after these pups have been dismissed for the summer?

Me: In case you’re wondering, I will not be taking any crap off of anyone today.

Kaitlin: Are they sucking away my milk or my life force?

Kaitlin: I feel like my job is doing this metaphorically.

Me: You seriously want me to catch a frisbee from you right now?

The Coolest

My church is just the coolest...

Ok, Pam and I had no sooner finally taken the plunge and joined Hope Church, when a new sermon series was launched entitled, Healthy Money. I’m thinking, Great...what is this, some sort of cosmic bait and switch? Two years at Hope as a visitor and I don’t hear squat about money, we sign on the dotted line and bamm, here it comes!! As a preacher’s kid and professional skeptic, I have become jaded over the years to pleas for cash from the pulpit. I generally consider sermons about money as mostly exercises in church fundraising, kind of like those annoying 24 hour PBS beg-a-thons you have to endure every once in a while. So, it was with great trepidation that I attended church three weeks ago to hear Pete Bowell introduce the four week series. The next week it was David Dwight’s turn, last week, Nicole Unice. Three weeks in and I have heard narry a peep about tithing. Not only that, not one word has been said about the church’s finances. Maybe they are saving all of that for this week’s finale? Maybe, but so far this has been a decidedly unique money series epitomized by last week’s message by the estimable Nicole Unice, which I will attempt to summarize...

According to Nicole, the primary reason that we all need to get our crap together when it comes to money is that it frees us up to get in on the real thrill of...giving it away! Generosity is one of the most powerful concepts in Christianity, and if we are mortgaged to the hilt we miss out on the joy that comes with giving. It’s important to point out at this point that she was not talking about giving it away...to the church...necessarily. No, she was talking about something else entirely. As illustration she asked all of us to look under our chairs for a white envelope. There were two such envelopes, each containing a $50 bill. Then this...

If you found this $50, your assignment this week is to pay attention to the people around you. Keep your eye open for a chance to give this money away. Seek to be sensitive to those around you who may need a small miracle, and then follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit.....or something like that.

She went on to challenge the rest of us. In a church like Hope, everyone is in a different financial place. Some of us can afford to be generous with more than $50 bucks, others, like teenagers and young parents with toddlers, it might only be $10 or even $5. Whatever the amount is doesn’t matter, the point being...something that is sacrificial. She then instructed us all to go to the bank and get that amount out, fold it up and place it in our wallet. Then spend the week looking for a chance to give it away. If the scripture is to be believed, the stories that will come flying back to us as a result of this outbreak of generosity will be amazing, and spur even more enthusiastic giving. 

I love this sort of thing, always have. Being in a position to be a blessing to struggling people has always been one of the most fulfilling things to do with money. So, I obediently went to the ATM and withdrew a C-note. So far, no opportunity has presented itself. I mean, I live in the west end of Richmond in one of the most affluent suburbs in Virginia. It’s not like I’m surrounded by hard luck stories. But then I read this morning where Kate Spade, famous handbag designer was found hanged in her grand New York City apartment...a suicide. It serves as a stunning reminder that everyone, and I mean everyone...is fighting invisible battles. I need to look harder, look past the facades.

Anyway, nothing yet, but I’m excited for the opportunity and thankful for the reminder from the pastors of my very awesome and relevant church that everything I have been given in this life is a gift and I hold it in in trust. God doesn’t need my money, but he needs my willingness to use it for something more noble than my own comfort. 

An Observation and a Birthday

Here’s something I’ve noticed about life, although good news feels better than bad news, bad news clarifies the mind. A bad report performs the valuable service of cleaning out frivolous thoughts from your head and replacing them with more rational, sober ones...a not entirely bad thing. Of course, too much bad news can lead to despair, but an occasional broadside of alarm can snap you out of dangerously pollyannish thinking. 

In my line of work, for example, a sharp and sudden sell-off in the equity markets can serve as a reality check for a new investor who has never lived through a major bear market. Watch your portfolio crater in on itself by 25% over two or three weeks and suddenly your internal fantasy math about how you’re going to retire with 5 million at age 45 come crashing down to earth. But this principle works in other areas of life as well. Your first unexpected health scare can shake you out of bad eating habits faster than a thousand lectures from friends. One terrifying flutter of the heart will suddenly convince you that eating a box of donuts every time you feel like it might not be a wise long term diet plan. But, without that terrifying flutter, ignorance is bliss.

So yeah...bad news can be the great clarifier, the mother of correction, you might say.

Just an observation on this 5th day of June. 

Speaking of which, something happened on this day 62 years ago which most definitely was not bad news. My sister, Paula, was born. In her life she has been my playmate, buddy and friend. She has been my ally in pitched battles with our two older siblings. She has been my sounding board, a debating partner and for a couple of years back in the day, a roommate. She has been a proud and doting aunt to my children, a dear friend to my wife, and wicked-good cook and hostess. She can be irrational and overwrought at times, but she is seldom if ever in doubt, the signature trait of all The Dunnevant clan. Like my other siblings, she has always and will always have my back. So, on this day, I wish her the best and happiest birthday.