Dan Gilgoff, CNN.com Religion Editor, posed this question Tuesday via Twitter: Where was God in the Aurora Massacre? On the CNN Belief Blog, he added, “It’s a fresh take on an age-old question: Why does God allow suffering, natural disasters or – if you believe in it  evil?”

I saw the Tweet yesterday and got around to reading the blog this evening. The key responses ranged from it was God’s punishment, to God’s will, to the devil at work. There were a few other viewpoints in between. It was odd to read, and it troubles me that so many people abdicate their individual responsibility for humanity.  I guess some people need a way to absolve mankind, or maybe themselves, from such actions in our world by placing the responsibility on some greater power.

In my opinion, the shootings in Aurora were simply a desperate act of a disturbed individual. Neither God nor the devil had anything to do with seventy people being shot and wounded, and twelve people dying. This is about a man and his actions.

The concept of free will—man, is free to make decisions that coexist with a higher power and is morally and ethically responsible for those decisions—is at the core of my beliefs. Others will most certainly disagree with me, but I cannot believe a higher power punishes, or even allows such horrific happenings. It would be difficult for me to believe in a God so vengeful—what parent wants to see their children suffer? This is man’s work.

I also don’t believe a supernatural creature with horns, or with cloven hooves, who eagerly await opportunities to infect our thoughts, directs evil in the world. I do believe evil exists; I just think the root of it is buried within each of us. We all have the capacity to think about doing bad, or even evil, things to others. Some may choose to act on these thoughts. Should they do so, I believe the responsibility of the actions rest with individual—whether the reason is poor judgment, uncontrollable rage, or mental defect. I don’t believe there’s anything else behind it—certainly not some sort of supernatural dark force. It’s the free will thing again.

I do believe this: A higher power, God if you will, was in the Aurora Massacre. God was at work in the heroic actions of others in the theater; carried through the hands and voices of those who cared for the injured and dying, and; found in those positive words and deeds of friends, families, and even strangers who offered them as sympathetic gestures for the victims and their families.

Yes, God was most definitely present in the Aurora Massacre.

The whole town was alive with the spirit of a living God.

Please note: I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist, theologian, or a member of the clergy. My opinions above are based only on my lifetime in the church, my personal study of Christian teachings, and my admittedly incomplete and imperfect understanding of my own faith. For context, I’ve been a member of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. since 1985, although I spent much of my youth in both non-denominational and American Baptist churches.

Obscured by the gray building in the distance and across Interstate 77, sits my first house. I can’t see the house from my hotel window, but I know it’s there.

It is a Dutch colonial with a gambrel-style roof. Most people who see the house say, “It’s the Amityville Horror House.” It is small and noisy, and sometimes unnerving if one happens to wake up at 3:30 AM. It was the host of many good times and a few bad ones.

It is just a house, though. A home is something different.

As cliché as it sounds, I’ve always carried “home” in my heart, where I refuse to allow it to be obscured by times of sadness, an occasional, and sometimes startling, pre-dawn awakening, confined to a structure, or limited by time or geography.

I’m in my hometown today, but it’s not my home.

 

 

 

It’s fun to have a little extra time to take in the sights, sounds, and food in the places I go for business. I am an introvert, but traveling to new places is always exciting for me.  I seek the energy of big cities, although I’m often physically overwhelmed by the constant stimulation.

I don’t think I could ever again live in a big city. I need the peacefulness and solitude the mountains provide.

It’s always good to come home, my wanderlust notwithstanding. The respite allows me to continue exploring the world.

Such is the curse of the introvert.

I can tell you from experience what it’s like to hang by a thread.

The clothesline pole looked like a giant letter “T.”  It had four eyebolts bored through the crossbar, two on each side of the post, to which each of the clotheslines was attached. The rounded eyes of the blots faced toward the workshop, while the threaded-ends stuck through the back of the pole and were held in place with a nut. Four rope clotheslines stretched from a t-shaped pole at the edge of the back porch, across the small back yard, to a board on the outside wall of my dad’s workshop.

I would stand on my toes at the edge of the porch, carefully grab the crossbar in the narrow spaces between the eyebolts, and swing myself into the yard. I repeated this action many times daily to experience the thrill of flying for the half-a-second it took me to get to the ground from the porch two-feet above. I had jumped from the edge of the porch before, but the sensation of thrusting from the crossbar was much more exciting and gave me an extra quarter-second in the air.

Such death-defying displays of courage were the cause of many of my childhood injuries; sprained ankles from poor landings and cuts on my hands and wrists from grabbing the pole too closely to bolts. There were few scares, though, that topped the ten minutes I hung suspended in the air by the threads of my watch band.

After I had taken the garbage out one summer morning, I ran back to the porch, quickly grabbed the crossbar, and launched into my first swing of the day. Much to my surprise, I never hit the ground. Instead, my watchband had somehow slipped over the threaded, protruding-end of an eyebolt and twisted so that it was wrapped around the threads twice. If you had seen me from a distance, it might have looked to you as if my right wrist was bolted to the crossbar. With my fingers sticking upward, my feet dangling two feet off the ground and inches from the edge of the porch, I am sure it was the sight to see.

My body weight made it impossible to release the buckle on the band, or to untwist the band with my left hand. I was too far from the edge of the porch to swing back so that my toes could touch and take enough weight off my watchband to allow me to free myself.  Dad was working that day, and I was too embarrassed to call for my mom knowing how she always found so much humor in these situations that her laughter would have prevented her from helping me before I lost the circulation to my hand.

I was contemplating the next day’s newspaper headline: “Boy hung by watchband. Loses hand,” when I heard the neighbor’s screen door squeak. I saw Dan come out of the house and into his back yard.

Dan was probably 20, about ten years older than I was at the time, and lived next door with his grandparents. His large pot belly, acne-scarred face, and biker-like dress made him look considerably older. The only hint to his real age was the exceptionally well-drawn superhero characters that he painted on the ever-present white t-shirts he wore under his sleeveless denim vest.

As he walked into the yard, Dan saw me hanging from the crossbar. He walked over to the fence and asked what I was doing.  I acted as nonchalantly as I could, considering my fingers were turning purple, but I finally explained my predicament and asked for his help. He laughed, and after what seemed like hours of making fun of me, he agreed to help me down.

It took Dan a long time to walk the twenty-five feet from his backyard, through the alley, and into my backyard to release me from this awkward, self-inflicted crucifixion of sorts. I am sure he took baby-steps once he was out of my sight. He might have even stopped for a while to smell the flowers along the way; that’s just how Dan rolled.

When he finally arrived, he lifted me just enough to take the weight off the watch band, and I was able to free myself. I thanked him for helping me get down; he smiled and went home without another word. For a brief moment in the life of a little boy, Dan was a hero, not unlike the comic book heroes he drew on his t-shirts. Learning about his life struggles as an adult, helping me off the clothesline pole may have been the only time Dan felt like he was anyone’s hero.

I am sure he would have said he was an unlikely hero because he just happened to be in the right place, at the right time.  To me, that sounds like the best definition of a real hero.

______

Photo Credit::Spider-Man vs Beer Belly by Niccolò Caranti

Not long ago I sat in the bleachers looking down on a class of eighth-grade students taking their seats for a middle school graduation. They walked into the room in alphabetical order, but it was easy to spot the jocks, the geeks, the nerds, the goths, the cheerleaders, the mean girls, and the band kids not by what they wore, but by the way they carried themselves. As they took their seats, I wondered what they were thinking about as they marked this milestone in their life.

Were they thinking about going to high school? I was certain most were. Many of them probably had chosen a college, selected a career, and planned the size of their future family. I imagined when they thought of themselves as adults they simply saw an adult-version of who they were on this day. This self-awareness, if they possessed it at that time, had a far greater potential to be life limiting than they surely realized.

I’m sure they didn’t understand that each of us should constantly be growing.

I can’t imagine now that any of them really knew how every-day living would shape them far beyond the vision they had of themselves that day, or how each person they would encounter in their lives—from that day forward—would help them become, or in some cases make them, different people.

We do become much different people as we grow older and not just in the physical sense. Our hopes change, and so do our dreams. Our goals, achievements, memories, and feelings each have a different meaning than they did when were younger. I like to think we get a few gifts, too, as we add the years: We all gain experience, many of us gain wisdom, and some us are fortunate enough to earn a little more respect, if not by our accomplishments, most certainly by what we have endured.

I hope that we’ve found a wider sense of our own purpose, too.

Somewhere along the way, if we have listened closely to life’s teachings, we should have also learned that while our lives are ours to live as we see fit, we are most fulfilled when we share our lives with each other. I have always believed that some people come into our lives to teach us, while others come to learn from us. We will encounter very few people who can balance the teaching-learning scale and we we do find them, we should make sure we never let them leave. Of course, we have to balance their scales, too.

Here’s a secret I’ve learned: We are defined not by the events of our lives, but by the people whom we have known.

The people we meet, the people we choose to invite into our lives, the people we love, and the people we lose; all of them make us who we are and they never stop coming or going as long as we’re breathing. No matter how old we are at this very moment, we are not now, who we will become, because of this never-ending stream of people who touch us in ways that we often never realize in the present.

It’s the people in our lives who fuel our perpetual state of becoming.

My grandfather always told me, “Time flies; the older you get, the faster it goes.” We all know that time moves at a constant speed throughout life, so it is not that the seconds click by faster. Instead, I think what he meant was that as we get older we begin to understand how precious the moments of life are because age grants us a higher sense of appreciation and purpose for the gift of our own lives, and for the lives of others we have come to know.

No, you are not now, who you will become. Neither is anyone else.

What are you going to do about it?

Remember, time flies.

_____

Photo Credit: The Old Grandfather Clock by sburke2478

Eight months ago, the idea of becoming a beekeeper popped into my head.

I’m sure the idea had rooted long ago and for some unknown reason decided on that day to sprout and bear fruit.  Until eight months ago, I had not fertilized this root of an idea in any way; I had not been reading about beekeeping, watching beekeeping movies, or talking to beekeepers. Still, there it was, the idea that beekeeping was something I now wanted to think seriously about as a hobby.

Beekeeping is not a hobby that would usually grab my attention. While I am not afraid of bees and I understand their tremendous value to our ecological chain, hanging with them is certainly not at the top of my “fun-things-to-do” list, despite the fact that I am a big fan of honey.

The act of beekeeping is not foreign to me, though. Growing up, a family friend was an apiarist. He had about two dozen hives, all of which he made himself. These were top-bar hives, meaning the hives have several removable frames within, on which a wax honeycomb is attached. These frames lift out to harvest the honey and honeycomb quickly. After each harvest, a replacement frame with new wax honeycomb is added, because the previous honeycomb cannot be reused.

I sometimes helped to prepare those frames, pulling a thin wire through small holes in each end, and then placing a perfectly cut, thin sheet of wax honeycomb on the wires. A small, grooved, metal wheel was heated slightly and then used to trace the wires on the honeycomb. This melted the wax around the wire to hold the honeycomb within the frame. For a ten-year-old, it was fun to build things, but mostly I liked to watch the heat melt the wax over the wire.

I had forgotten those experiences; the memories came back eight months ago on the heels of those first beekeeping thoughts. It wasn’t long afterward that the beekeeping articles began to appear in the magazines and newspapers I regularly read. A couple of months ago, I happened upon a beekeeping television program while flipping through the channels one Sunday. I even ran into a beekeeper, with bees, at a local festival recently.

A pattern of coincidence in my life, such as this involving beekeeping, will always grab my attention.

I have long believed that God, however one might define a higher power, speaks to us through the coincidences in our lives. Those repeated presentations of something or someone are God’s way of encouraging us to be open to learning something new so that we will be better prepared for what lies ahead. Personally, such coincidences have always led me to new tools for my life-toolbox—skills, abilities, or knowledge—that proved critical in the next stage of my journey.

Whether this is the not-so-gentle-nudging of a higher power, or simply the intuitive guiding abilities we all possess, I don’t know. I have come to trust these feelings to lead me through life; they rarely fail to equip me for the path I’m traveling.

I am confident there is something I need to learn from beekeeping. While I am clueless as to my toolbox needs for the next phase of my journey, I’m ready to find out what beekeeping can teach me about my life. I just can’t seem to shake the feeling, though, that there are many lessons for me to learn from the hive and I may lack the patience to be the best student.

I wonder if patience is to be my first lesson.

___

Photo Credit::(The Unruly Hive) by Bug Dreams