Blog 17: An Idiot's Tale

Greetings.

Welcome to another installment of…
“Stupid Things Done By Tony”

In today’s episode, we find our perpetual idiot helping a grieving family as they prepare for the funeral.

“What could possibly go wrong there?” I hear you say.

Well, let me tell you all the ways I can be stupid. Ok, in my defense, it was only one way in which I was stupid, but I digress. Let me tell you all about it.

Last Friday I received a phone call from a person who attends a church in the next town over. The 52 year old son of one of the members passed away due to a heart attack. They are trying to plan for the funeral, however their pastor is out of town and can’t get back in time. Therefore, they decided to call me and ask if I would be willing to perform the funeral for them.

Of course, I said yes. Not because I just love doing funerals. I don’t. I’m happy to do them because it’s necessary and needs to be done. But it’s not what I categorize as “fun.” However, I’ve done my fair share in the last few years and have become more or less comfortable doing them.

As a side note, it’s amazing the things you can get used to. But continuing on…

I don’t know this person or family. I tell them to contact me back once they know when the funeral will be, and I will sit down with them and work out the details and talk and pray with them.

Now, let me clarify something. Some of you may be wondering, “Why wait for them to get the funeral scheduled before rushing right over to be with the family?”

You ask a good question. Here is my answer. I have found that the first couple days after a death are a whirlwind of phone calls and trips to the funeral home and scheduling and taking care of business paralleled only by wedding preparations. Therefore, unless I was called in before the death happened, i.e., coming to the hospital to sit with the family as they watch their loved one die, I try to stay out of the way till they actually have the time to focus on themselves. Until then, I’m only getting in the way.

And this is what I did. I waited till Sunday and then we set a time to get together. Not to ring my own bell, (trust me, I’ll be humiliating myself in a moment…), but this turned out to be perfect timing. They told me how this was the first time since the man died that they’d had a moment to sit down. They were finally done setting up the arrangements, and were just now catching their breath.

Ah, how my ego soared as I realized, once again, my superior wisdom and judgment paid off.

Well, as I listened to them and talked with them and narrowed down what would be in the actual service and let them talk about their fear and anger and frustration and denial and whatever else popped in their heads, I gave them sage wisdom and advice designed to lift their spirits and give home without trivializing their loss and grief.

Oh yes. I’m THAT good. (ugh…)

Well, after my brilliant afternoon with these people, and by people I mean mother and wife, I prayed with them and for them and headed for the door.

Let me pause here for a moment. Let me tell you the other half of my day. It’s important for what I said to this family next.

I’ve been trying to exercise more. It happens in spurts, but I’ve been getting better. That morning my wife and went out and jogged about three miles before I had to stop for fear of my heart and lungs bursting forth from my chest cavity. After that, we went out and did the week’s yard work. Cut the grass, trimmed everything… you know, stuff like that.

I was completely toasted. I was done. Absolutely tired. I was ready to take a shower and go right back to bed. It took all I had just to get out of the chair when it was time to go visit with these people.

The lessen here is, do your best to avoid trying to be the patient, wise, strong, comforting figure when you are wanting nothing else than to not be any of those things. I know, life happens and we don’t always have the option… but still, go into it with the knowledge that you aren’t at your best and proceed with caution.

Back to my story. Ok, I think I’ve played this up so much that you are probably going to find this anti-climactic. But here it goes.

As I’m heading to the door, the mom and wife see me out and notice what a beautiful day it is. They say, “Wow, so are you going to out and enjoy the beautiful day?”

I said, “Oh, I’ve already done that. I jugged like mad this morning and worked the rest of the time in the yard. I’m so beat I could just drop dead.”

“…I could just drop dead.” He said to the people who’s funeral he, not 2 minutes before was helping them deal with and plan.

Really? I just said that? I smiled and walked off as if I hadn’t said it, and they didn’t react, but I felt like the worlds biggest jerk/idiot. I sat in my car pretending to check a message when actually I was begging God make them not remember that I had just said that.

Seriously? I could just drop dead? I might as well have said, “I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack and die just like your son tragically did. Isn’t that funny? How weird. Te he.”

Just to be clear, I don’t generally make those mistakes. And, maybe, that was the problem. I went into this situation very confident. Confidence isn’t bad, mind you. But I had just been thinking that day as I was pulling out my funeral sermon texts and getting ready, how, “I’ve done so many funerals in the last couple years, I’m getting pretty good at this death and family thing. I’m getting good and putting people at ease. Maybe I am cut out for this stuff after all.”

And then not 3 hours later… “I could just drop dead.”

You go long enough without the world noticing your mistakes that you start to believe that really don’t make them. I know better, of course. And yet, knowing it didn’t seem to stop me from shove my foot knee deep into my mouth.

I know that I’ve talked about pride and ego more than once. This is just another angle at which these things can just step up and thwack us in the head. Comfort is good. But in some situations, there is such a thing as being too comfortable. So comfortable that you let your guard down and start making stupid choices. Saying stupid things.

We like to pick on young people for this problem. You know else does it well?

Everyone else.

I have an elderly lady in one church who tells you point blank that she can get away with saying anything she wants because she’s old and people feel they have to let her. So she just takes advantage of it. I have no less than 5 other people notorious in my churches for doing also, even though they don’t make any claims about it.

You know who else is bad at it? Married people. They get about six months to a year into their marriage and decide they don’t have to be nice and thoughtful anymore. They say things in a tone and manner they would have never used when dating. Or with anyone else EVER, for that matter. And they… we… rationalize like this. “What? We’re married. I shouldn’t have to be careful.”

I’ve actually had people say this to me about themselves as if it’s a profound truth.

My response is always, “Um, yes, you do.” We do. We shouldn’t stop just because we are married. We should try even harder BECAUSE we are married. Love should drive us to want this. And if we don’t… well, I’d start asking myself, “why?”

You’ve heard the saying, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Well, ok. I get the meaning. If you are acting in love, you will never do anything that you need to apologize for. And, that is true. But here is what is more true.

No matter how hard we try, we always screw up and do or say something stupid. Even in marriage and friendships. So, I like to say it like this. “Love is always being first to say you’re sorry.”

Of course, this isn’t about marriage. It’s about life. It’s about any person we come in contact with. The situations of life in which we exist.

Do we get so comfortable with ourselves and our abilities that we careless and thoughtless?

I did. I got lucky. I know other people who would have melted down right there had I said that. It was thoughtless and insensitive, even though it wasn’t intentional. Now, think about the times we do stuff like that and it IS intentional?

Don’t let our competence get in the way of our compassion. Don’t let our thoughts get in the way of our thoughtfulness.

Of course, it could just be me. Maybe I’m the only moron who does stuff like this. In which case, feel free to ignore me.

Have a great night.

Blog 13: My Epic Stupidity.

I want to tell you about my epic fail.

And why it’s important.

You know… a story, a lesson… lather, rinse, repeat…

Here it is. An absolutely true story from just this past Saturday.

I wrote this totally sweet sermon. One that I was(and still am) quite proud of. It was informative, interesting, detailed, only moderately relevant, but useful in an interpretation-of-scripture sort of way.

Now, the point of that sermon is completely irrelevant for today’s story. What is important was that I was excited about how cool the subject matter was. Well, cool to me at least. But that’s a different story.

So, there I am, throwin’ it down. I’m throwin’ it down like a Jesus monkey on crack(umm…???). I’m into it. I’m feeling it. The words are flowing. And I’m talking. And I’m talking faster.

As a side note, I tend to exaggerate some. I actually don’t slam the pulpit or shout and scream when I preach.

FYI.

As I’m into it and talking and making my point I made an itsy bitsy little slip.

As it turns out, if you say the words “city should” back to back too quickly, there is a slight risk that you might, let’s say… mix up, the first letters/sounds of each word. “Should” comes out as “could”, and “city” comes out as… well, you know.

As I stood there and blatantly used the descriptive expletive, I kept talking, but was quickly scanning to see if anyone had noticed my slip. I didn’t have to look beyond the second row as my wife, apparently, was having an aneurism from trying to keep the hysterical laughter from spilling out into actual sound.

Apparently, I wasn’t going to get away with it.

But like any “good” preacher, I just pretended nothing had happened and kept on truckin’.

Fortunately, no one, besides my wife, mentioned it to me. It was nice of them all to be understanding of the fact that I’m human, and, apparently, an idiot.

Now, what does this, you ask, have to do with the price of smack in Columbia?

As I reflected on my moment of embarrassment… like ya do… I started thinking about how, while that particular example was relatively innocent, that incident is sort of a metaphor(I have no idea if that’s the correct word…) or analogy(maybe it’s this one…) of a more serious issue.

It’s sort of an adjunct to a previous blog about checking things out and making sure we know what we know.

This, however, is about getting ahead of ones self. Just like how I was talking away and trying to think faster than my mouth could keep up, ending in disaster, we often latch on to ideas and run with them, often to the exclusion of the actual facts. We put an idea together about something and it just fits. It’s perfect. And we go with it. And we share it. And we hold it up as the glowing standard of epiphany. Completely oblivious to the reality of it’s flaws. Completely ignoring those who shed light on our ignorance.

And because our idea is so profound, we start molding the rest of thought around this perfect truth. This idea that impacts the rest of our thought which suddenly starts forming the basis of our larger belief system until we have run headlong down a path without even knowing where we are going.

We liked the idea soo much, we never actually stopped to check out the validity of it. It was just THAT perfect.

We got ahead of ourselves.

I’ve done it. More than once. I’m probably doing it right now. I hope not, but it’s possible.

This is where personal honesty must come in to play. One must be honest enough with themselves to be willing to admit the possibility of personal error. If we don’t, then we don’t have any check or balance in our thinking. It’s just raw brainstorm run amuck.

There’s no intellectual honesty.

It get’s the point where we just start defending our view, because it’s our view. It’s no longer about the facts. It’s purely about me being right and you being wrong. Because if I’m wrong about this, then I might be wrong about something else. And if that’s true, maybe it’s all wrong. Then, not only does my entire belief system collapse, but I also have to acknowledge that someone else was smarter than me.

And, holy gravy, do we humans hate to admit that. Always.

While my verbal snafu isn’t really a problem at all and serves merely as an illustration of a greater point, I did have the real issue slap me in the face twice in the last two weeks. Once because I was a moron and once because someone else was.

Here is mine.

There is a particular belief amongst my people(religious denominational types) that is popular and semi controversial. I’m not going to outline this belief here on these pages. If you really, truly, want to know, I’ll discuss it in private with you. What is important is that I have pretty much always held to the traditional view on the subject. I know, I know… that seems so unlike me. But it’s true. It made sense. At least from a certain perspective. And I was ok with that. It was simple and straightforward.

And I bought into it. So much so, that when people over the years have tried to question it or point out flaws in it, I staunchly, yet politely, let them know that they must be wrong. One person in particular is one of my most trusted friends. His opinion is of great value to me. He forces me to make sure I know what I believe. Even with him, I argued until we just agreed to disagree. Sure, I thought he was wrong. But mostly, it was because I wanted to be right.

We’ve had the discussion a number of times over the years. Even recently. And every time we’ve finished the discussion I’ve always left with the idea that in no way was I buying what he was selling. Not at all.

So last week I’m reading my bible. I’m in the middle of prayer meeting. After we spend our time in group prayer and praise, we then have a bible study/discussion. And during this study, we start with our chapter, take turns reading verses till we read all the way through. When finished, I go back to the beginning of the chapter, and lead the discussion by taking each verse or idea reading it aloud again and asking questions.

Well, we’ve finished and I’m now re-reading and asking questions. As I’m re-reading one section, I read this one verse. And in this verse, it blatantly an directly related to this issue that my friend and I have discussed time and again. It gave the answer(one of a number of verses, it turns out…) to the dilemma of our disagreement.

Once again, I was slapped in the face with solid proof that I am, in fact, an idiot. It was so obvious that I was wrong. I couldn’t have been more wrong. And as I sat there staring at the verse, the rest of the room wondering why I was just sitting there staring at the bible, all the implications of my mistake just fell together like pieces to a puzzle.

The obviousness was embarrassing. For me to have missed something so simple was an insult to my pride and ego(I think we’ve talked about that one before as well…).

I was wrong.

I was going to have to eat crow.

I had been so sure. Completely confident in my stance.

Completely confident in a fallacy.

My friend knew it, and had been very patient with me.

Now, I won’t lie to you. He has a couple other conjoining theories that I still think are inaccurate. But really, that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that, I was inaccurate and didn’t want to see it.

I refused to see it.

That is very, very dangerous.

The kicker is, the argument for my point wasn’t even grounded in the bible. (I’m laughing right now as I think about how utterly stupid I can be. It’s awesome. *ugh*)

I’m not even going to go into details on the other one. Mostly because my failure was just as bad as hers, and I’d be a hypocrite to point at her for playing with matches while I’m in the process of dousing my head in gas and tossing a lighter on it.

But basically, she tore me up one side and down the other this week because I wasn’t teacher her what she already knew.

That’s right. You didn’t read that wrong. The point of bible study is to go beyond and teach what is not obvious and to give more and go deeper. And for her, going deeper is to have someone recite to her exactly what she already knows, because in that way, she won’t have to think about it and she runs zero possibility of being wrong in some way.

You should have been there. It was classic.

And yet, she was only doing the same thing I’d been doing for years. It seems that the students really don’t rise any higher than their teachers.

We both got ahead of ourselves. Completely self assured in our intellectual smugness. Totally engrossed in our own understanding that we denied the very possibility that we made a mistake.

This can’t happen.

It mustn’t happen. Not if we want to grow as a person. Not if we want to become something more than we are. Not if we want to be useful to those around us in any meaningful way.

Another friend of mine has this quote on her Facebook page.

"Let us dare to read, think, speak, write. Let every sluice of knowledge be open and set flowing." -- John Adams

This is a powerful principle and challenge. Powerful because it pushes us to grow. Powerful because it absolutely requires personal honesty and intellectual humility.

It’s the difference between epic failure and epic success.