Ding Zheng

Is a god.

Colyn Fuson

Colyn Fuson
Is a God.

Kind of.

At least he looks like one.

The Man in the Wilderness

There was once a group of people who lived in a village in the middle of a wilderness. As the number of people in the village increased, men and women of the community worked together to clear out more space to breathe.

In the middle of the village, the women would plant flowers. On the outskirts of the village, men would pave roadways. And on the frontier, adventurous young boys would leave the village and enter the thick of the wilderness, clearing trees and undergrowth to make new spaces for their grandchildren.

Jonathan was a frontiersboy who spent all of his days in the woodlands outside the village. While the other young boys his age spent their days slashing and burning the great oak trees on the borderlands of the village, he made long, narrow pathways that stretched deeper and deeper into the darkness of the forest.

Every morning when he awoke, he drank a cup of coffee and ate a banana. After breakfast, he kissed his mother on the lips and told her that he would return at the setting of the sun. Then he grabbed a machete and ventured onto the path he had made, which each day stretched farther into the woods.

As the path grew longer, so did his days. It became more and more difficult for the boy to walk the length of his path, clear more bushes, and return the long way home before the sun set. So he awoke earlier, before his mother awakened, took his coffee and banana with him, and worked until the sun set. When he returned home, his mother was already sleeping in her bed, and he kissed her on the forehead.

Eventually, the boy asked himself why he spent so much time walking along the path, and as the light from the full moon shone down upon him as he slashed his pathway deeper and deeper into the jungle, he decided to lay his head down upon a rock to rest a while.

In the morning birds awakened him, and he felt the dew on his clothing. He had slept through the night. No matter, he thought. This accident had given him an opportunity to make even more progress on his path. Getting an early start, he was able to drive more deeply into the wasteland than he had ever traveled before.

He continued in the same manner for days, weeks, and years, until he reached finally reached his destination on the outskirts of oblivion. The only person who ever missed him was his mother, who wondered where her son had gone, and why he had never returned.

Centuries later, the great-great-great-grandchildren of the village found the remains of a solitary man as they were burning the stumps of oak trees.  The skeleton rested just a few hundred feet from the outskirts of their village. The skull lay on a rock, and there was a rusted machete nearby.

Movie Review: This Is 40

Tonight I watched the movie This Is 40 (2012) by Judd Apatow, and this is what I want to say:

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a journalist. I never wanted to be a lawyer. I couldn't imagine the dull tedium of those quiet offices. The business suits. Demure secretaries typing in the reception room at the front of the building, filing papers. If I had chosen to become a lawyer, it would have been for the courtroom. But realistically, I knew that I'd never really become Perry Mason. I didn't even really like those shows, the ones with the dramatic endings.

And doctors? No thanks. I knew, deep down, that those guys were going to have to work in the middle of the night, and I didn't want that kind of life. I wanted to be doing what I wanted to be doing when I wasn't doing what I had to be doing. If that makes any sense. So I guess that in the end, I hadn't ever wanted to be touching the insides of people's bodies, and if you were going to be a real doctor, then that was the kind you had to be.

Engineer? In a lot of ways, I would have made a good engineer, but to tell you the truth, nobody ever told me what an engineer actually did, even though my older brother became a "chemical engineer," and all my friends in college where engineering students. The danger of hanging out in a group where everyone is older than you is that everyone who's older just presumes you know the definitions of words that they use when you are a kid who's 10 years younger. I was always fearful that I would never have enough time to learn all of the words, and somehow, I knew that would be the biggest failure of all. 

Watching PBS shows when I was a kid always made me want to be a biologist of some kind, but I guess I just didn't have the imagination to see how I could have been successful economically doing something that would have been so easy to love to do. Maybe I thought no one should be so selfish as to believe his life could be so valuable that anyone would pay for him to tend to orphaned orang utans in the rain forests of Borneo. I could wrap my mind around what a biologist did, especially in research.  He went out into the world and gave things new names. To me, that was the closest to God I ever felt I could actually get. I would have loved to be a National Geographic reporter, and in retrospect, I think I could have at least pursued that path if I had wanted, but I was afraid to be so brave.

So by the end of my high school days, I had found my home in the newspaper room, typing articles for the Daily Mail at midnight. One time after covering a basketball game at Olney Central College, I waited outside the coach's room to get a few statements. After a loss, Coach Schimburg emerged from this office disgusted to see a 17-year-old boy holding a recording device to this face. I don't know who I expected him to think that I was. He told me to take a hike.

In truth, I felt a little dejected. The bull had put me in my place. I was just a kid, and what business did I have asking a junior-college basketball coach about a game? Around here, the high school coaches understood how it worked, but maybe not the juco coaches: The papers weren't well-staffed, and they relied on local help. Having only one sports writer, it was impossible to cover all the sports activities in a geographic readership large enough to adequately cover the news and still pay the electric bill. Thus, there were generally two or three different basketball games to be covered on the same night, and members of the community expected a story about all of them from a respectable paper. Circulation moved northward, toward Newton, so the publisher of my hometown rag paid high schoolers like me $50 to drive to a high school game in another town, watch it, interview the coach, and then come home and write a story about it. I covered games for Noble, Newton, and OCC when the main guy, (Shoot, what was his name? Rich something), covered the main event: Olney Tiger basketball games.

This sports writer guy, the guy whose last name I can't remember, Rich, he was great. He went to a United Methodist church in Sumner that was really hopping in those days. There was a new, young pastor named Shane there whose dad had founded an evangelical ministry that I had been involved with when I was a kid. This evangelical group was just a bunch of broken guys who went out and told the world that they were sorry and that they thought that they had found an answer to their problems in the story of Jesus (and I'm sure that they had). It's funny, as I was sitting here for a minute trying to think of how I could describe these guys, a phrase from the Bible came to me: No Greater Love. And suddenly I remembered that this was actually the name of the group.

Anyway, this sports reporter, Rich, he went to this church where this pastor was the son of this man who founded this group. And lots of men from my home church were members of the group, too. In particular, there was one man who went to my church and who participated in No Greater Love who had a big impact on my life. He treated young boys the same way they treated everybody, with dignity and respect. I saw this guy from my old church the other day (not Rich). He was eating at a restaurant with his wife and grandson, and he saw me helping a kid out in the same way that he had helped me. It was an important moment for me. I realized that it doesn't take a whole lot to help a kid out, just some encouragement, and space to think about heaven and hell without giving us all the answers. Just giving us an example. That had a big impact on us.

I went No Greater Love on an evangelical, missional trip to the Kentucky Derby when I was probably too young to have had to experienced those sorts of things. The environment was very intense, and the mission so huge. Eternal life. Fire and brimstone. 

My job was to hand out tracts about Jesus that advertised what he could do for drunk bikers who came to the Derby to party. I remember standing on the sidewalk after the horse race was over, as people were making their way back to their cars, and I was passing out tracts to passers-by. I handed a tract to a man who continued to walk past me several paces, but then turned around. I didn't turn to look at him, but I knew he was standing there. I felt him put a piece of paper into the back pocket of my blue jeans. I thought that he had placed the tract back in my pocket. Several minutes later, when I was certain that he had long since disappeared, I checked to see what was in my pocket, and it turned out to be a dollar bill. To this day I am not sure whether that message had intended to convey encouragement or ridicule, but I am confident that it was either one or the other.

Of course, I had no idea what this Jesus could actually do for them. The tracts seemed to suggest that he had a plan that involved saving them from invisible demons, which seemed reasonable to me at the time. But it also seemed reasonable that there was something else that they must have needed if they were going to avoid the fire and brimstone. Of course, I had no idea what it was. Still, I knew that nobody wanted to get thrown into that Lake of Fire.

But the eternal burning just never made sense to me. I still haven't quite wrapped my mind around it, which I think is the entire problem: It doesn't mean anything. Words come from experiences, and in some ways, experiences do come from words, such as when you tell a lady that she looks lovely, or when you tell a boy he did a good job doing something, yeah, words can change the world in those ways. But I never thought that words could tell people what a future was going to be. After all, how could anybody know if I was going to burn forever if it hadn't happened yet? My Sunday School teachers didn't seem to think that those questions were worth consideration. To me, they were the most important questions.

Now, wait. That isn't fair. In fact, that was below the belt. The true fact of the matter is that my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Redman, taught me more about the Bible than anybody I ever knew on this planet. She taught me about Melchizedek. She told me the stories of Issac and Ishamael. She told me how Esau sold his birthright to his younger brother, who was always grasping at his feet. And she taught about the apostles. I know the differences between Peter and John and Paul. Still, Revelation is a difficult book to consider for a boy at that age, but she helped us to dig deeply into it.

Contextually, you have to remember that we Americans were very frightened of the Soviet Union in those days, and many people had been looking toward the horizon, trying to decide whether or not the sky were actually reddening. Looking into that book is like looking into The Palantir. It really is quite a metaphor of the The Forbidden Fruit. Once you start looking at life through an apocalyptical lens, it is difficult to see things in any other way. Still, even though some of those ideas were scary, there were also inspiring. I spent many nights on the street outside my house at night, looking up into the galaxy, trying to imagine whether or not I could see The New Jerusalem falling from the sky.

To this day, right now, right here at my house, in the guest bathroom, if you want to read something, you can read This Present Darkness, which is sitting in a basket beside a roll of toilet paper. I'm not really sure why it's there. It's not like I really think much about those things anymore, and if I did, I am not sure if I would really believe them, at least not in the same ways that I did when I was a kid. But I actually did read the novel when I was about 13, cover to cover. For the past twenty years or so, the book has just been sitting in a box somewhere, or on a shelf. Somebody got it out, I guess it must have been my wife or one of the kids, and I actually read a few pages in it this afternoon, the section about when the new secretary comes to work at The Clarion, which is the newspaper of the fictional town in this weird book about the Second Coming of Christ. 

When I was a small boy, I actually wanted all this knowledge in my head. I wanted to know all about it. I wanted to know about Daniel and the Lion's Den, sure, but I also wanted to know about how Jael drove a tent spike through the temple of Sisera or how Abraham made love with Hagar, one of his slaves, in order to fulfill God's prophecy through him, first producing a son to whom God says, I hear you, and later with Sarah his wife producing a son whom he named laughter. 

But anyway, this guy, this reporter at The Daily Mail whose last name I can't remember, Rich, he was just a guy who loved Jesus in a normal way that let him go to youth group meetings on Wednesday nights and hang out with high school kids like me. He would talk to us about stuff, you know, just about whatever. There wasn't an agenda or anything. He just had a sincere desire to interact. He loved showing off this thick Irish accent that he pretended to have, and he bragged that all his ancestors were Irish. I liked that because my last name comes from Ireland, and my immigrant grandfather is buried in Antioch Cemetery in Claremont, just off Prairieton Road. So it helped me trust him, in a way. He was from people like me, after all. I remember he was having some twitching in his eye, and he was worried that he might have brain cancer. Maybe he did. I don't know. I was 17.

So I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to write things on paper that people would have to read, and a newspaper was one way to do it. Journalists could be good or bad. Bad, if they wrote like they did in the textbooks. Somehow, I could see through all that even in those days. The Five W's and One H. The Inverted Pyramid. Punctuation. Grammar. Standard writing. Clear communication. I took the job as a stringer, a word that I didn't even know at the time, even though it was exactly what I was. I went to basketball games, took notes, talked to the coach, then went back to the office on Whittle Avenue to type up my story into the column margins on the Apple computers (we are journalists, after all). 

So there I was, that night after the OCC basketball game, typing up my story at a computer just a few feet from the glass doors that revealed an empty street, except for a few cars parked outside The Red Door, which was a bar across the blacktop road, where The Gypsy is today. As I was finishing typing my story, which was going to be brief, I heard a tapping on the glass windows of the exit doors. Coach Schimburg had seen me in the newspaper room typing a story about his basketball team, and suddenly he had decided, after having a couple drinks, that talking to a kid about your night might not have been such a mistake after all.  

But who got to make those rules? Who got to make the decisions about whether to use a comma here or a comma there? That was an interesting kind of power. And I had quite a strong sense of justice, which is why lawyer is the profession at the top of my list. 

But who makes the laws? The people do. And who speaks for the people, if it's not the paper?

If you are approaching 40, this movie might not be a mistake. Or maybe it's a big one.

I never saw the end of Lost because I had given up on the writer.

But my children are watching it now.

The Inverted Pyramid.

I'm 36.

--30--

To Dalton

If you ever read this,
It's just an attempt to connect,
As is all language,
Working myself into your headspace,
Like a virus,
Or a baby,
Transferring thisness into thatness,
From me to to you,
Across time and space,
Into generations beyond,
Where I am carried boldly,
Forever,
In your granddaughter's belly.

June 15, 2013

A day that changed the world.