Fear of Depth

Well, Dwain unexpectedly showed up at my church tonight, and our enjoyable (but regrettably brief) conversation motivated me to blog tonight. I've been avoiding le blog lately, for reasons I'll explain below.

Cindy and I honeymooned in Grand Cayman. I have a recommendation for a perfect small, quiet beach inn for not a lot of bucks if you're interested. Our second-favorite activity on the trip was snorkeling. We went every day, and most often we drove to a place on the north-central section of the island called Rum Point. The beach and reef wasn't too overpopulated by partying crazies there, and the snorkeling was spectacular.

I'm not an exceptionally good swimmer, but I love snorkeling. And Grand Cayman's snorkeling is some of the best. Stingrays, myriad colorful tropical fish, and a colossal reef known as The Wall. At Rum Point, The Wall is about 100 yards out from the end of the pier. Inside the reef, the water stays shallow, very clear, and you can see everything around you. Out past the reef, The Wall drops off a mile or more straight down. It's an underwater cliff.



I have a desire to do some scuba diving over the Wall at some point, but when I'm honest with myself I have to admit I think I know what would happen. Swimming over that drop-off would be a vertigo-inducing thrill at first, but I would very quickly begin to imagine all the things that could be eyeing me hungrily from those dark depths. I would look around at the reef and its inhabitants, take some pictures while glancing constantly over my shoulders, and retreat to the safety of the shallower waters as soon as dignity would permit.

My fear of depth is what has kept me from this blog for a few weeks as well. When I started these little inanities, I did it just to exercise the writing muscle a bit and write about anything and nothing. But I always had it in the back of my mind that when something really deep and write-up-worthy came my way, the Proser would come into his own and this page would become something important. Such was the naive pomposity of my thinking.

A couple of weeks ago, a teenage boy named Dustin was killed in a car accident in El Dorado Springs. He came to our youth group fairly regularly until his dad started a new church about six months ago. Some of his best friends are still youth group members. He was in our home several times. He beat me handily at a video game called Halo several times.

I spent last week doing my best to help students, parents, and teachers through this impossible time in any way I could. Here I need to pause and say that I'm humbled and grateful for the incredible amounts of grace, peace, and strength that God provided for so many of the people involved.

I came to this blog in the middle of that process and stared at a blank screen for half an hour or so. I had my deep, important issue to discuss and I found I had no desire to explore it - at least not in this partly public setting.

Why couldn't I write about something this profound? The deep things scare me away, it seems.

There was also this: while there were many people hurting deeply in the process and many others who really rose to the challenge and did their best to help the hurting, I was disappointed and a bit jaded by other people. Some who weren't even that close to Dustin seemed to want to use the occasion to turn the whole world into their own personal therapy session. Others were well-meaning, but incredibly and stupidly insensitive to those who were hurting. Others seemed determined to grab a piece of the hype that weirdly surrounds a tragedy. I found I had no desire to become one of those hype-grabbers.

I've always heard that some of the greatest songs, books, art, and poetry was born from times of tragedy. I'm not destined to create any of that, it seems.

So that's it. That's my skirting-the-issue way of dealing with the deep issue I'm afraid to tackle. If you're looking for something more conclusive on this issue of grief and loss, you might check out some pretty good things Wendie, Chris and Dwain had to say about it here and here.

Words

A couple of interesting links for those of you who are of a literary bent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

http://www.100words.net

On the 100words site, look around and figure out what's going on, then go to the 2001 entries and look at the September 11th and 12th posts for several authors. Some are quite good.

(Warning: the 100words site doesn't filter naughty words. However, most of the authors do keep it clean.)

Snow

I love snow. Most people I know talk about snow like it’s some kind of infestation or something. Gotta call the exterminator with the big truck and the plow blade. Spread salt over the parking lot to keep it from growing back.

I know it causes a lot of inconvenience – I had to spend forty-five minutes this morning shoveling it out of my driveway before I could move my car. Then I spent another fifteen minutes shoveling later this afternoon when I got my car stuck in our friend Candace’s still-unshoveled driveway (Candace drives a 4X4 and scoffs at snow shovels like Chuck Norris scoffs at “humane” mousetraps). But I love snow.

The accumulation here last night was about fourteen inches. This made Cindy wildly happy; in the two-and-a-half years she’s lived in El Dorado Springs there has been a total of about 3 inches of snow until last night. Now that she’s a teacher I think she likes snow days even more than she did when she was a student. She was exuberant when they cancelled school.

Also, since I’m a youth pastor, a snow day is a great excuse to get out and go sledding or snowball fighting “to build relationships with the students.” And go sledding we did. There’s a great sledding hill off First Street at the southwestern corner of town. It’s long and steep enough to be fun, but not so long that you’re completely exhausted after hauling your sled back uphill. Alex, one of our youth group guys, took charge of building a snow ramp halfway down the hill. He piled snow, packed it down, piled, and packed. After he’d groomed it for half an hour or so, it was a very cool sledding jump. It actually got a little scary. Some of the people there were afraid to try it at first. It took a little bit to work up the nerve. Then it was off down the hill, and no going back. As long as an intrepid sledder leaned back just before hitting the ramp, he would sail about five or six feet off the ground, pondering just for an instant his own mortality before coming back to earth with a “whump,” a spray of white powder, and a whoop of delight. Invariably this resulted in snow down the collar, in the face, up the pant leg, and anywhere else. But back up the hill we all went, grinning and impatient to try it again. And the best kind of sled to use was the round disc variety – no way to steer, no way to keep from spinning around. Even though it was messy and we were all a bit sore later, we’re doing it again tomorrow!








See Aaron's blog for more pics of this snowfall.