The Trying of Your Faith

Over the few short years of my adult life the single most important thing I have learned is that there are only three ways to get good at something: practice, practice, and practice. Unfortunately, just knowing that you have to work hard to get good at something, doesn’t make the actual process of working and practicing any easier.

Which is why, not more than a few weeks ago I was pulling my hair out with frustration at not being the foster parent I really wanted to be. I was coming unglued inside, wondering if I had made the right decision, trying to figure out what had happened to my formerly tranquil life. In short I was in short supply of patience.

Probably my least favourite verse in the Bible is the one that says, “The trying of your faith worketh patience.” It basically means that if you want to have more patience you have to endure lots of things that make you impatient, which is why when I was coming up my dad always told me, “Son, never pray for patience.” And though there were plenty of things my dad told me that I might not have heeded as much as I should have, that one I followed.

And now I’m sorely in need of patience and I’m getting it the only way you can get patience. Practice, practice, practice.

But the good news is, the trying of your faith does work patience. Or, to put it differently, there’s only so much hair you can pull out before you go completely bald.

Which is why I’m happy to announce…drum roll please…the return of my sanity!

Okay, so maybe that’s just a bit more dramatic than necessary, but it’s true. Things have really been looking up over the last few weeks. My nerves haven’t been as frazzled, my patience has not been wearing as thin, and on the whole me and Ashley and the kids have just been happier.

I think it helps too that we’re all finally figuring out our roles in the household. For instance, I am figuring out that I can tell the kids what to do, and the kids are figuring out that it’s really a good idea to listen and obey.

There are still issues to work on, still things I need to strengthen in my life to become the man and the father I would like to be, but at least now I feel like I’m on the right track.

I still worry whether the things I have tried to teach Thing 1 and Thing 2 will have any real and lasting impact on their lives, but I can say without question that they have had an impact on mine. I feel surer of myself, more confident that I can be the father I need to be to nurture my own child into the person he ought to be when the time comes.

Because, like everything else worth having in life, being a good parent doesn’t come easy; it takes hard work and practice.

And thanks to Thing 1 and Thing 2 trying my faith, I’m that much closer to where I need to be.

Pondering Productivity

I don’t know what productivity is anymore.

It used to be I had measurable, easily quantified goals for my days. Write one thousand words, edit ten pages, finish building my death ray. You know, easy stuff like that.

Now I’m realizing that the things that matter most in life aren’t something you can really put a “percentage complete” meter on. The task “mold boys into respectable and stable members of society” doesn’t exactly have a sixteen step instruction guide with it. Ditto the objective “strengthen relationship with wife.”

This was the conundrum I found myself facing last Saturday tramping through the woods with the foster kids. I kept thinking to myself, “This feels too much like fun. Fun is bad right? I mean not bad exactly, but it doesn’t go anywhere, right? On the other hand, I do want to give these kids a thirst for something beyond the confines of a TV screen and- Oh look, a deer track!”

As you may have gathered my thoughts tend to ramble. But it’s hard not to feel guilty sometimes. It’s hard not to think, “I should be writing now instead of lying in bed with my wife just talking.” But the truth is, I’m pretty sure “lying in bed just talking” is the nobler of the two pursuits.

I’ve heard it said before that no one lying on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at the office, but I’m not sure that’s true, at least not in spirit. Because I can imagine lying on my deathbed, looking back over my life, wishing I had accomplished more with it.

And so, I find my mind once again returning to that seemingly ever-present theme of balance. Writing is a good thing. So is mowing the yard, or fixing the leaking sink. But I’m finding the most important tasks in life are the ones you never quite get to mark off as “complete”. Building a good relationship with my God and my family is something that’s going to take effort on my part every day for the rest of my life. And I have to continue to remind myself that those moments when it seems like I’m not “accomplishing” anything may be the most productive moments in my life.

To Live Would Be An Awfully Big Adventure

This is it. This is the day I’ve been waiting for.

I feel like I’m an astronaut in a windowless capsule, plummeting down into an alien world. I don’t know what I’ll find when the hatch opens. Will the natives be hostile? Will they want to speak to me at all? What if it takes so long to understand their language that I offend their culture forever with my bumblings.

Okay, let’s back up. A word of explanation is in order I suppose. Where to begin? Ah, I know.

I’ve always wanted to be a father. I mean maybe not always. I’m sure there was a time when I was lying on my back in some cradle somewhere staring up at one of those ridiculous mobiles that I wasn’t thinking, “You know, fatherhood sounds like a pretty good gig.”

But for a majority of my life I’ve had a desire to raise children. Even before I wanted to be married, I wanted to be a father. After all, girls might have been icky, but adoption was still a very real option.

Fast forward a few years, and now I am married. And wouldn’t you know it, I married a woman who wants to be a mother. And I mean really wants to be a mother. She’s dying to take care of kids. So much so in fact that for a while she took a job at a daycare that forced her to work eight hours a day without a break in violation of state labor laws.

But the hitch is, we haven’t been able to have any of our own. We’ve conceived few times, but so far nothing has stuck. Add to that the fact that babies seem to be falling from the sky at the church we attend, and I think you can understand the position we find ourselves in.

But my wife and I aren’t the kind of people to sit around and wait for something to happen. So when she said, “Let’s sign up to be foster parents,” I shrugged and said, “Sure.”

Fast forward through us driving for an hour every week to take a three hour class for eight weeks and us jumping through all the hoops for our home to be certified, and we come to today.

If everything goes according to plan, today is the day we’ll receive our first placements. Plural. Brothers.

Part of me is excited. Part of me is screaming, “What are you thinking!? You don’t know the first thing about these kids. What if they hate you? What if they want to run away? What if you end up making things worse?” Part of me is trying to contact the mothership. That part of me is a little weird.

But I know my heart. I know that the debt I owe to my own father is incalculable. And I’m thinking, maybe, just maybe, I can make that kind of difference in someone else’s life.

I don’t know how long they’ll be with us, what they’ll be like, what their real parents were like…nothing.

I’m about to embark on a grand adventure. It’s a pass or fail test with two real human lives on the line. I’ve prayed for the wisdom to make the right decisions and be a good leader. I’ve prepared the house for their arrival.

Really, the only thing I can do now is hang on and get ready to splash down into a new world. The next message you review will be transmitted from the planet’s surface. Assuming I survive this.

Prioritize Your Life: Hack Off a Limb

There’s a tree in my back yard.

Yes, I know. Riveting, right? Gimme a break. We’re going somewhere here.

See this tree is kinda funky looking. It has a bunch of branches at the bottom but the top is just this barren length of wood with a couple of leaves at the tip.  And why does this tree look like this?

Because it’s badly in need of pruning. See there’s only so much sap one tree can produce and all the little branches at the bottom sucked up all the sap that should have gone to the leaves at the top, so eventually the leaves at the top just withered and died.

I was looking at this tree the other day and it occurred to me that my life is a lot the same as that tree. Only instead of sap, I’m running short of time.

I find myself scrambling to fit it all in, and at the end of the day there’s just not enough room for everything I’d like to do. I have to prune some stuff. I have to make sure there’s enough sap left for the important stuff.

Because there some stuff that’s vital, utterly important. These are things that I absolutely refuse to let fall by the wayside. And before you get too far ahead of me, let me stop you and say this: writing is not on that list.

I’m not saying writing isn’t important, but it’s not essential. My family life? Now that’s essential. Keeping a steady job so I don’t starve to death? That’s essential too.

Writing is somewhere in the middle. On most days there’s plenty of fluff I can cut out of other areas of my life to make room for my writing time. But some rare days get filled up with the essential stuff and crowd out the writing to a bare minimum.

And that’s okay.

It doesn’t make you a horrible person or a terrible writer.

So sure, look for those lower branches that need to be cut off. Chances are there are more of them than you think. But don’t let writing leach the sap of time away from the things that are more important.

Never let the good things of life, take away from the best things in life.

This is the only time you get, so do your best to make the most of it. Because it’s running out.

Lumberjack Legacies

If you’ve read the bio on my “About” page, you know that I describe myself as a “writer, mad scientist, and freelance zombie apocalypse preparedness consultant.” Some of these things are not 100% exactly true. They aren’t lies persay. They are more like fictions. I am, after all, a writer. But there is one awesomely improbably job description that I could add which would be totally true: lumberjack  hobbyist.

Specifically I’m referring to my annual participation in the Pensacola Junior College Lumberjack Festival.

I got my start attending the lumberjack festival when I was somewhere around ten years old. My dad saw a sign up in front of the college and said, “Hey there’s some kind of lumberjack thing going on down at PJC. You want to go?” So we went.

It was cool. There were guys throwing axes, guys throwing knives, guys climbing poles, guys cutting down poles (not at the same time though). It was about as awesome as it could be.

But the real life changing moment happened on the way home when dad said, “You know that ax throwing stuff didn’t look so hard. They leave that target up all year round. We should go down some afternoon and give it a shot.”

And to make a long story short, we did. From time to time when we had a free afternoon dad and I would lug his big chopping ax down through the college campus, ignoring all the twenty-something students giving us weird looks and we would practice.

I wasn’t very good at it, mostly because hey, it was three-foot-long chopping ax, and I was twelve at the time. But I did try. I got frustrated when I failed, but I tried.

But dad. Dad had the stuff man. It took him a while to get the hang of it, but by the time the lumberjack festival rolled around next year he was ready. I still remember the moment when he walked in with that big single-bit ax and went to sign up for the ax throw. The administrator of the event looked at him and said, “You’re going to throw that?”

Dad said, “Sure, why not?”

“Well, for one thing it’s only got the one blade,” the guy said. “And for another thing it’s huge.”

“Is there a rule against that?” Dad asked.

“No rule. Just…no one’s ever used and ax like that before.”

Dad just smiled and said, “Well there’s a first time for everything.”

And he took his monster of an ax down and won the whole shebang. I mean he just plastered the rest of those guys with their fancy double-bladed throwing axes. Oh, and did I mention he did it all while throwing underhand?

It was possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

So we kept practicing. We went back the next year, and the next one and the next one after that, and somewhere along the line we turned the thing into a family tradition. Dad didn’t win the ax throw every year, but he started branching out into other events and he found out he was pretty good at some of them too.

Along the way, I got a little bigger, and a little more confident with the ax, and eventually I beat my dad out and won a blue ribbon in the ax throw for myself.

And today I’m going to try to do it again. By the time you read this, I’ll probably be out there in the sun with my Helbotica t-shirt on, working my way through the various lumberjack events.

I don’t know how I’ll do on most of them, but I’ve been practicing quite a bit on the ax throw recently. Possibly a bit too much.

So if you’re in the vicinity of Milton, Florida, and you want to see some manly men throwing some axly axes, then swing by Pensacola Junior State College. Who knows? You may just find yourself with a new family tradition.

***

By the by, I’ll be tweeting about the event throughout the day, so if you do the Twitter thing give me a follow at @Albert_Berg and check that out.

Mom’s Homemade Writing Advice

My mom had a few little sayings that she grew fond of dishing out whenever the opportunity presented itself. For instance, she used to say, “You don’t have to tell everything you know,” whenever one of us was close to crossing the boundary of sharing too much information. Another one she liked was “A little work never killed anybody.”

And for an entire year after watching The Emperor’s New Groove, she took up the habit of randomly seasoning her conversations with the phrase “Boom baby!” That was a Dark Time for the Berg household.

But the one I think has stuck with me most of all was this: “You can do a lot of dishes in five minutes.” It was her way of saying, “Don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of time, just get done what you can. You might surprise yourself.”

I think this is great advice for writers too. Often times, I set myself some big writing goal, and then things happen in my day that make it impossible to fulfill that goal. And how do I react? I don’t write at all.

But mom was right. And just like you can get a lot of dishes done in five minutes, you can also get a respectable amount of writing done in fifteen.  I know it can be discouraging when you can’t quite find the time in your day to do all the writing you’d really like to. Believe me I face it all the time. I have a full time job, and responsibilities at home, and God only knows how much more I’ll have to deal with once I have kids. But writing doesn’t have to be a monumental endevour every time you do it. Sure it’s nice to be able to carve out an hour to focus on nothing but writing, but life doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes its enough to give yourself just a few minutes to pound out a few hundred words. Its always better than thinking, “Well, I don’t have that much time so I guess, I’ll just blow off my writing for today.”

We’ve all got little bits of time in our lives that go to waste simply because we think they don’t matter. But maybe we need to reconsider. Maybe those little bits of time could be the most valuable parts of our day. It may not seem like much, but never underestimate the power of those in-between moments. If we use them, we might get more accomplished than we could have dreamed, not all at once, but little by little. Because writing is a journey we take one step at a time.

Thanks

It is not Thanksgiving anymore, but I still want to say how thankful I am for my family. If I didn’t have my sister to talk to, you have no idea how bored I would be. I mean seriously, how many people do you know who would find the grammatical structure of the English of the King James Bible an interesting topic of conversation? Not very many people, that’s how many. But she will talk my ear off about it, and I will talk her ear off as well, and then we have to sort out whose ear is whose, which is harder than you might think.
Also my dad, who dropped everything, and came over to help me when my toilet exploded yesterday. He’s always a life saver when I’ve got any kind of mechanical problems, and he’s fantastically interesting to talk to, even though most people don’t realize it. He’s basically an older version of me, which is pretty awesome. I almost never have the guts to tell him in person, but I love him more than I can ever say.
And my mom. She taught me everything I knew. I’ve since forgotten most of it, but I’ll never forget her.