Question: Where should one turn in times of crisis? And perhaps the more important question is, Why do we turn where we do? What reasons do we have for turning the way we do?

Illustrations: I am surely not unique in having times in my life where I didn’t know how I was going to make it. I was unsure about my finances, about how I would live, about how I would provide for my family, about how I would afford health insurance, etc. I am not special, I get that. But I am hardwired to work, to provide. It is inseparable from my identity. I don’t do well if I am floundering. I thrive when I’m busy working on a project, focusing on some goal, have a target, etc. I blossom when allowed the freedom to maneuver towards a clear objective. I don’t understand laziness. I despise it. I was raised to respect hard work and to do hard work. Laziness is, in short, sinful.

But what happens when life throws us curve balls? What happens when our health goes south? What happens when our job is eliminated? What happens when the powers that be, so to speak, restructure and we find ourselves cut off?

Or perhaps worse still, where to do we turn when an emergency befalls our family or us as individuals? Where to turn? And why turn where we do?

Connection: Recently I was reading a book by Ken Ham entitled How Could a Loving God . . . ? In it he quotes J.I. Packer:

The ultimate reason from our standpoint why God fills our lives with troubles and perplexities of one sort and another, is to ensure that we shall learn to hold Him [God] fast.” The reason why the Bible spends so much of its time reiterating that God is a strong rock, a firm defense, a sure refuge, and a help for the weak, is because God is bringing home to us that we are weak, both mentally and morally. We dare not trust ourselves to find or to follow the right road. God wants us to feel that our way through life is rough and perplexing so that we may learn to lean on Him. Therefore, He takes steps to drive us out of self-confidence, to trust in himself (154-55).

The beauty of the binary is that clear thinking reveals the alternatives, the worldviews. Either we trust in the holy, good, purposes of the sovereign God or it’s all meaningless and random and there’s no reason we should expect order. You don’t matter, I don’t matter, your suffering doesn’t matter, my suffering doesn’ matter, and this is all one sick joke where we just thought we had significance. It’s like Macbeth says in Act V of the play bearing his name:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

The Alternative to Macbeth’s Despair:

The alternative to Macbeth’s despair, the alternative to discounting your suffering and my suffering; the alternative to viewing the moments of panic and despair and emergencies in our lives as evidences of meaninglessness is to be quickened by them.

Why? So that we look to the Author of life, the Alpha and Omega, the One who raised his friend Lazarus, and the One who says of himself in Isaiah:

I am the LORD, and there is no other,

besides me there is no God;

I equip you, though you do not

know me,

that people may know, from the rising of the sun

and from the west, that there is none besides me;

I am the LORD, and there is no other.

I form light and create darkness,

I make well-being and create calamity,

I am the LORD, who does all these things. (Isaiah 45:5-7, ESV)

To state what should be obvious, God does not hide. He reveals himself here.

He says, in short, you and I are not accidents.

Our sufferings and joys and dreams and aches matter.

Why? Because we are clay in the hands of the sovereign Potter.

Takeaway: The alternatives remain. Either we are nothing and so we should expect nothing–because there is no God, no objective meaning, no overarching purpose.

Or we are what Scripture says–creatures formed by the sovereign hand of God the Potter, who uses and even ordains our sufferings. Why? So that we come to Him, the One who knows and does always what is right, even though that takes us through valleys of the shadow of death, through the throes of cancer, divorce, brokenness, unemployment, and uncertainty.

We can give up and say, “It’s all pointless,” or we can flee to God who bids us welcome.

This morning as I sat at the kitchen table looking over Scripture and jotting my notes on the index card for purposes of teaching, I watched several small bucks milling about outside the kitchen window. The rut is over, the bucks are skinny, and will shed their racks soon, but as the saying goes, “Boys will be boys,” and it was fun to watch several scrape and rub scent on shrubs and laurel as they meandered down the trails.

Here was one little fellow I caught as he passed through:

A cloudy mist-filled day in our area, but Brewster and I took in a bit of time for the woods and the creeks.

He discovered more deer skeletons.

We have found over the years that certain areas seem to be preferred for their last moments. Maybe it has something to do with thirst, as the areas are invariably close to running water.

And my friend Jim is seeing some of his beloved birds come near already and we’re still only in February. But I’m already seeing blooms on some of the flowering trees and grasses are appearing with new green blades, too.

When I read Plath’s The Bell Jar as a student in college decades ago, I knew little of the author’s biography.

Having studied her background now and her brief life, her reading regimen, and her lifetime of writing, I now have a fuller, deeper appreciation for her writing and her soul’s anguish. It is unfortunate, in my view, that her suicide overshadows her literary contributions. I know of few people who can speak intelligently about Plath’s poems and prose, but of several who bloviate about her suicide. That is indeed depressing to those of us who appreciate Plath’s gifts to the world that came by way of her pen.

I completed reading The Bell Jar again this week, and it details the shock therapy her stand-in protagonist endured, the misunderstandings she endured, her ambitions, her isolation, and the respite she found in logotheraphy. For Plath, her only salvation came via literature, poetry in particular.

She penned many caustic rebukes, especially towards Roman Catholicism’s system, and she was not much kinder to some Protestant abuses she saw and endured via some professing adherents. Some of her black humor in The Bell Jar is seen here:

“Of course, I didn’t believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn’t have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent” (164).

There are many examples of Esther (the main character in the novel) calling out false systems and of religious hypocrisy in the novel, all of course as the protagonist’s reasons for wanting to end her life. She’s literally sick of the lies and comes to view death as preferable. Sadly, the protagonist’s struggles and laments were carried to fruition in Plath’s own life just a few months after her novel was published.

Life imitated art in tragic form.

It is not uncommon today to hear so much about mental health. Well, we might do worse than reading and grappling with the writing of Sylvia Plath, both for her literary importance and for the light her literary corpus may shed upon spiritual, psychological, and emotional spectres that haunt not a small number of people.

Today is a federal holiday and I am off from work, and my friend of encouragement, Jim, shared some of his photos of his beloved birds.

They remind him of the goodness of God, of the providence of God, of the artistry and craftsmanship of God, and I could not agree more.

The birds, the daffodils, and more showcase the coming of spring and the author and restorer of life that superintends creation.

Hope you enjoy. (Thanks, Jim, for sharing.)

This morning I stopped by the shoppette for a cup of coffee. Normally I park as far as possible from the store in order to walk more. Plus, I labor to avoid door dings from other drivers and/or passengers who don’t mind opening their doors into other people’s. But the shoppette had almost all open parking spaces in front of the store, and so I took the space adjacent to the handicapped spot, as I figured no one would park there for the ninety seconds or so it would take me to get a cup of coffee.

When I went to the coffee section, I poured my black coffee and snapped the plastic lid over the lip of the cup, and walked to the register. The friendly lady who works the mornings there said, “Good morning, Chaplain,” as she always does when I stop in for a coffee.

I was paying when a very muscular man, dressed in a ball cap, flip flops, shorts, and a t-shirt came through the door, expelling a large breath as if exasperated. I had to take a step closer to the counter to avoid being shoved by him. He plunged his arms into the coolers and came out with a case of Monster drinks, the ones with the lime green writing on the black cans. When he came to the line to pay, my skin literally crawled. I know this may sound crazy to some, but I sensed being in the presence of the demonic. My guts seemed to turn inward in visceral retreat. I knew spiritual warfare was occurring.

As I finished paying for my coffee, the sweet lady behind her register looked at me and nodded as if she, too, shared an understanding with me of what was occurring in that moment. I nodded at her and said, “Thank you. Have a good day.”

“Have a good day, Chaplain,” she said. And we both heard the man behind me muttering to himself as if I was taking too long to pay for my coffee. I must’ve been at the counter for thirty or forty seconds.

When I walked out to my car, the man with the Monster drinks had parked his black F-250 pickup truck in the handicapped spot, and so closely to my car that I had to squeeze into my door like a rodent entering a wedge. Why would a young muscular man, in t-shirt, flip flops, ball cap, and shorts, driving a jacked-up black F-250, park in the handicapped spot?

But I finally got in my car and could still feel the presence of evil. I buckled my seat belt, put my coffee in the center cup holder, and pulled towards the road in order to go on to the morning’s duties. As I waited to turn onto the highway, the man with the Monster drinks pulled beside me and the other cars, and shot onto the highway, the sounds of his truck exhaust ricocheting across the morning air.

I cannot prove it empirically, I concede that, but I know in my bones that spiritual warfare occurred in that shoppette this morning. It was as real as the coffee I sipped later on and as emblazoned on my guts as those demonic lime green emblems on those dark energy drinks.

If you adored The Andy Griffith Show, skipping stones across the pond, placing pennies on the railroad tracks, and have ever been frog giggin’, Willie Morris is probably your type of writer, too.

I am reading his Good Old Boy and My Dog Skip this week, and when I went for a stroll in the gloaming, the sunset burned in majestic bronze, and I came across two mature does in the river bottom just when it was growing dark enough, and they did not even dart into cover when I approached.

When you read a master of capturing simple pleasures, especially ones that bring your formative years back to you in burning and joyous remembrance, it’s a good day.

Thanks, Willie, for bringing it all back.

Recently I came across a former peer of mine who’d written on books that mean a great deal to him, so I thought I’d share a glimpse at 12 books that mean a great deal to me and speculate at perhaps why each has a hold on me.

These books and/or collections I return to. I’ve bought multiple copies over the years. They’re marked up, the way, say, one’s Bibles might be worn from writing and years of reading from them.

If you have books that continue to move you, would you let me know what they are? They may deserve a similar place in my literary affections.

Here’s an enduring dozen for me:

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. By far the most violent book I’ve ever read, it explores McCarthy’s enduring themes about God, evil, judgment, and man’s capacity for both unspeakable evil and goodness.

The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor. I have read O’Connor so much that it is difficult say anything about her that has not already been well said. But for any unfamiliar with her genius, she excelled in making sin so blatant, so egregious, so horrific, that the reader has to deal with it. Why? As she wrote and said many times, because we as a species are deaf and blind, and so only the grotesque is sufficient to jar us from our spiritual and intellectual stupor.

The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. War, men and women, shell shock/PTSD/numbness, God, endurance, cruelty, booze, friendship, honor vs. dishonor, courage, etc. Hemingway touched on it all. Though often a monster in his personal life, his stories are unbeatable in terms of the pathos they call us into.

Melville’s Moby-Dick. Melville’s mind, like his themes, was a Pacific. It’s all here: God, theodicy, friendship, monomania, violence, love, meaning, strife vs. repose, and countless more. A lifetime of learning.

McCarthy’s The Road. Each time I read this novel, I know that I will weep. That is not, of course, why I return. But this book has among the most beautiful and heart-rending language, scenes, understatement, and pathos I’ve ever found in the world’s best literature. McCarthy’s recurring themes are here, too, but the love between the father and the son, and what McCarthy is driving at, is unparalleled.

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. When I read it as an English major for the first time several decades ago, I was simply overwhelmed. But if you return again and again, you’ll begin to see what he was up to. A-chronological time; interior monologues; Bergsonian plays upon time and consciousness; multiple narrative points of view; stream of consciousness, and more. Faulkner broke the mold over and over again, and we are indebted to him for his courage and artistry.

McCarthy’s The Crossing. Part II of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing is definitely a novel of ideas, but–again–it’s McCarthy’s gift of language, of landscape writing, and the cogitations of his characters that enrapture. Not a fast read but a deep read.

Eudora Welty’s Complete Stories. Welty is a master of the short story, and especially of irony, dialogue, and understatement. She exhibits the mind of a scholar and the finesse of a linguisitic savante. No detail escapes her attention.

The Collected Complete Works of Hawthorne. King of the Dark Romantics, Hawthorne’s characters don’t leave you. Hester Prynne, Chillingsworth, Dr. Heidegger, Young Goodman Brown, and on and on.

Faulkner again. Absalom, Absalom! Not for the tepid, but here is Faulkner at his zenith. With the longest sentence in a novel (I don’t think it’s been beaten, but I may be mistaken), with Quentin Compson, and Thomas Sutpen, and the cast of Yoknapatawpha County legends, this is Faulkner’s literary genius on display. With biblical allusions and Greek references sufficient for countless theses and dissertations, it’s all here. (Bring your dictionary.)

Porter’s stories. Specifically, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. A troubled but beautiful soul and linguistic magician, Porter will make you continually ask, “What’s really real?”

And this’ll be no surprise to folks who know me well, but it’s Dickens. Great Expectations holds a place in my heart unlike almost any other piece of literary fiction. I love his other tops like David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, etc. but GE still grips me like no other.