Mural on the Bedroom Ceiling

I’ve dreamt four nights of children,

but the long days teach me to give up

dreams of children, so these three nights

I’ve lain awake.

 

But what am I?

I am a hand resting on a doorknob.

I leave behind traces of oil on the locks I’ve tried

and left behind.

But what am I?

 

I am nothing compared to a child.

Look into my swollen grey eyes and tell me,

 

is there more substance there than in

cheeks rosied with laughter, the face of a baby girl?

Or will that miniscule finger that blesses my face

with its touch one day reach out for locks I’ve tried

and find them broken by a father’s hands?

 

The ceiling is unchanging these three nights, but

on it my eyes have painted scripture and promises;

laughter from lips resembling mine.

I Versus Terminal

I dated a girl once that told me I reminded her of Matt Damon. I don’t know if she meant in looks or actions. She’s married to an athlete in Arizona now.

I shift uncomfortably in the seat. The man next to me turns on the overhead light.

In middle school, my best friend and I got in a fight over a comic book he’d lent me. I hadn’t finished it. It’d been three weeks. He said I was a bad friend. A good friend would have given it back as soon as he’d asked for it. I still have the scar on my right knee from when he pushed me. I gave him a black eye. He’s studying business at Texas, now.

I have to turn my music up higher than I’d like; the engines are so loud. The air tastes stale – processed.

When I was a kid, my brother told me I should be an architect. I was always building things back then. Pictures of the Lego cities I’d made are still on Dad’s fridge. I think the fort I built in the woods at Mom’s house is still there. It was made of a fallen Leland cypress and plywood I’d taken from abandoned construction sites. My brother’s seeing a therapist about anger management now.

I slide by the man next to me back into my window seat; I’ve just used the lavatory. Outside all I see are the clouds and wing below. I can’t see the ground.

My first boss told me that I reminded him of himself at my age. I never liked him. He never realized that. He said that I had the same motivation, determination and personal integrity that got him to vice president. My dad had gotten me the internship with him. He reminded me of my dad in most ways. The door to his office was left open one day. I caught him with the girl intern. He had threatened to fire her. He and Dad couldn’t keep their hands off of women. I reported him; he didn’t know it was me. Several other women testified against him. He lives in a mansion by himself on the coast of California now.

There’s a crick in my neck. Airplane seats are a chiropractor’s worst nightmare, I think. A baby starts crying in the row behind me. Ocean’s 12 is playing on the TV sets. I watch, but don’t listen.

I fell in love with a girl on September 11, 2001, minutes after planes flew into the trade center. I was a freshman in college. Her name was Camille. I felt the moment I fell for her – when her head fell onto my shoulder. We’d just seen the news. Her grandmother had died of a stroke the week before. We had the fact of our parents’ divorces in common. She had green eyes. I’ll always remember her smile; the sun-seed between my ribs. She started falling apart after that day. She needed me. She needed more than me. She needed a rock; I was gravel. I could only handle so many tears. She needed a shoulder to cry on; my shoulder was eroding. She began seeing a therapist that December. She stopped seeing him in January, right after we broke up. They began dating in April.  I fell out of love with her on May 4, 2005. That was two months ago; on the day I bought this ticket. She has one child and is in the process of a divorce now.

I’ve been trying to read a book; I put it away. My hand finds the acceptance letter in my backpack and I pull it out. The baby behind me is sleeping now. The yeasty, microwaved smell of airplane food pushes forward from the aft.

My parents paid for my college education. I was pre-law. If I hadn’t been, my parents wouldn’t have paid. My mom never finished her law degree; she felt I could make up for her failure. Dad thought English was a dead end. So, for once, the two of them agreed: I was to be a lawyer. I was eight when Dad left. Since then, I’ve been set on disagreeing with him. But free education at the Ivy League was worth more than vengeance. I graduated with a 3.8 GPA. They began talking about the bar exam – separately, of course. I began disagreeing. Then they locked their respective doors until I changed my mind. I spent the next year – this past year – in Hawaii. I lived with a friend. He got me a job at a hotel restaurant, tending the bar. I wrote in my spare time. Two months ago I met Jesus and a girl in that bar, within five minutes of each other. Both told me to honor my parents. I made a few calls to the two halves of my home. I apologized. They accepted silently, gratified. They offered to pay for law school. I tried praying for the first time. An English program at Oxford caught my attention. I daydreamed. Dad got me into Northwestern University Law School with his connections. Mom bought me a plane ticket. The two of them are waiting for me to call when I land now.

A nearby woman yelps. The cabin jolts as we land. Rain streaks the window. The flight attendant chirps into the intercom with a Welsh lilt, “Welcome to Heathrow International Airport! Local time is eleven twenty-four, AM.” The girl I met in the bar winks at me from the other side of the plane. The man beside me flips through a magazine and I see a picture of Matt Damon. I smile, thinking:

I’m nothing like him.

Mere Mortality

“The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship [ . . . ]. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

– C.S. Lewis

On the Friday of Heldenwoche (Heroes’ Week), the kids’ camp in Germany of which I had the privilege to be a part this summer, I had an epiphany that the point around which our team centered the camp – the fact that everyone can be a superhero by Christ’s life within us – is exactly the point that I had planned on making during the devotion I had been asked to lead that next morning. This is what I wrote in my journal as a rough draft of sorts for that devotion.

This past year, God began teaching me a lesson about having my identity in Christ and what that means for everyone. In the midst of a bout of depression, I heard the Lord say to me: Harman, you are My brother, My coheir; and you are more than a conquerer because of my life within you. This led me to Romans 8:15-17 & 35-39 (look it up, it’s good stuff, and keep your Bible handy, you’ll need it.)

We are sons and daughters of the MOST HIGH GOD – coheirs with Christ . . . if seems that “super-hero” is too tame of a word . . . Christ calls us by a much fiercer name that I think better sums up the power that we have only through Him. When debating with the Pharisees, Christ quotes Psalms 82:6, “I said, you are gods/ you are the sons of the Most High”.

Indeed, we are the image-bearers of YHWH – the pinnacle of creation. In Ephesians, Paul tells us of the power that comes with the indwelling Holy Spirit – the power that comes with this sonship and daughtership. (Now you need to look up Ephesians 1:18-23.)

Here Paul explains that the Holy Spirit of Power that raised Christ from the dead lives within us, and thereby we have been given that selfsame power – NOT, I stress, by our own strength, but by the power of our Head – under whose feet God has placed all things.

So who is the “super-hero”?

We are. We are each super-heroes; gods in the likeness of the Most High; sons and daughters of the King whose kingdom is coming! This is our identity – we are co-heirs and more than conquerers because of the Power that lives within us.

But don’t get me wrong – we are not gods of our own making. We are nothing without our Savior God. NOTHING. Yesterday we taught the kids a memory verse. “Denn alles ist mir moeglich durch Jesus Christus, der mir die Kraft gibt, die ich brauche!” (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”) The emphasis here is not on “I” or “all things”, as we like to think. No, it’s on “Christ, who strengthens me”. It is because of Christ that we are sons and daughters, it is by Him that we cry “Abba, Father!”

This is our hope, the blessed hope known only to those who know Christ: that He, by His death and resurrection, has redeemed us and taken our sins away. But furthermore, He has given us the Kingdom – that we may be called sons and daughters of the Most High.