Exposing Yourself

Good evening. Good morning. Wherever this finds you, hello out there. I haven't posted in a while. To be honest, I had run out of things I believed in enough to speak about. Whether you're in China searching for a picture of an animal with a human's beard, or in Alaska actually searching for whales, you are now here. This is my little neglected home where I write things down. This is my history, at least the history the way I see it.

I was driving today, stuck in the gridlock and dazing into the sky at a plane scratch the sky (as my daughter says). I started thinking about the plane and who was on it and where they were going, I didn't know, so that led me to smile at my daughter saying that, whenever she looks into the blue sky. I was thinking about what makes things that a kid says so cute and precious to people. I could have just as easily said the same thing and no one would smile at all. They would just stand still, then look down at their phones. I think maybe it's their innocence that draws such attention. A kid says something so little, yet it stuns people into this memory of themselves being so frail, yet so empowered to say or do whatever they wanted. 

At the heart of happiness, there is transparency.

A child is happy because they are open. They have no deep secrets or insecurities. Insecurities are learned from ridicule. Children should never be ridiculed. Neither should adults. Kids are happy because they don't know about the world yet. They're safe in their homes watching cartoons and waiting for their next desire to be fulfilled. They are doing exactly what a child does. They get a little older and life begins to show them the world and all of it's beauty and wonder and despair. For many, the darkness hides the beautiful things and for others, the light exposes the root of the darkness. For me, the despair was all I could see. I saw only the bad in people without really acknowledging the good. The world was wilted flowers to me. I had an idea that things were once beautiful gone terribly wrong and now filled with the remnants of what used to shine in the sun. I realized after many bad things that I was just hiding. I turned the lights out. I was finding the darkest places and living there. So I made a decision. I made the decision to let go of everything I had been taught about God and whatever He supposedly wanted from me. I had reached a place where there was no more down. I just sought out something different. I found it. Things changed slowly with work and frustration, but they were changing. Something about me was changing from within. I asked God if "He were really real and had something to say to me, then say it so I can here you." So He did. All of those things that made me so angry and awful to other people had to go. They had to be exposed. I....had to be exposed. No more hiding. So I painfully devoted my life to living without secrets. I have failed many times, but I am continually reminded and motivated to let every stranger know exactly who they are dealing with.

Here's why.

Transparency attracts people. People want to be around someone they can trust. It's both refreshing and scary to them. It makes them angry when things are said that aren't what they wanted to hear, but keeps them coming to you because they know beyond all that you can be trusted. I think many Christians have real issues with honesty, including myself. I think that our words about God should be few. We are often quick to share the words of our faith and keep the obstacles and troubling truths silent. People are smart. They see through this as a scam. In honesty, it is a scam. We hide the difficulties of being a person with faith in Jesus silent to attract people to the more attractive aspects. We tell them they will finally be happy and free, but hide that their family may reject them and ridicule them for their senseless faith in the unseen man-made superstitions of the Bible. We tell them them that God will protect them, but hide the notion that people all over the world are taking leaps of faith and being slaughtered for it. We tell them that we accept and love everyone, then segregate and ostracize based on whatever perceived sin the person is living in. This is not transparency, this is a hoax that drives people away from God. This isn't what God wants. God doesn't want you to flaunt your freedom and condemn the others for their differences over social networks. God doesn't want you bashing and judging His Creation because you feel your rights are being infringed upon. God want's no hate or lies to spill from your lips. God wants the same unconditional love from you to others as He gave to you while suffering and dying on the cross.

God wants a different Christianity.

God wants a different religion.

God wants an open book standing right here for all to read, because people flock to truth. You may be ridiculed, but you will represent God...who was in fact...ridiculed.









Sing.
Migrate.






Thanks for reading...Z

The Church in Peril

This is the day the Lord has made, I will rejoice and trample the hurting under foot.

I think this is the day that many Christians have lost their minds. One would think that the Bible would be clear on this issue in the hearts of those that subscribe their lives to following it. This principle is at the very base of God's moral code. Love God with all of your hearts, souls, and minds, and treat others as you would be treated. Love God, love people. Yet here we are in 2013 and all we can do is argue. The Bible also says not to do that. You don't see Jesus doing it. He knew better. Our personal liberties are not worth driving those that are lost further into the dark. What those do that are not subscribing to our Bible is between them and God. We aren't granted the liberty to judge them. We are granted the responsibility to love them. Love drives people to God. Judgement drives them to the grave. We use harsh Bible language and use God's very words of love as a dagger to cut at the hearts of those who are already bleeding. This is insane. It is as if we are stumbling right back into the pharisee's robes. We pray loud in the squares and flaunt our freedom as if it were something we earned and not God. We exercise our own freedom and strip others of it as if they hadn't worked hard enough for it. It was Christ who worked for all of it. We build worship buildings and spend millions on drawing a crowd. We could never draw God with our money or bricks. We draw God with sincerity and love. We are still throwing stones at that prostitute instead of reaching out our hands to her.

The American church is in peril. We got here by ignoring the very actions of Jesus. Jesus did not call out the sinners and condemn them, quite the opposite, he called out the righteous as hypocrites for their judgement and legalism. Jesus ate and drank, yes alcohol, with the sinners and the religious called him a drunkard and a glutton. Jesus spent his time with the hated people, washing their feet, not condemning their actions. The American church will be destitute of the actual Spirit of God if we continue this progression into hate. We will be sitting in huge buildings full of people acting out emotionally and as publicly as we can, all while rotting on the inside while the country rots on the outside.

We must wake up. Our banner must be love, compassion, and grace for God to be seen in us by the world. Those are the very attributes of God Himself. When people see those things, they see God. I challenge my brothers and sisters to simply close your mouths. Lay your hands beside the keyboard. Take a few minutes to meditate on God and what His Word actually says and act accordingly. Make this your creed with me, we will all fail at times, but people will have grace on us because of our practice of having grace on them. "Let us speak no evil from our mouths."





Sing.
Migrate.





Thanks for reading. Z

What The World Needs Now

Lot's of sad things in the world right now. Yesterday a 13 year old kid shot himself dead in the school bathroom before classes began.When something like that happens we always picture our own kids in their shoes...picture ourselves in the shoes of their parents. I don't even know how to describe what would be in my head. A few months ago a guy robbed a pregnant woman and shot her in the belly, killing her baby...just because. Every week in Detroit a guy breaks into an elderly person's home and rapes her, robs her, and kills her...just because. Point being, you watch the news enough and you will learn to loathe the world we have to live in. You will become cold in your heart and forget about those that just want peace.

I have served as youth minister for 13 years. I've seen and heard a lot that I can never tell you. Things that make me sick. At this point and time, I cannot serve at the capacity I used to. So since yesterday and the suicide of that kid, I have been wondering what to do. What can I do? I have never been one to sit back and watch the world burn. I wanna get burned trying to save others. It occurred to me this morning that I am not doing much at all to help those in peril. I have been living my life and adjusting to a different career and craft. I sat down this evening with my wife and watched a doc about a guy who used Craigslist ads to keep him in shelter and food for a month. He didn't want to just mooch off others, so he spent most days volunteering to those that needed love. During the film, it occurred to me that this is the answer. Disconnect from the digital and reconnect to humanity. We are cold and self centered because we are conditioned to relate via internet or text. The issue is, you cannot look into the eyes of a person on the internet. You get what they choose to give you. Face to face, most cannot hide who they really are or what is really happening in them.

So here is my rough draft resolution. Take more time in every human interaction you experience in your day. Speak with the person serving your coffee, your lunch. Take every opportunity to get to know strangers everywhere. I am betting you will find that people share the very same feelings on many levels. I am betting that you will make a difference in more than one person's life. Say hi to the neighborhood kids. Give a 100% tip to your waitress. Adopt a child from Compassion International and actually write her. Start a relationship with a person whose life you are sustaining.  Sit down next to a person who is sitting alone and open a conversation. Step out from where you are comfortable. Look people in the eyes and say things that matter. Learn to keep your mouth shut when it is foolishness coming out. Leave behind your negative attitude. Ask God to break your jaded heart. Give in to the thoughts of that kid that still lives in you. Would you as a 9 year old drop your last nickle in that filthy guy's hand...probably yes. If you are shoveling snow, shovel your neighbors as well. Buy the lunch of a random person sitting across the restaurant. Do all of these things in secret.

I think this is what the world needs now. Love. Love is still a verb, not a feeling. Love is something you practice. Do so intensely. I will too.











Sing.
Migrate.






Thanks for reading...Z

Beginning to Break

Life is really fast. When you're young it goes by so slow, always waiting to be old enough. Thirty years later, you have no idea where your life went and how it got here without you noticing. Things then spiral and speed up and your time is more, for the most part spent doing something that you would soon not notice your doing so much. Phone calls and text messages and emails and tournaments and soccer games and dance recitals and appointments and paperwork and insurance and 401 K and 403 B. When your 80, you know now you will wonder how you got these wrinkles so quickly...you were just 7 years old playing in the sand and picking the bark off branches at the top of your backyard tree. Without knowing it, the world spins around and around, reproducing the same 24 hours it produced the day before. Days vary, but in all, they are the same and it is all going too fast.

Until that moment your world is shaken. When everything that has inhabited your turn of the earth is changed. Suddenly things slow down so you can really experience them. Sometimes this is a blessing when it is time to celebrate, others it is a cruel joke and everyone is laughing but you. Then...you having nothing but time.

When you've been rocked the lights above you as you drive move slower above your head and you notice when a streetlamp is out. You look at the details of your surroundings because all of the sudden you have time. You listen to the drip of melting ice trickle down your gutter. The turn off the radio to hear the sound of the cracks in the cement of the road pass beneath your tires. You wonder why that baby is crying in the shopping cart while it's mother shops quietly and oblivious it. You wonder what it will look like as an adult crying like that in front of the mirror trying to see what you look like crying. You watch the trees sway back and forth with the wind and the helicopter seeds sail down to the earth and realize that this very same moment in time produced the tree that produced them in the first place. All of these things are part of the shock and jarring of the changing of the pull of gravity of the earth in your life. This is what happens when rotation is reversed...you end up on your head.

For a while, we stay on our heads and look at all of the beautiful things in the world and learn how to block out bad thoughts. But after a while the earth begins to make sense a little. Never as colorful again, but sensible enough to allow the earth to speed round and round again unnoticed by your days.


The question then becomes appallingly clear...Are we now healed or are we again beginning to break?










Sing.
Migrate.




Thanks for reading...Z

Excerpt From the Diary of the Great Grizzly Brown

If I stopped walking, my legs would fall off and I would bleed to death. If I stopped and stepped back, my eyes would be crushed and my tongue pulled out. I had been through that hell. I had seen all that the devil wanted me to see. I lived through it. Now I walk away from it with the back of my shirt still on fire. The smoke still smolders from my flannel button down.

I had stared into the eyes of everything that I feared and became who I never wanted to be. I became nothing at all. I just sat there. I stared at blank screens and lost track of time inside of myself. Any pride left inside was torched and left to mix with the ashes of what I had lost. There was no sun. There was no day. The night reigned both my dreams and lucid hours. I fought for my sanity, I begged for comfort. I got only emptiness for my cries.

Until the day I woke in the dirt, my face down on the concrete alley. Bottles surrounded my frail form. I lift my head in weakness and let it fall back to the ground that I so badly wanted to dwell in. I had heard a voice. I am sure it was in my head, but it was loud enough for me to understand. I heard a voice of One calling in the desert. I heard Him and I rose to my feet. I had been waiting for this voice for thirty years. Thirty long years of obedience. Thirty years of faith without one moment of proof. Now He speaks. Now...after my only family is perished and I have nothing left but my thoughts. He speaks, so I listen.

He says....."Move! Remove yourself and get up and keep moving."


So I did because I had nothing left to do. I could lay in this alley until I froze or starved to death, which may have been only hours away, or I could stand to my feet and start walking toward where the sun used to be.


What I found was a fire remained. It burned inside of me quietly. It was what kept me from fading into the asphalt. It was anger, but misplaced anger. It was anger at my childhood for what it produced. It was anger at God for where He lived compared to where I lived. Most of all, it was the anger that screams from the emptiness that comes from holding out your arms to hug a son that is gone and a wife that has joined him in paradise. It was directed and everything that had always kept me alive through all of this madness.

For the first time I was silent. I walked for days and weeks and months, not speaking a word to anyone. I sorted it out. I fought every demon that had infested my heart. I fought until I nearly bled out. But in the end, I walked forward, away from the madness and into more madness.

-The Great Grizzly Brown (Excerpts from his personal diary found during The Celebration- dated 3013)



















Sing.
Migrate.





Thanks for reading...Z

Valentine For My Love

"And if ever to leave. I'll say before I go. That you're the best moment I've ever known." Ben Howard


Life travels so fast. When I was little, I would always want to be some older kid. The older kids got to stand up on the school bus or leave class early to stand on the corner. Adults would always tell me that I was too young for this or for that. It bothered me to be young. I didn't like being put off...still don't. Every year seemed to drag on and on as I would perceive it then. Now my perception of it is much different. I wanted to be the teenager smoking in the park playing the saxophone. Instead I was stuck in this over-sized Member's Only jacket in an under-sized body. I tried once to just go buy cigarettes with my lunch money. I went to the counter and asked for a pack of cigarettes...had no idea there were more than one brand. Lady laughed and told me to buy some gum. I looked up to the wrong people. Something about a rebellious teenager made me want to be one. I did end up being one.

Now I want a time machine. I want to travel back and watch it happen the entire night. It could take the place of dreaming. I could be sleeping soundly in the here and now, but back there in my mind. I don't want to be able to change anything, I just want to see it. I want to perceive it as I do now and not then. I want to speak to myself then, even if I can't hear it. I may have trusted very few if I could go back. I would have told that guy in the park to stop making me afraid of nuclear war and to get a job and stop playing that sax in the park, people are trying to sleep. I would have realized my potential far before it became so painful to achieve. I would have given all I had left in my hands to take a step out of the shadows and be who I wanted to be. I was always an underdog in my mind, but it took years to fight like one. I was held back and restrained by my own fears until late in my teens. I got to where I always wanted to be. I bought cigarettes and drank booze.


I was that cool, rebellious teenager. I hurt people on purpose, I think it made me feel powerful to make a person cry. I was the weakest of all teenagers. I was full of rage that had been held back. I was a lion that could not devour enough of everything that satisfied my need for life to fair. Life was never going to be fair...not for me...not for the millions who had things far worse than me....and that isn't fair. So I just let everything around me burn to the ground and I stood over it. I fought for every moment of every day. I gave in to nothing. I dared not to try anything. If it scared me, I ran at it. Nothing was enough. I became all that I had always been scared to become. I became fire.

It was empty. Inside, I wanted something better. I didn't want anger to fuel everything anymore, it took too much out of me. I was lonely. I was the loneliest man in the entire world. I fell in love with everything but what I needed.

Then I met her. She sat in front of me at a wedding. I had a girlfriend at the time, but she was another placeholder to something different. I went to the wedding with my brother instead. She was the most beautiful thing I had seen in my entire life. I played it cool. I didn't talk to her. My rule was that if you wanted the girl, act as if you didn't want anything to do with her. So I did that. We got to the reception and I knew we had something going on with the glances and the fast turning of our heads when the other looked. I took a picture of her looking at me...an action she could have copied from me a hundred times. I walked over to her table and a friend of mine introduced her to me. She was holding some random person's baby. I took the baby from her. Years later she would make the claim that I purposely fondled her during this baby exchange, but I will deny it to death. We spoke for a minute and I sat back at my loud table and ate dinner. A couple of hours later because of her courage, we were dancing together. We had an amazing time, even though I looked like Jar Jar Binks flailing around with my arms and legs like a skier falling down a hill. That night I asked for her phone number and she hesitated, which was awesome to me.

The next morning I broke every one of my dating rules. I called her and spoke to her little Scottish grandma, who told me she was at college and would be back later. She called me back at some time, I don't know how long.

I loved her right away. She didn't mind that I didn't take her out to eat for dates and dates. She didn't mind me taking her to strange places like this train car below a hill where homeless people lived. She didn't mind that I didn't kiss her for a month after we started dating. I wanted to know her on a different level. She became my wife on June 9th 2001. She delivered our first child on January 13th 2003 and our second on May 6th 2006. This was the life I never knew that I always wanted. I never saw this coming. I didn't think I ever deserved it. I found my potential on the one thing I never saw growing up. A husband and a father. This was God's second greatest gift given to me.



Happy Valentine's Day my love. You are the best moments I've ever known.



Sing.
Migrate.





Thanks for reading...Z

Drunkin Dunkin, time to make the donuts

 His eyes open at the high pitched sound of a swing set and kids shouting. At first he didn't know where or even who he was. He had asked that very same question hundreds of times before. He would wake up and roll out of the bed and onto the floor, crawl to the dresser and lift himself to his feet. He would stagger his way to the bathroom feeling every pulse from his heart blasting blood into a brain that felt full already. He would look at his creased and quickly aging face and ask himself out loud, "Who are you?"

Now he wakes in his car in a parking lot next to a school beside a big hill that the trains run on. He wakes to the sounds of recess. He wakes to the very sound of his own child playing with his friends. No one even knows he is there. He would pull down the back seat that opens a hole that leads to the trunk and would lie 50/50 between the back seat and the trunk. In the winter, he would start the car for 30 minutes several times a night to make it warm inside, then shut it off to conserve gas. He had to work too hard to pay for gas...and hurt too many people.

He brings himself out of the back seat and sits down onto the front seat and lights a cigarette. His little boy is standing straight up on the top of a dome of monkey bars. He hasn't spoken to him in years, but sees him 5 times a week at 9:45 and 2:15 PM. Some days it's kickball and others it's the dome of steel. Either one, his kid was clearly king. It makes him remember when he was king...that very short period of time that he ruled the entire world.

Literally.

He sat in the oval office and controlled whether a nation would recover or decay. The earth was at his fingertips. He thought at the time that he wanted this power, but when his wife left him during his second term, reality set in deep inside. He started smoking weed in the presidential garden. He did so without regard to anyone that may be watching. He got drunk and made a state of the union speech using a made up language that no one understood. This was his last term and he just didn't care anymore. He had lost everything. His wife had left 2 years after his kids gave up on him and wrote tell all books about him. He was shamed, damned to serve his final year as commander of the world and go off into oblivion. That was when his maid got pregnant with his child. He knew it was his because he never let anyone leave him. He paid them more money to stay and ease the loneliness.

Now he sits and watches his child play in the park of a low income community. No one is calling him for speeches or stamps of approval. No one cares whether he lives or dies anymore. If he is mentioned anywhere, it is accompanied with a joke at his expense...and he deserves it. He is the "Trailer Park President" the "Black Eye of the American Electoral College." He was President Duncan, now he is "Drunkin Dunkin, time to make the donuts." The laughing stock of the entire world. This is why he awakens to the sound of swing sets and not the radio.

His bottle of the cheapest vodka available sits under his foot as he rolls it back and forth on the floor until the bell rings and he gets to watch his son walk back into school and out of his life until 2:15 when he will barely recognize him due to a new bottle of the cheapest vodka available.

He sits and watches the doors close and the field go silent. He begins to figure out a way to get the 2 dollars he needs for a new bottle, but is interrupted by the young guy walking toward the doors of the building his kid is about to learn mathematics in. This guy doesn't look official and surely is holding something under his jacket. President Drunkin Dunkin opens the car door and runs as fast as an intoxicated man could be expected to run and swings open the door of the school exposing himself to a very angry teenager with a very deadly gun. They lock eyes for a moment of understanding and the kid fires a round into the stomach of President Shamed Duncan, then turned toward his son's classroom. Duncan pushes forward toward the kid, making noise that would both distract and agitate the gunman. Another bullet into the shoulder. Another into the abdomen. Duncan kept coming. He kept walking until he put his hands on the shooter breaking his neck with the last amount of strength left, then crumbling to the ground in death.

No one called him "Drunkin Dunkin, time to make the donuts again." No one called him anything but a national hero.









Sing.
Migrate.




Thanks for reading...Z

The Need For Prayer

It was never about the lions. The lions are always hungry. It was about a story between God and Daniel.

 Guns are really popular. Guns right now are either angels or demons to people. People everywhere are talking about gun laws and freedoms. There is an outcry on both sides of the coin. However, we see a similar situation, except way worse in the Bible.

Before Christians take arms to fight, as some are threatening, take note of Daniel's response in Daniel 6. He was stripped of his right to pray to his God. The real God. He was told he would be killed if he did so and he did anyway. He didn't hold up a picket sign or march on the Roman capitol. He didn't make a fuss, he simply did as he thought was right in the face of death. They sent him to the lions den and he was unharmed. Those that accused him were then sent and killed immediately...

God is powerful and will shut the mouths of lions if He chooses. We are nothing. We are powerless. We should stop believing otherwise as far as our state of living is concerned. God is in control. Things happen that we consider bad or unjust, yet we do the opposite of Daniel. We fight. We whine. We cry about freedoms.

We are not given freedoms apart from the freedom of God. Neither was Daniel. Did he cry about it and scream about freedom entitlements? No, He just kept praying. The answer is prayer.

Just pray.

Get alone in the house with God and pray. You cannot overthrow the government when  things get voted against you. You are powerless...and that is where God wants us. We need to rely on Him and pray. Submit.




Sing.
Migrate.









Thanks for reading...Z

Saying Goodbye For Good?

It has taken me such a long time to discover some things that I always knew with my mind, but never experienced with my life. There is a difference between the two. People know everything until they have experienced it and have found themselves lost.

Saying goodbye is one of the most difficult things for me to do. I have difficulties leaving things behind, even if they are causing me harm. I have never wanted to ever say goodbye for good to anyone or anything. This is a thought that is so sad when I think about it. To leave it behind and never come bad to it. My dream is to have a time machine. The kind of time machine that will only take you back for 30 minute periods. I don't want to stay there, I just want to revisit. I want to watch myself make all of those decisions I made and experience all of the things I remember as being golden. I want to relive them and then come back home to my beautiful wife and kids who are more than I have ever deserved.

I have everything. I have all I have ever wanted and more than I could have expected, and yet I still want to go back and live it again. I realize now that I am making a heaven for myself, one much different than the one God has prepared. One far less beautiful than what God has in mind. I want to relive the sorrow. I am not sure why, maybe the train wreck syndrome. I just don't want to let it go...it just doesn't feel right. Those times were me. That was me. Those were the things that made me what I am now and what I will be. I should be moving forward without looking back. Well I am moving forward, sometimes there is no choice in that, but I am constantly looking back. This brings me to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible. There was this place...these two connected cities where the people had lost all desire to please God or to follow even a moral code of some sort. They were a city of rapists. God sends angels to remove the one righteous family and the people line up at the door to rape God's angels. Lot, the righteous man, agrees to leave after much prayer and arguing with God and as his family leaves, God tells them not to look back...no matter what. Lot's wife disobeys and looks back and sees the horror of a city full of people turned to salt. She then turns to salt also. She had one job and that was to move forward to something beautiful. Instead she could not say goodbye, no matter how disgusting the things that were behind her. This is a lesson to us. We should heed it. I should heed it. I/you cannot live in the past. It may bring back nostalgic feelings that we want to cling to, but we must let those things just be feelings. The word nostalgia means basically, a "Pain for the past." In the human body, pain is a warning. It's a sign of something wrong. The point is to correct what causes the pain. For some, this is easy, for others the most difficult thing life could bring.

For the past several years I have been working on goodbye. I have been trying to say goodbye to my brother, who is gone from here and somewhere else beautiful, but still so much of what drives my thoughts. I've been trying to say goodbye to the bad habits my actions have produced in my life. I have been trying to say goodbye to a certain set of railroad tracks that once almost made my life a tragedy.

I am a positive person. This has not always been, but by the grace of God, I have become a positive thinker. I love to laugh. I make jokes wherever I am because life should never be taken too seriously. We are a mist that appears for a while, then vanishes. I try to stand out to every person I meet, so that they can see that God is good. But I just cannot keep from looking behind me. I cannot find it in me to finally say goodbye.

To be honest, I don't even know how or where to start.





Sing.
Migrate.








Thanks for reading...Z

Happy Birthday Will

I laid on the grass next to you watching the sparks erupt and fade into the dark as the rocket flew first up, then to the side.  We used to build those rockets all night long as the snow would fall outside our window. Yours was the most meticulously built. It's nose was as sharp as an arrowhead. It's fins were perfectly placed. It's packing was stuffed gently but carefully, sure to not bring unbalance to the rocket as a whole. The rocket was taped to the side with a counter weight on the other side to keep it from throwing off the weight and balance of the rocket, whose frame was a simple toilet paper cardboard base. Joe and I were both lacking in any mechanical abilities, but you....you were a guru. Your rockets flew into the night December sky and out of our vision...out of our reach. It was as if they had a real destination that was far away from this place.

We laid on the grass and watched Joe's rocket fly sideways and onto the neighbors roof...a site I had seen so many times before in both my rockets and his. We didn't take those nights for granted. It was cold outside. Crystal covered everything. We wore those hats. We smoked and smoked and smoked. We exhaled and made symbols of our youth into the sky, never once admitting that we would grow older and have to accept the responsibility that came with age. We just tuned out the world and built those rockets and enjoyed every moment of our time together.

Underneath was a dread of it all ending. In the back of our minds we knew it would have to end and there would be wives and kids and jobs. We knew we couldn't live in the night sky forever. There was something profoundly sad about the thought of that. I didn't want it to end. I had what I needed...finally.

I grew up, just as I suspected I would. I got married and had kids and became a wild success...maybe not the way success is usually defined, but success the way I have perceived it. I became intensely devoted to my wife and my children. I had been blessed with everything I thought I did not deserve. I had everything, until I lost you on Christmas of 2009. The last time I saw you was your birthday 2009, just 6 days before you built a rocket that could hold your 6 foot 6 frame. It's your birthday today and I don't know still why you aren't here celebrating. In fact, today none of us are celebrating. We are instead somber...trying to remember only the positive. We are trying not to let it all come flooding back in. The last three years have been the most difficult of our lives. We have wept uncontrollably and without consolation. We have shook our fists at God. We have held each other and held each other together. We have had to stop talking when talking about you to keep from breaking down. We have remembered every beautiful thing about you. We remember who you really were...the most beautiful person any of us had ever met.

Losing you brought us together. Losing you has defined the way we live our lives. Joe and I still talk about going night fishing or building rockets, but those things are gone now. If we did them, they would only be an unbearable reminder of how you were no longer here with us. All of those things are gone now and we are forced to finally grow up....without you.


I miss you big brother more than any of my words could describe. I wish I would have known and done more to save you. I wish all of the beautiful lights of Christmas could have kept you out of he dark. But I didn't and they didn't and now I stare at your grave with your ashes lying on my chest. I say, "Happy Birthday!" You would have been 35 years old. You would have loved to see your son as a safety at the elementary school. I get to see him directing traffic every morning. You would have loved to see your daughter sing a solo in the Christmas play. You would have loved to see the way your kids have grown so strong. They worship the ground you walked on. You are their hero. You are my hero. They miss you and so do we.

I stopped being mad at you years ago. I thank God for you. I thank God that I got that time with you, laying on top of my car, looking at the sky and dreaming together. We were made of gold and nothing could touch us. We were what every kid believes they are...invincible. Until we weren't.

Happy birthday Will.









Sing.
Migrate.









Thanks for reading...Z