If Home is Where the Heart Is

Autumn Kickoff

Football Season. The most wonderful time of the year. Well, at least in my house. This morning I woke up to 50 degree weather and dreams of running backs dancing in my head.

Since I was in the womb (no exaggeration here) the Fall was a season sanctified solely for football, not just the mere act of watching it but living and breathing it as well. My dad was a walk-on kicker at the University of South Carolina for his first two years and he's been addicted ever since. Our most fond memories have been in section 804 of Williams-Brice stadium rooting on our beloved Gamecocks.

Somehow, I became the Prodigal son and left not only the university but the state in 2005. After only missing 5 home games my entire life, I've missed all but one the past five years. In a way, the mourning never ceases because each approaching season reopens those wounds.

Yet technology has allowed me to not miss a snap. But while the actual game is what gathers us, it was the pageantry surrounding it that kept us coming back. I attended every single sold-out home game in the midst of a 21-game losing streak not because I was riveted by the product on the field but because I loved the people around me.

I cherished eating my weight in wings in between tossing the football with my buddy Rivers. I lived to make the rounds between fraternity tailgating lots, my dads' spot, and the cockabooses. The fare varied from kegs of beer to crab cakes to frogmore stew. Even if the cocks fell flat, the party never would.

But beneath all the fan-fare was an ache to see our boys finally live up to our other-worldly expectations. There were moments when they made us believe, players like Sterling and Sidney, but despite our flirtations they never got the girl. Until now.

Today we embark on a totally new experience for any gamecock fan. We are the defending East champions and have been predicted to not only reclaim that title, but according to some we have a good shot to play for it all. I keep pinching myself waiting to wake up from this dream. And maybe I will tonight, but I don't think I will. This will be a season that I will always remember even if it is with a clause of "if we'd just hit the tight end, he was wide open" because it has taught me to hope again.

And I know that our school and our passion is not unique, that across campuses nation-wide today others will be carrying out their own traditions wondering if this year could be the one, wondering if the drinking they'll be doing tonight will be in celebration or to drown their sorrows. But of course, if your team is playing the Gamecocks, there is always next year.

Go Cocks!!!

All of Your Chains

As we turned East into a little box canyon nestled among the San Juan Mountains in Southwest Colorado, we found ourselves transported and perhaps transformed. The glowing groves of aspen trees lined the snow-capped peaks around us with an overwelmingly green bed skirt and drew us into the town of Telluride a bastion of beauty seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Our favortite phase soon became, "look!" We were like three year olds going to the zoo for the first time, bewildered by the scenery. There are a few times in life when you forget about all the pain and suffering that dominate not only our lives but all of creation itself, when you see or experience something so beautiful that it hides all the ugly. Jesus spoke about such things as the light and that the light shines in the darkenss and the darkness is compeltely overwhelmed by the light. This weekend I saw glimpses of that light and for a few moments the darkenss trembled and ran.

I don't want to over sentimentalize my experience, but my life like so many others I know has been filled with little but darkness and even the beautiful things around me have been hard to see. I have begun to doubt that the light will actually overcome and yet it often finds me in the strangest places. When my faith is dragging God has a way of showing up at just the right time although He often seems late or out of place. So in a sea of hippies, missing a shoe, listening to something akin to bluegrass music, I found God again and it was beautiful.

This trip was just a chance to get away and have some fun but I found my expectations lacking. Absent were my girls, my wife and daughter, and consequently my sanity. I struggled to survive camping on a baseball field in the town of Telluride. I found myself during some of the rippingest music I've ever encountered wishing they were there with me. I battled inwardly about whether I deserved to celebrate life when so many in the world were deprived of the very basics of life. But the reality is that life will not die, the light will overcome and when it breaks through we must dance.

In a weekend full of highlights and special moments, one stands out clearest. at a side stage in the midst of what amounts to a yard off of main street Telluride we saw one of my favorite acts, Abigail Washburn, perform an impromptu acoustic set five feet from me. As I sat on the grass and soaked up the surreal moment, tears welled up in my eyes as Abigail sang "Chains." As the wind gushed through the park the band delivered a cry for freedom, a cry that my heart longed to utter. Devoid of amplification, stripped to their rawest, I saw my soul reflected in the honesty of that moment. Life was passing me by. I was chained to darkness by my fears and for a split second the light of hope burst the chains off me and my soul lept to its feet to dance.

I could hardly wait to return home, both literally and figuratively, to start living life instead of merely watching it pass by.  Below is a video of the actual performance detailed here captured by the guy sitting beside me, a stranger, but forever a friend for grasping this spark of light.



I pray for the light to shine, for beauty to grasp us and free us. I pray that we breathe in deeply the aroma of life and give ear to the melody of God. I pray we dance.

A Tree Called Home

Check out my blog at The Neighborhood Cafe:

http://bibleconversation.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/a-tree-called-home/

A Tree Called Home

I’m not sure why everytime I think of home, I feel compelled to describe the Spanish Moss-draped oak trees.  I feel the need to become rather verbose and compare the moss to trapped spirits of the men and women damned to never leave the lowcountry (I could think of worse fates).  But simply put, nothing speaks of the area like the oaks.  These ancient giants with their gnarly knotted elbows meandering to and fro are the epitome of the grandour and history that so defines the lowcountry of South Carolina.  They belong to a rare group of items like the mountains of Colorado and the sea, that no matter how many times you see them they still inspire awe.  As a kid they held a certain mystery for me, that if they could talk, God himself would pull up a seat to listen. Yet they also had a laziness about them.  The oaks have the appearance of the rivers they surround, a fluidty that can be rather mesmerizing.  When they have reached the grandfather stage of life, their limbs will rest on the ground much like a cane.  But most of all, I must speak of them because they are home, as much as mom is even. 

Yet, I have been cut off from that land, somewhat by choice and somewhat by force. And this saddens me because my blood has a brown tint to it thanks to those muddy rivers that these oaks line.  I know worthless tidbits of history about the plantations that inhabited the land before me, but it is not my home anymore and I wonder if it ever truly was.  Even though I was born on the banks of the black river in Georgetown much like my father before me, I always felt a stranger.  My great-granddad wasn’t a rebel and I’d lie straight through my teeth about the fact the my Grandfather was from Pennslyvania.  If anyone ever discovered that fact, I’d quickly remind them my mom was from Arkansas.  Yet I lived in a place where my friends last names matched those of the plantations and even though this heritage wasn’t always flaunted, I was always on the outside looking in.  

Home is a funny place.  The cliché is that it is where the heart is, but that is too vague for my sensibilities.  I need a place to call home and I think that I am not alone in this quest, that one way to describe our exisitence is that it is a search for place, for home.  The religious thing to say is that God or heaven is our homes and that is not far from the truth as I can see it.  When I think of home, I think of mom and our gardens and a tree.  Is it fair to guess that those things stick out because deep in all of us is a longing for a Father, a garden and a tree, a longing for a place that though we may stare into it for eternity it will never cease to inspire awe?