Sometimes it’s the silent prayers that speak the loudest.
For years my mother has prayed for me on Sunday mornings before I preach. Last Sunday, Lori and I had taken our oldest daughter, Mary-Elizabeth, to the airport to fly to New York City where she is interning with Harper’s Bazaar for the summer. As Lori and I were driving back from Mary-Liz’s 7 a.m. flight, we talked of how we were excited and somewhat apprehensive about her opportunity in New York. And then back home, on my way to church, I asked mom to pray for Mary-Liz as she was at the moment in flight.
Mom started to pray for her granddaughter, and in mid-sentence stopped. Thinking it was a dropped call, I looked at my cell phone, then spoke, “Hello? Hello!” Nothing. Then I realized it wasn’t a dropped call or a dead area but an unspoken prayer. Mom’s voice, a tad weaker after 88 years of life, falters easier than it did in younger years. And I could sense she was tired that day. But something else was happening too.
Sometimes we simply can’t say the words. The emotion inside can squelch the strongest of voices. The intercessor whose soul searches for words expressing the yearning of the heart--- a heart sometimes burdened with the plight of others, sometimes exuberant with joy, sometimes pained with past failures, but nonetheless seeking a connection with God, a God who receives the inexplicable, the unutterable, the unspeakable with infinite understanding---on occasion can only gasp for words. And that was what happened as mom prayed. Her prayer was silenced.
But it was heard, ever so clearly. As Origen, the early church father of the third century observed: “God pays less attention to the words we use in prayer than he does to what is in our heart and mind.” The Searcher of hearts is attentive to those desiring him, those desperate ones, those delirious for him. And when we, prompted by the Spirit of love are moved by compassion, care, and concern for others, even as we search for the Finder of hearts, then the One dwelling in us speaks the unspoken for us. This knowledge gives the speechless believer hope. The hope is that prayer, even when inexpressible, is ultimately the declaration of a life seeking its purpose beyond the self. As the Cistercian monk of the Abby of Gethsemani, Thomas Merton, said, “The purpose of our life is to bring all our strivings and desires into the sanctuary of the inner self and place them all under the command of an inner and God-inspired consciousness. This is the work of grace.”
When mom couldn’t speak, I spoke for her. I prayed what I thought she wanted to pray for Mary-Elizabeth. But words were not necessary. They had already been spoken. Sometimes it’s the silent prayers that speak the loudest.
Life Matters by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D., is published weekly. You can visit his website, DavidBWhitlock.com., or email him at drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Avoiding the Graduation Blues
It can happen to you most anytime and anyplace; all that’s required is a stuffy auditorium filled with graduates in caps and gowns, a principal or president or superintendant who directs the program with boring predictability, speaks in a monotone voice with a staccato cadence, and of course, a guest speaker, who is prone to talk long after most have stopped listening.
And then, quite suddenly in the midst of this, you are overcome by the graduation blues.
It’s happened to me, in lesser or greater degrees, every time I graduated. I thought with my last and final degree I had certainly earned perpetual immunity to this strange and mysterious malady. But alas, it struck me again just last week when my oldest daughter graduated from Eastern Kentucky University. In what seemed like a nanosecond, the blues enveloped me, time traveling me back to every crowded auditorium where I had once sat just like those graduates did that day last week, transporting me back to Altus, Oklahoma, carrying me down to Waco, Texas, lifting me to Ft. Worth, thrusting me miles and miles from there to Princeton, New Jersey, and finally depositing me in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the same scenario in every graduation ceremony: the anticipation of the event, the slight nervousness just before my name is called, the excitement in holding the diploma, then the deflation as I step down and walk back to my place, and finally, the uneasiness, the angst, as I sit down.
What causes this? I thought about that as I watched each graduate walk across the stage last week. I felt for them, entering this uncertain economic climate, a climate with stiffer competition for fewer jobs, and even if they plan for graduate school instead of immediately entering the job market, there is the reality of no longer being at the top but orienting to a new program filled with unfamiliar faces and unknown ways. In each seat in that auditorium, there sat a person facing doubts and fears about themselves and the world around them. A chapter of life closes, washed over with memories of friends who will move on. Even though they can reconnect in many ways, it is never really the same.
Anxiety about an uncertain future disconnected from friends only submerges us further into the deep freeze of the graduation blues. The fear is that all the fun that is to be had is gone. As Jenny (Carey Mulligan) says to her headmistress in the 2009 movie, An Education: “If people die the moment they graduate, then surely it’s the things they do beforehand that count.”
But, as Jenny painfully learns, it’s not. Graduation day is a milestone, but not the end, certainly not of an education, which should continue for a lifetime. Graduation may close one chapter, but it opens another, and another, and another. In fact, every day is in some way graduation day.
The graduation blues are not all bad; they do serve a purpose: by forcing us to slowdown for at least a moment, we can reflect on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. It’s okay to shed a tear--- or even two--- as we, diploma in hand, glance back at the stage. Yet, we can be happy: we can, after all step forward; we do have control of our lives, at least most it; we can walk boldly and confidently into the future, knowing we can make a positive contribution. The cure for the graduation blues lies in embracing them and realizing that we are what we choose to be, that every tomorrow has its own opportunities, and we don’t die the moment we graduate.
Next week my youngest daughter graduates from high school. As she walks away from the platform, I will look forward with her to a hopeful future that’s promised to none but possible for all, a future filled with possibilities but not certainties, a future we can shape but not control. And as I do, I will be thankful for everything, including the graduation blues, even as I wave goodbye to them.
Life Matters by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D. is published weekly. You can visit his website at www.DavidBWhitlock.com or email him at drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com.
And then, quite suddenly in the midst of this, you are overcome by the graduation blues.
It’s happened to me, in lesser or greater degrees, every time I graduated. I thought with my last and final degree I had certainly earned perpetual immunity to this strange and mysterious malady. But alas, it struck me again just last week when my oldest daughter graduated from Eastern Kentucky University. In what seemed like a nanosecond, the blues enveloped me, time traveling me back to every crowded auditorium where I had once sat just like those graduates did that day last week, transporting me back to Altus, Oklahoma, carrying me down to Waco, Texas, lifting me to Ft. Worth, thrusting me miles and miles from there to Princeton, New Jersey, and finally depositing me in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the same scenario in every graduation ceremony: the anticipation of the event, the slight nervousness just before my name is called, the excitement in holding the diploma, then the deflation as I step down and walk back to my place, and finally, the uneasiness, the angst, as I sit down.
What causes this? I thought about that as I watched each graduate walk across the stage last week. I felt for them, entering this uncertain economic climate, a climate with stiffer competition for fewer jobs, and even if they plan for graduate school instead of immediately entering the job market, there is the reality of no longer being at the top but orienting to a new program filled with unfamiliar faces and unknown ways. In each seat in that auditorium, there sat a person facing doubts and fears about themselves and the world around them. A chapter of life closes, washed over with memories of friends who will move on. Even though they can reconnect in many ways, it is never really the same.
Anxiety about an uncertain future disconnected from friends only submerges us further into the deep freeze of the graduation blues. The fear is that all the fun that is to be had is gone. As Jenny (Carey Mulligan) says to her headmistress in the 2009 movie, An Education: “If people die the moment they graduate, then surely it’s the things they do beforehand that count.”
But, as Jenny painfully learns, it’s not. Graduation day is a milestone, but not the end, certainly not of an education, which should continue for a lifetime. Graduation may close one chapter, but it opens another, and another, and another. In fact, every day is in some way graduation day.
The graduation blues are not all bad; they do serve a purpose: by forcing us to slowdown for at least a moment, we can reflect on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. It’s okay to shed a tear--- or even two--- as we, diploma in hand, glance back at the stage. Yet, we can be happy: we can, after all step forward; we do have control of our lives, at least most it; we can walk boldly and confidently into the future, knowing we can make a positive contribution. The cure for the graduation blues lies in embracing them and realizing that we are what we choose to be, that every tomorrow has its own opportunities, and we don’t die the moment we graduate.
Next week my youngest daughter graduates from high school. As she walks away from the platform, I will look forward with her to a hopeful future that’s promised to none but possible for all, a future filled with possibilities but not certainties, a future we can shape but not control. And as I do, I will be thankful for everything, including the graduation blues, even as I wave goodbye to them.
Life Matters by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D. is published weekly. You can visit his website at www.DavidBWhitlock.com or email him at drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Curious Case of Aaron Glascock
Daisy: You're so young.
Benjamin Button: Only on the outside.
Time is slipping away for Aaron Glascock. It daily slithers through his fingers, snakes unseen through the iron bars that keep Aaron confined, clandestinely floats by the security doors at the Federal prison’s entrance, and happily rises to freedom, leaving Aaron behind, stuck in a past he can’t reclaim, aging ever so quickly, growing older from the inside out.
Aaron’s youthful, twentyish-looking face, fit, athletic build, and boyish grin betray an inner age far beyond his 33 years. Now eleven years into a thirty year sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Aaron, native of Lebanon, Ky., and member of the church I pastor, remains hopeful that somehow, someway, his sentence will be commuted. Federal law requires that he serve at least 85% of his sentence. He will be 48 years old when he is released. Aaron’s last great hope is that President Barack Obama will commute the sentence to time served.
His case is curious in many ways and points to inconsistencies in the federal judicial system.
How is it that a young man in his early twenties, a law-abiding, church-going, well-rounded young man with a steady girlfriend, a young man who was a model pre-med student, a biology major at an academically respected Catholic school, Bellarmine University, how is it that he, in his last semester before graduating, gets charged with conspiracy to traffic in drugs? Perhaps the answer lies in a young man’s desire for a father’s relationship.
In the spring of 1998 Aaron’s father, who had not been a part of his son’s life for years, suddenly took an interest in him. He began taking Aaron, by then a college student at Bellarmine, to Florida when Aaron was on spring or summer break. His father was supposedly buying homes, making needed repairs, and selling them at a profit. Aaron would help with electrical wiring. He liked staying in a beach-front hotel and hanging out at the beach. He didn’t bother to ask where the money was coming from. Three such trips had been made when his father asked Aaron to do something curious: make a trip not to Hollywood, Florida, their usual destination, but to Gainesville, Florida, and travel not with his dad but with his father’s friend. They were to start working on repairing homes until the elder Glascock could arrive.
The first night in Gainesville, early on the morning of March 11, 1999, officers with the Drug Enforcement Agency (D.E.A.) knocked on their hotel room door, burst in, read Aaron his rights, and charged him with trafficking in cocaine.
His life would never be the same. Time would pass, but Aaron would remain frozen in 1999, aching from within, holding on to his childhood dream of becoming a physician, slowly aging on the inside as his dream slowly faded until, like the early morning fog, it finally disappeared at high noon with the rejection of Aaron’s third appeal.
Aaron could have admitted guilt and received 12 years, or he could have cooperated and been sentenced to 3 years. That was the “deal” the government offered him. He turned down both options, refusing the first, since he maintained he knew nothing and was therefore innocent; he would not cooperate, believing that justice would surely prove his innocence, allowing him to pursue his life-long dream: a medical career.
Now Aaron waits. And works. And reads, mainly the Bible and newspapers. He keeps one eye on the world above; and the other on the world outside. And both feet in prison.
Some people think Aaron knew what was going down on those trips when he accompanied his father, and maybe that’s the way it happened; others think he not only knew but cashed in, and maybe that’s the way it happened; and others think he was a totally innocent pawn in someone else’s game, and maybe that’s the way it happened.
One thing is for sure: the punishment exceeds the crime, especially when you consider the sentence given Glascock is longer than that given to Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator and drug smuggler, longer than the ten year sentence for conspiracy to murder given to John Walker Lindh (alias Sulayman al-Faris), who was captured by American soldiers as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan, and it’s longer than the average amount of time actually served by first time sex offenders.
Curious? Indeed.
In prison, Aaron rests in Psalm 23, finds solace in Jesus’ words that we are not to worry about tomorrow, and prays for mercy.
As I leave, walking through the prison gates, wondering if there are other Aaron Glascocks behind other prison walls, the wind hits my face, awakening me to the freedom on the outside; the setting sun’s orange glow reminds me that another day is passing into infinity; and my heart cries for an explanation to a curiosity: how a man’s soul---worn by the routine of prison life, wizened to the skill of prison survival, scorched by disappointment in the court system---can be aging so quickly and yet still be so alive, even as that burdened soul is hidden beneath a hopeful outlook, a warm handshake, and words that promise a new tomorrow.
Life Matters by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D., is published weekly. Visit David’s website, DavidBWhitlock.com. His email address is drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com
Benjamin Button: Only on the outside.
Time is slipping away for Aaron Glascock. It daily slithers through his fingers, snakes unseen through the iron bars that keep Aaron confined, clandestinely floats by the security doors at the Federal prison’s entrance, and happily rises to freedom, leaving Aaron behind, stuck in a past he can’t reclaim, aging ever so quickly, growing older from the inside out.
Aaron’s youthful, twentyish-looking face, fit, athletic build, and boyish grin betray an inner age far beyond his 33 years. Now eleven years into a thirty year sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Aaron, native of Lebanon, Ky., and member of the church I pastor, remains hopeful that somehow, someway, his sentence will be commuted. Federal law requires that he serve at least 85% of his sentence. He will be 48 years old when he is released. Aaron’s last great hope is that President Barack Obama will commute the sentence to time served.
His case is curious in many ways and points to inconsistencies in the federal judicial system.
How is it that a young man in his early twenties, a law-abiding, church-going, well-rounded young man with a steady girlfriend, a young man who was a model pre-med student, a biology major at an academically respected Catholic school, Bellarmine University, how is it that he, in his last semester before graduating, gets charged with conspiracy to traffic in drugs? Perhaps the answer lies in a young man’s desire for a father’s relationship.
In the spring of 1998 Aaron’s father, who had not been a part of his son’s life for years, suddenly took an interest in him. He began taking Aaron, by then a college student at Bellarmine, to Florida when Aaron was on spring or summer break. His father was supposedly buying homes, making needed repairs, and selling them at a profit. Aaron would help with electrical wiring. He liked staying in a beach-front hotel and hanging out at the beach. He didn’t bother to ask where the money was coming from. Three such trips had been made when his father asked Aaron to do something curious: make a trip not to Hollywood, Florida, their usual destination, but to Gainesville, Florida, and travel not with his dad but with his father’s friend. They were to start working on repairing homes until the elder Glascock could arrive.
The first night in Gainesville, early on the morning of March 11, 1999, officers with the Drug Enforcement Agency (D.E.A.) knocked on their hotel room door, burst in, read Aaron his rights, and charged him with trafficking in cocaine.
His life would never be the same. Time would pass, but Aaron would remain frozen in 1999, aching from within, holding on to his childhood dream of becoming a physician, slowly aging on the inside as his dream slowly faded until, like the early morning fog, it finally disappeared at high noon with the rejection of Aaron’s third appeal.
Aaron could have admitted guilt and received 12 years, or he could have cooperated and been sentenced to 3 years. That was the “deal” the government offered him. He turned down both options, refusing the first, since he maintained he knew nothing and was therefore innocent; he would not cooperate, believing that justice would surely prove his innocence, allowing him to pursue his life-long dream: a medical career.
Now Aaron waits. And works. And reads, mainly the Bible and newspapers. He keeps one eye on the world above; and the other on the world outside. And both feet in prison.
Some people think Aaron knew what was going down on those trips when he accompanied his father, and maybe that’s the way it happened; others think he not only knew but cashed in, and maybe that’s the way it happened; and others think he was a totally innocent pawn in someone else’s game, and maybe that’s the way it happened.
One thing is for sure: the punishment exceeds the crime, especially when you consider the sentence given Glascock is longer than that given to Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator and drug smuggler, longer than the ten year sentence for conspiracy to murder given to John Walker Lindh (alias Sulayman al-Faris), who was captured by American soldiers as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan, and it’s longer than the average amount of time actually served by first time sex offenders.
Curious? Indeed.
In prison, Aaron rests in Psalm 23, finds solace in Jesus’ words that we are not to worry about tomorrow, and prays for mercy.
As I leave, walking through the prison gates, wondering if there are other Aaron Glascocks behind other prison walls, the wind hits my face, awakening me to the freedom on the outside; the setting sun’s orange glow reminds me that another day is passing into infinity; and my heart cries for an explanation to a curiosity: how a man’s soul---worn by the routine of prison life, wizened to the skill of prison survival, scorched by disappointment in the court system---can be aging so quickly and yet still be so alive, even as that burdened soul is hidden beneath a hopeful outlook, a warm handshake, and words that promise a new tomorrow.
Life Matters by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D., is published weekly. Visit David’s website, DavidBWhitlock.com. His email address is drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com
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