Flip Flops and Forgiveness

I have one of the most beautiful daughters on the planet. I kid you not, she is stunningly beautiful. I have probably two of the prettiest girls on the planet sleeping in my house right now and if you include their mother in that list, without question, all three of them would make the top 5 of anyone's list!

I digress.

My middle child is a typical middle child. Has struggled the most with the birth of the new "baby of the family" all the while fighting hard to keep her space. She is not the eldest and misses out on the perks there in, and she is not the youngest, and misses out on all the attention that used to be hers!

You should also know that she is all girl. There is not an ounce of boy in her. She plays with dolls, she doesn't get the whole sports thing and doesn't understand why "go down fresas" (fresas is Spanish for Strawberries) is not the same as "Down goes Frazier" (a great boxer whom AJ and I like to imitate all the time!). She dresses up in princess clothes and changes outfits at least 4.9674 times a day. She is moody (don't think I'll let me wife preview this entry) and loves to shop. Need I go on?

But she is the comic of the family and will be, I'm sure, the life of things in our family for years to come. She does great impersonations and is funny than heck when she does that Nextel Dance commercial. You should see her dance to Shrek's Swamp Karoake Party. It's good stuff.

Yet as I talk about her being a dancer you may get a slightly misshapen image of her in your mind? You might envision a graceful ballerina prancing about the stage in perfect cadence with the music. You might see a trendy young lady giving it her best shot for a panel of judges on some TV "reality" show. But friends, while my daughter is a beautiful, girly, articulate, princess-like, shopping while dancing fiend, she is not, in any way, shape or form, coordinated. It's as if an entire segment of genes was omitted from her DNA.

I'm not saying her mom and I are the next winners of Dancing with the Stars, but I am saying that we're both athletic and can manage to get by each day without the following: Hitting a random wall in the house 3x; falling off the dinner chair 4x; walking off the front step of the porch without realizing it, 317x; walking in front of brother while he swings the bat at the pitching machine, 2x; kicking the leg of the couch, 9x; tripping on anything in our paths, 17x; skinning up some previously unskinned up part of our bodies, 1x. Please don't think these numbers are exaggerations, one day with my daughter and you will be fairly confident we missed a few!

For example, yesterday she came home from an event at church looking like she had run as fast as she could and just face planted herself on the pavement. In fact, she had. But not just a face plant, we're talking about this sweet little princess girl running, glancing over her shoulder to see where brother (or "Bluther" as she likes to say) was when her flip flop catches on the ground. I watch in horror (I honestly didn't laugh until over an hour later) as her feet go air born, head-over-heals and I realize that this will hurt. Amazingly, she catches herself -- briefly -- on her hands and if you had not known her at that moment, you would have thought she was trying to do some acrobatic maneuver involving a hand stand and a front flip and incredible gravity defying aeronautics. But you would have only thought that for a moment. Suddenly her arms gave way under the full weight of her body. Thankfully her fall was stopped short; unfortunately it was stopped short by the parking lot. With her face. The screech went up and when she turned her sweet but recently-bloodied face to me, there was an enormous bump on her forehead, road rash on her nose (from top to bottom!), a cut and bleeding upper lip along with some special road memories left on her chin. It only took her seconds to do what some people will never accomplish in a lifetime of falls.

Then today, for no apparent reason other than total disregard for life's lessons, she was booking it at a play ground with some kids. Deja vu. She turns around to see who's chasing her and boom...this time her knees took the brunt of the fall and she made a matching set for her nose and chin. She is after all, all girl.

Sometimes it's hard not to laugh at little pains like that, but to my daughter, they are anything but little (and to anyone within a 9 mile radius of her scream). After your heart goes out to your child, you might find yourself chuckling but only because you and know something they don't: Life gets harder than skinned up knees. Imagine if all our pains today only occurred when we fell -- life would be pretty easy, because we'd all stop running, or at least, stop running with flip flops on!

There's another reason we chuckle after-the-fact: It's that we know that after a few kisses, a few hugs and maybe one Hello Kitty bandaid, that she's going to get up and run like she had never fallen. She won't hurt again until she sees her knees in the mirror while getting ready for bed and when that little princess wakes up in the morning, she'll prepare for her day of bumps, bruises, falls, trips, snags, lunges, head bonks, knee bangs and butt busters like she has every day for the past 3 years.

Sometimes I catalog my bumps and bruises. Oh, it's not as easy as looking in the mirror, it actually involves looking through the mirror. Looking through it, through it to the person in the reflection. Sometimes those bumps are enormous and sometimes those bruises practically come to the surface. Strangely, most of them, even when they show physically, have a relational source. They are there because some relationship isn't right, some connection with a fellow human has gone astray and I am bruised, I am bumped. And I am faced with a choice. Will I go out tomorrow focused on my bruises, or will I choose to be like my daughter?

It's interesting, my daughter's cuts, scrapes and tire tracks don't disappear when she wakes up, she just chooses not to make them the focus of her life. It's almost as if she can't make them her focus. It's almost as if it doesn't matter how hard she would try, before long, her day would be cruising along with not a thought towards her wounds. It's almost as if God gave us kids to show how to cope with life's bumps and bruises but then we do our best to show them how not to.

I guess I want to choose not to let my relational bruises fester. I want to remember Paul's words in Colossians 3, "bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another" because there is freedom in forgiveness! A freedom that lets me live with the pain that doesn't just disappear, but that I'm also not reinjuring in order to keep myself miserable.

I choose forgiveness because it lets me run between the sermons, with my flip flops on.

Pain

I just finished watching "Cinderella Man" on DVD (Clean Screen version is very nice). What a movie! You don't even have to be a sports fan or a boxing fan to appreciate the greatness of the movie because it's not really about boxing or sports. It's about pain.

Really.

Pain is a powerful and compelling story teller and the life of James J Braddock is definitely powerful and compelling. Born in 1905, he became an average amateur fighter by the mid 1920's. In fact, from April 14th, 1926 to September 25th, 1933 Braddock fought over 60 times but never really faced anyone substantial. Then when he broke his hand against Abe Feldman in '33 his boxing career appeared over.

Enter pain.

Of course in 1933 the Great Depression was in full swing. Braddock was struggling to make ends meet and as a man deeply committed to his wife and his three children, he was bound and determined to survive. He worked the docks with a broken hand and yet the infrequent employment wasn't enough to keep bill collectors away. Food was running scarce, electricity was out, the Winter of '33/34 was settling in hard, kids were sick and things looked less-than-grim for the Braddocks. With few options left, Braddock's hopes were waning and pain's all too familiar story was being told through another victim.

But when, in 1934, a last minute cancellation of a boxing card came up, James' long time promoter and friend, Joe Gould, "smuggled" James back into the ring for a one-time fight against an up and coming champ as a "warm up" for his (John Griffin's) climb to the top. Against all odds, James wins the fight. Then he gets another bout against another would-be champ and another shocking victory to add to his Cinderella like run. A third fight and a third victory suddenly thrust James into an unbelievable position: He was the number one contender for the World Heavy Weight Title.

If you haven't seen the movie you may want to skip the next paragraph:

He wouldn't be called the Cinderella Man if he turned out to be an ugly step sister: James wins his title fight and becomes a true Rocky Balboa -- rags to riches in every sense of the word. But more than just winning a title, he won a people, a people of the Depression who knew nothing but pain. Through his overcoming of the pain, a sense of victory, a sense of hope began to spread among the people of New York and New Jersey. He was the people's champion and he never forgot his roots.

When his boxing career ended, he served admirably in World War II, went back to work on the docks that had sustained him during the Depression, and stayed married to the same woman and lived in the same house until his death (the house they purchased with his prize winnings). He even paid back the government for the money he was given during the depths of his pain.

Pain is inevitable. We are born in pain (I won't bore you with the pain of birth stories but my pastor told a great one last Sunday....Apparently Giraffes drop their young from ten feet! Ouch! Then the mother welcomes her precious little cargo with a series of swift kicks to the chops in order to get the kid to its feet so that it won't be an easy meal for anybody running around with Giraffe meat on the brain. Nothing says "welcome to life" quite like a swift kick to the chops!), and we live our lives navigating fields of pain.

But I'm becoming more and more convinced that it is through pain that we fully experience the beauty and joy of life. How could we be so excited to hear the dentist say, "no cavities" if we haven't experienced the pain of a filling? How could we know the soothing comfort of friends, if we have never experienced the sting of sorrow? How could we know the simple pleasure of eating out if we haven't ever worried about making ends meet? How could we know the magnificence of life if we have never known the great sorrow of death? It seems that it boils down to this principle: Experiencing pain is the key to experiencing life.

Maybe it was that simple principle that motivated Braddock to take advantage of the opportunities given him? Maybe it's not understanding that principle that leads so many people to blow the opportunities given them? (Insert any number of stories about great athletes, performers, musicians, etc... that blew their natural talent because of lousy work ethics, and/or laziness, and/or no appreciation for "the hard life".) I may not like the principle, but I can't ignore it.

Today life is treating me pretty well. But I don't know what tomorrow holds. In fact, I don't even know what the next few minutes will hold for me. I could choose to live in fear of what's around the next corner, but I can't stop it from coming. I could choose to run from pain's big ugly face, but I can't escape. Or, I could choose to put my hope, my faith, in the ONE who knows. HE knows my life, HE knows my future pain, and HE knows the joy, beauty and hope that will come from that pain.

Ultimately it's pretty simple. I guess I could fear the uncertainty of life and spend most of my time dancing around the ring trying to avoid the pain that I will still endure. Or, I could face the certainty of life between the sermons -- the joy AND the pain, the comfort AND the sorrow -- with God in my corner. I know pain will lay a lickin on me from time-to-time, but I also know who's in my corner.

Who's in yours?

ps Read all about Braddock at his official web site: www.jamesjbraddock.com