Who is Nigel Hawley?

With my dad, recently

Truth be told, I have been trying all my life to get my dad's recognition and affirmation.

Before you conclude that I'm some blithering wreck of a daughter, let me assure you that by the time I figured this out I had differentiated from my dad enough that it was simply a "situation," not an ever-present wound. There has only been one situation in my adult life when it was really painful to not be able to gain my dad's verbal affirmation, and it is what it is. My dad simply does not grant me recognition when I do well, and that's more about him than it is about me. Nowadays it's just interesting or even amusing when it happens. He loves me dearly, but he has passed up some good opportunities to bond.

So a couple of days ago I was visiting my parents and said to my dad, "You know, dads like opportunities to brag on their kids, so let me give you some good bragging fodder."

"Oh yes?" he said. I saw the glint of interest in his eye. He was pretty perky that day, not at all fuzzy, and ready for stimulating conversation.

"I got an e-mail from one of our students," I said. "You don't know her. She's a teacher in Taiwan. She works with Nigel Hawley, who I met again when I was working at the booth in Texas." I had been at a large church conference, taking my shifts at our university's booth. Nigel had walked in and we had some initial discussion about the university providing professional development for his teachers in Taiwan.

"Who's Nigel Hawley?" my dad asked.

"A principal of an American school in Taiwan," I said. "You don't know him."

"Hawley, Hawley," said Daddy, rolling over the name and trying to make a connection.

"Never mind!!!" I exclaimed. "You don't know him. So let me read you what our student wrote to me. You can brag on this stuff, you know."

"What's his name? Where is he from? Do we know him?" my dad queried again.

"Nigel Hawley. You have never met him and he's not related to anyone we know. He's probably 30 years old. Let me see, ..." I fished around on my e-mail and then read him the line from our student's e-mail: "Oh yes, here it is. 'Nigel Hawley tells me that he met you at the GC session. He also said that he wishes he had a brain like yours, and I must say that he said that with more than just a touch of envy.'"

I looked up at my dad in triumph. There you go, Daddy. You sprouted a daughter who impressed a young principal with her great brain. Come on, show some pride.

There was a pause.

"Nigel Hawley," said my dad. "Now who is Nigel Hawley?"

Standing on a Burning Grate

Not an attractive illustration, but necessary for the topic

I had just learned to walk by the age of 1 when my parents took me and my brother (the newborn) on our first airplane ride all the way from Bangkok to the United States. On that long trip across the Pacific Ocean, my mother has told me, I refused to keep my shoes on. I ran up and down the aisle of the plane barefoot, she said, to the delight of other travelers. Well, at least she remembers them as being delighted. As I ponder the scenario, I can't imagine why they would have felt that magnanimous.

My barefoot ways continued at Grandma's house in La Puente, a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles. It was winter, and the heat was on in Grandma's California bungalow-style house with heating grates set into the hallway floors. No one considered that this little one-year old might be in any danger. 

No one, that is, until cousin Esther, who was on crutches at the time, saw me run into the long hallway barefoot and step onto a heater grate. I screamed and stood still with the hot grate burning into my little foot. Esther also screamed as she tried to move in my direction to rescue me. My mom came running, grabbed me up, raced out the back door and plunged my feet into icy-cold rainwater in the barrel behind the house. And for a while I ceased walking as my foot healed.

As I grew, the scar from the burn grew with my foot. My size 9+ foot bears a scar much bigger than my 1-year-old foot. It doesn't hurt and it hasn't impeded my walking. I remember it from time to time and take another look at it (even though it requires me to contort myself around to see the bottom of my foot), occasionally peeling off a little layer of skin where new cells have replaced the old, still maintaining the scar.

As a child I liked to think about what would happen if I were ever kidnapped. Would my mom still recognize me if I was found years and years later, looking different? I knew I would prove to her who I was by showing her the distinctive scar on my foot. (Yes, I was a dramatic child, full of unlived stories.)

I ponder that criss-cross scar. Through the years I have wondered, "Why did I just stand there with my foot on the grate? Why did I not immediately jerk my foot back and thus avoid the depth of the burn? Why did the scar grow as my foot grew? Why is it that we use scars to verify people's identities?"

The scar of the grate on my right foot has become a metaphor.

Too many of us are willing, for whatever reason, to "stand on the grate" and not move away while we are getting deeply burned by a person or situation. You don't have to do this. There are times to stay where you are and stick it out, and sometimes that is the righteous thing to do. But I think we apply that "stay and stick it out" principle far more broadly than we should.

Once you have been burned by a person or situation and the injury results in a scar, there is a possibility that the scar will grow larger and more pronounced as you continue to develop throughout your life. For those of us who grow our scars, I believe we are complicit in their growth. I don't know why they grow in some and not in others, nor what "aloe" you can apply to keep the scar from growing. But I think the first step is to recognize the fact that the scar has grown bigger than the hurt, and to deliberately remind yourself that the original hurt was smaller than its scar. When you allow your scars to grow larger than they should be in the whole body of your life, they can overwhelm and cripple you.

Finally, we can all identify certain people by their scars. These people tell and retell the stories of the hurts that created their scars. They can contort themselves around to view their scars again, and they will do so often. They have grown their scars bigger along the way. They make their scars part of their identity, so that even if you lost track of a person, someone describing the scar would discover that you could tell them exactly which person it belonged to. For these people, their scars become a core part of their identity. 

There are people around you who can help you to "step off the grate," and who can help you examine the scars and heal from the hurts. And I believe there is a Healer who is eager to work through these people, who can take away your pain and give you a new identity apart from your scars. For human and divine healing, I am grateful.

I will heal you of your wounds, said the Lord. Jeremiah 30:17

Pictures From the Life of a Wannabe Altruist

Picture #1:
Years ago on a relatively cold winter's day for southern California, I came upon a little family pushing a grocery cart along a road through an orange grove. Always a bit impulsive, I pulled over. A God-thing, I wondered in the moment? It felt like I was actually being urged to pick them up. Whatever it was, I rolled down my window and asked if they needed a ride. The kids were dirty-faced and the parents were hauling a few bags of belongings. They happily abandoned their cart at the side of the road and piled in--all five of them--to my warm VW Rabbit.

"Where do you need to go?" I asked.

To the Rosewood Motel off Anderson Street, they told me.

Wow, I thought. They would have had to walk about five miles to get there. How did they end up in this orange grove? They were vague about it, as I recall, and I drove them to the motel, one of those low-budget two-storey types with the doors opening right toward the street.

Having been raised on angel stories, moral stories and miracle stories, I'm a hopeless storyteller--to myself if no one else. The inner chatter in my head tested out one dramatic scenario after another as I drove along, breathing in the unwashed scent of the family. One story went like this: They are angels, and God is testing my heart for unselfishness. Or: They were going to meet some horrible end, but I have unwittingly saved them. Or: They will throw themselves at my feet in gratefulness for making their lives bearable today in the midst of their hardships.

But I got no story, no moral or miracle. The couple didn't offer anything other than a simple thank-you as they all hopped out of the car. They didn't disappear when I looked away, didn't tell me "the rest of the story," didn't give any indication that I saved their lives or made their day.

Being a curious and overly-responsible sort of person, I stayed in the motel parking lot to see what would happen after the little family checked in. They got a room on the ground floor and let themselves in. As I drove away, the last glimpse burned itself into my memory: the door of the motel room still open, kids up jumping on the bed while the parents moved around in the room beyond them.

Picture #2:
Driving to the grocery store one snowy, bitterly cold New Year's Day when I was in college, I saw a young woman standing by the road with her thumb held out. No one should be out in this cold for long, I thought. I "felt the urge," pulled over and she got in.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Burbank," she said, warming up her hands in the flow of air from my heat vents.

Burbank! That was twelve miles away.

"But you can just take me as far as you can, and then I'll get another ride," she said.

I started in the direction of Burbank, and my little VW Rabbit just kept on going. All twelve miles.

She started talking. She'd gotten in a fight with a guy at the bar the night before, and he'd hit her, she said. She showed me where he'd ripped the belt out of the seam of her coat. And then she asked about the music playing on my stereo system. "That's Christian music, isn't it?" she said, starting to cry. She was so distraught, I reached over and held her hand. All the way to Burbank.  I dropped her off and drove back to the grocery store.

That was all. No story with a moral or a miracle.

The picture burned itself into my memory: my right hand by the gear shift, holding the hand of this teary young woman, about my own age.

Picture #3:
Yesterday I went through the drive-in at Starbucks. It was a beastly hot, humid day, a day that didn't feel like it was hanging together with any cohesiveness. I wanted something to ease my journey while doing errands. As I drove up to the speaker post, I noticed a sweaty middle-aged freckled man in a straw hat squatting down and working on some kind of conduit pipe right next to the speaker.

I placed my order, feeling odd that the man was forced to listen in. Then I addressed him, friendly-like: "Are YOU getting something cold to drink on a day like this?"

It took him a second to register that I had spoken to him. "Hah," he said, glancing over his shoulder.

How do you write that so a reader hears all that was conveyed? His tone was cynical and off-putting. He wasn't just irritated or wishful; he thought I was a bit nuts.

Fine, I thought. I'm weird and I say things people don't understand.

I drove on to the window and got my order, then "felt the urge" and handed the girl another $5 bill. "Do you have someone who can take the time to get that man a cold drink?" I asked. I motioned over my shoulder.

She craned her neck to look out toward the speaker post. "Sure," she said. "What do you want to order?"

"I don't know," I said. "Whatever you think he would like. I'll just leave the $5 with you to cover it."

She looked rather confused, and I drove away. I tried to imagine a young Starbucks worker handing the freckled man a cold coffee, and couldn't come up with any scenario other than a vague one of him responding with some slightly negative remark. As I rounded the corner with my eye on the rear view mirror, another picture got filed away in my head: the man in the straw hat standing up with his back to me, arms at his sides, silhouetted in the sunlight and looking off slightly to the left.

No moral or miracle or divinely-arranged quiz here. Just another picture.