Author: J. Thorp

The Second Third, Week 27: New Growth on the Family Tree

/ J. Thorp / 6 Comments

Blogger’s Note: In my last Second Third post, I dug into the roots of my family tree. Today, let’s examine the newest blossom – and how we got to this point!

When Jodi and I first got together, she wanted six children, just like the family in which she grew up. I, on the other hand, knew I wanted children, but thought one or two would suffice. I had learned in my anthropology classes that large families were irresponsible — that our planet could not support humanity’s continued exponential growth, and that America’s resource-intensive consumer culture would drain the Earth even more quickly that other, faster-growing nations.

So I told Jodi, “We’ll see.” I knew that, over time, things would change. And they have. Earlier this week my bride and I announced the best thing to happen to our December since Christmas: the anticipated arrival of a fifth Thorplet.

The kids are ecstatic. Trevor longs to be a big brother; Emma has wanted to roll the dice on a little sister for years; Gabe adores all babies (and has verbally agreed with Emma that “we could use another girl around here,” which, given his history of rabid anti-sisterism, demands the question, “Use her for what?”); and Bren – our eldest, who wants his own room and has complained that our house is too small – has been grinning for days now. He knows just enough, I think, that this new addition is equal parts miracle, mystery, and science project to him.

* * * * *

My evolution into a father of five (six, when you count Jude, whom we lost last fall) began early on, with the way in which Jodi’s quiet faith drew me like a magnet. There is a peace about my bride that, I recognize now, is not of this world. Most of the time she is unworried, unflappable, confident that the world is unfolding as it should, despite appearances to the contrary. She led me slowly, steadily, to conversion – first, back to the Catholic Church, then to a previously inconceivable closeness with God, then to the gradual realization that marriage and sexuality are meant to be more than the “sum of our parts.”

On top of this spiritual conversion came four important, practical realizations. First, although we had planned to wait until we were more “financially secure” to start having children, we became pregnant with Brendan only about six months into our marriage – demonstrating that A) there is only one fail-safe way to not get pregnant and B) you’ll never be more or less ready than you are right now. Second, we realized that once you have your first, you might as well have more if you want ’em – you’ve got the baby gear, the mindset, and (when you’re young) the energy, plus the sooner you bring them into the house, the sooner you get them out! (For the past several years I’ve taken great pleasure in reminding my friends who waited to have kids that I’ll have all four of mine graduated before I’m 50. C’est la vie, I guess…) So we forged ahead – and Gabriel was born.

Now, I realized right out the gate that I loved being a dad. So when Gabe was born – at the point at which pre-child/Ivy-grad me would’ve said, “That’s it; no more – it’s the responsible thing to do.” – my heart was whispering girl-baby, girl-baby, girl-baby.

I struggled against this urge for awhile and came to a few other practical conclusions. First, although I have concerns about the wider world, our decision to bring another child into it – a child who would be well loved and well supported – would have little bearing on the allocation of resources in the world, but had the potential to sow peace and charity in a world in sore need of both. (For the record, we discussed adoption, as we have many times since, but felt our own limited resources could do more good raising our own children here in our own community.) Second, the more I thought about the social pressures in this country (and regulations in others) to limit families, the more I saw them as questionable means to a questionable end: a society in which freedoms were relinquished and families were engineered (and parenting outsourced) for the “good of the state.” Finally, I began to notice an inverse relationship between family size and per capita resource consumption in the families around us – put simply, most of the childless and only-child families I knew spent more, used more, wasted more, and still wanted more, than the bigger families I knew. Hand-me-downs, left-overs, gardens, and shared bedrooms conserve resources, too!

As if in affirmation of our choice, we were promptly blessed with Emma Rose. Shortly thereafter, we moved to Minnesota. We talked about a fourth child, but faced two challenges, one financial (the cost of daycare for four kids in or around the Twin Cities) and one psychological (the fact that most of our first friends and colleagues here thought it was ludicrous to have three kids, much less four). Fortunately, we had unwittingly settled in a veritable hotbed of Catholicism and big families—so when we had Trevor, we found that we also had support. Ultimately the families we met through St. Michael Catholic Church – and our tremendous priests brought us to an even greater understanding of what a blessing each and every child is: if you believe in God – if you believe that the world is unfolding as it should, despite appearances to the contrary – a new life here, there, or anywhere, is a gift meant to serve a Greater Good.

* * * * *

I remember once, early in our relationship, using the phrase risk of a baby. I was aghast as soon as I heard my own words…but it’s typical of the world today. In Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful,” but today, that original blessing is often regarded as a burden that we must sterilize in the act, or “fix” permanently. It reminds me of Christ on his way to the cross, speaking to the mourning women:

“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.’” – Luke 23:28

So here we sit, in our Second Third of life, with number five on the way. No more thoughts of “a whole new life together” when we’re 50, but that’s okay – the life we have is pretty spectacular. And the good news is that it gets easier. Think about it: your first child is revolutionary; it completely changes everything you’ve known before. Number two is big – 100% increase over number one; double the trouble, etc. Number three? That’s only a 50% increase over what you have already; the biggest problem (if they’re small) is you only have two hands, so one parent can’t restrain them all at once. After that, number four’s a piece of cake.

And now, with a six-year gap between the baby and our youngest, the first four can raise number five. Y’know, folks in the Twin Cities this might be called ostentatious, unsustainable, even irresponsible – but in St. Michael and Albertville, it’s a comfortable starter family!

Chivalry Is Not Dead: Sacramental Sexuality in an Age of Lust

/ J. Thorp / 10 Comments

“Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. … A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.”
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I remember, a few years back, sitting around a little round table in a crowded Minneapolis bar with two former co-workers. They were talking about their work and home lives—their wives and children (one each at the time) and the challenges of unwinding after a day at work. One of the two enjoys computer games, but said he had to wait until after his wife—and especially his daughter—went to bed, because he didn’t want them walking in on the particularly violent or sexual scenes in the game. The other agreed, saying very matter-of-factly that it was the same with viewing online pornography—you always had to be looking over your shoulder, not because your wife doesn’t know, but because it’s better for everyone if she doesn’t see.

Only natural?

They spoke very openly about it, as though everyone does it and it’s perfectly normal. I know only too well that these are common—even rampant—habits in our society, but I’m always dismayed when men pretend that they are natural, insurmountable, or even desirable as part of being an adult male. Another co-worker used to speak of men “in their natural state” as being herd bulls, biologically inclined to breed with as many females as possible—and he marveled that I could appear so happy in an intentionally lifelong and monogamous relationship.

The idea that men are nothing more than rutting bulls ignores God’s intention in the matter, to be sure, but it also ignores anthropology and common sense. From a common-sense perspective, the drive to breed is not what motivates a lustful or promiscuous male—in fact, many go to great lengths not to leave offspring behind. From an anthropological standpoint, the idea that there were ever primeval human males, free of cultural constraints, who could breed with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted, flies in the face of what scientists currently think about evolution. Current theory suggests that culture predates the modern human species by millions of years. In other words, even if you are convinced that God has nothing to say in the matter, we were already “artificially” overcoming our biology well before we were human.

That’s not to say that our presumed prehuman ancestors were lifelong and faithful spouses—it merely makes the point that we have been re-writing the rules of strict call-and-response biology for eons now, so claiming that we can’t do it today, or in this particular case, is a cop-out.

Pope John Paul II once wrote, “There are people who try to ridicule, or even to deny, the idea of a faithful bond which lasts a lifetime. These people—you can be very sure—do not know what love is.” We can be faithful, lifelong spouses—knights in shining armor—and the Church shows us how.

Higher calling

The great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton discovered in the Catholic Church the wonder and hope and beauty that had inspired him as a child and helped him to understand the world. The romance of the Church struck him as a more Truth-filled worldview than the coldly scientific view of the cosmos that many of the great thinkers and writers of his day espoused. No doubt many of his contemporaries saw him as a hopelessly devoted to a way of life that was quaint at best, and dangerously outmoded at worst.

We live in the same world as he did—you could argue that we fight the same battle as the knights of the middle ages. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell paraphrases another scholar of stories, Ortega y Gasset, in talking about the famous, foolish romantic Don Quixote:

Don Quixote was the last hero of the Middle Ages. He rode out to encounter giants, but instead of giants, his environment produced windmills. Ortega points out that this story takes place about the time that a mechanistic interpretation of the world came in, so that the environment was no longer spiritually responsive to the hero. The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need…

Now it has become to such an extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behavioristic psychology, that we’re nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. The nineteenth century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.

But like Quixote, if we take a hard look at the world around us, we can see the marauding giants—especially with regard to marriage and sex. Divorce, in particular, is so widespread that many children shrug it off as commonplace, and men and women joke that marriage isn’t worth it because the wedding is too expensive and lasts longer than the commitment. Roughly half of marriages end in divorce, and the results aren’t significantly different for Catholic couples, because even with traditional Catholic marriage preparation, many couples simply go through the required motions and never actually come to understand the why behind the Church’s teachings. Why does the Church oppose living together or having sexual relations before marriage? Why, in the 21st century, does the Catholic Church stand essentially alone in opposing artificial means of birth control?

According to Christopher West, the well-known Catholic speaker who has dedicated his life to spreading Pope John Paul II’s Theology of Body teachings, in the past two millenia, the Catholic Church has written roughly 6,000 pages on marriage and sexuality—and 4,000 of those were written by John Paul II since the 1970s. Obviously he saw giants, too, and knew they must be fought and slain. He armed the Church with a renewed understanding of the essential relationship of marriage and sexuality to what it means to be human and created in God’s image. Until recently, however, relatively few people had been exposed to these teachings.

Through the efforts of West and other impassioned lay leaders, bishops and parish priests, awareness is growing—and marriages are changing for the better. My own marriage is a case in point. My wife and I came late to understanding and embracing the Church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality. We’ve been married 13 years now, with four kids, ages 11 to 5. Catholic marriage preparation wasn’t easy for me—while I admired the strength of my bride’s faith, I didn’t have a strong religious upbringing. Although I had been raised with many of the same values and was quite proud of the fact that we had both “saved ourselves” for marriage, I wasn’t a fan of some of the Church’s teachings, especially on birth control.

I’m sure the married couples who discussed Natural Family Planning with us at our Engaged Encounter weekend told us that NFP is a scientifically safe and sound way for couples to determine a woman’s fertility each month in order to achieve or avoid pregnancy. I know they told us it was completely aligned with the Church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality—and while I argued with them about how NFP was different from contraception, inside I had two thoughts, one positive and one negative:

  • I thought that NFP might help me to better understand what made my wife tick as a Catholic and as a woman—
  • But I was sure it was going to take time to figure out and I wasn’t anxious to have a child right away or to wait any longer than we already had after the wedding.

We tried—briefly—to teach ourselves NFP from a book, and quickly scrapped that idea. We agreed to start our life together using artificial methods of family planning until we had a chance to take an NFP class. We quickly became very comfortable with our artificial method and easily justified not exploring NFP further. We also quickly became pregnant with our first child and had visions of switching to NFP and winding up with several more in rapid succession.

During the next 10 years, my wife coaxed me back to the Church, we had three more children, and my conscience began to nag me. Our children had all been large at birth, and when our youngest arrived at 12 pounds 2 ounces, the doctor suggested we stop having babies. That was fine with my wife, who was feeling emotionally drained and exhausted—so the timing was less than ideal for me to start reading up on NFP, to decide after a decade to confess to our priest that we had been using artificial birth control, and to push her to try something completely new.

She wasn’t convinced at first, and I was nervous, so for a year or more we discussed and prayed, took a class through the Couple to Couple League, and slowly came to share the Church’s understanding that married love is supposed to mirror God’s love: free, total, faithful and fruitful; sacrificial and life-giving.

Finally, we made the switch, and that one change changed everything else. First and foremost, we (and especially I) learned self-control. Christopher West likes to point out that what many in our culture promote as sexual freedom—in particular, the capability that artificial birth control gives us to experience sex whenever we want to, without concerns about fertility cycles, pregnancy, parenthood, love or commitment—is actually sexual addiction. We get so accustomed to being able to indulge our urges whenever we want to that we can’t say no, and we feel frustrated, angry or unwanted when our partners want to abstain.

This is not God’s vision. He gave us free will so we can love freely. He allows us to say no to Him so that our yes means something, and same holds true between spouses: if we can say no, our yes mean something; if we can abstain together, our embrace becomes a mutual choice and a free and total gift.

For us, every month is like a honeymoon now: we watch and anticipate together, we don’t pressure each other as much, and we pray together about our marriage and our family more than ever before. We communicate better in general and feel more deeply in love, because we understand each other and what God meant us to be to each other.

Truth works

People often have the idea that the Catholic Church is against sex, when in fact, the opposite is true. Properly understood, sexuality is sacred to the Church—it is considered so beautiful and good, so important and such a gift, that it is to be honored and preserved. Indeed, some use the term sacramental sexuality to underscore the nature and meaning of sex in Catholic marriage. Each of the Church’s sacraments has form (the spoken words) and matter (the material sign of the sacrament)—so in the case of Baptism, the form is the particular rite read by the pastor and the matter is water; in the case of the Eucharist, the form is the Words of Consecration and the matter is the bread and wine.

What many Catholic spouses don’t realize is that, in the case of the sacrament of marriage, the form consists of the questions of consent and the vows, but the substance of the sacrament is the “one flesh” union of husband and wife, mirroring the free, total, faithful and fruitful love of God. This understanding elevates sexuality to its true importance in the Church—as close to an experience of the life-giving love of the Trinity as we can have here on earth. Indeed, West opens the first chapter of his book, The Good News About Sex and Marriage, with this quote from Pope John Paul II: “The ‘great mystery,’ which is the Church and humanity in Christ, does not exist apart from the ‘great mystery’ expressed in the ‘one flesh’…reality of marriage and family.”

Shortly after we made our switch to NFP, our pastor connected us to a team of couples who put on Theology of the Body retreats for engaged couples in the parish. St. Michael Catholic Church requires these retreats in addition to diocesan marriage preparation for couple who wish to be married in our parish, and the results we’ve seen over the past two years have been inspiring.

Many of the young couples who attend these retreats are living together or are sexually active, few have been exposed to Theology of the Body teachings, and most know very little about Natural Family Planning. Using Christopher West’s video series God’s Plan for a Joy-Filled Marriage (and his book mentioned above) as a framework, several married couples bear witness to the truth about sex and marriage in the Catholic Church throughout the morning and afternoon. Anonymous evaluations completed by participants ask about their religious upbringing, spiritual life, sexual activity, living arrangements and plans for children—regardless of their current situation, following the retreat, most of the couples indicate that they are planning on (or at least considering) abstaining until marriage, moving apart, and using Natural Family Planning.

The Truth resonates, not only with the engaged couples, but with the witnesses, too—we all grow in understanding, faith and love by sharing these powerful teachings. In fact, some have characterized NFP as marriage insurance: while the divorce rate among Catholics in general is similar to the national average—about 50 percent—the rate among couples using NFP is 1 to 2 percent. I believe this is in part because Natural Family Planning is a couple-based method of family planning that demands mutual participation, requiring spouses to act in loving but chaste ways at times and to learn and practice self-control.

Self-control is essential in an age of lust, when so much around us insists that “men will be men,” and that we should do what feels good. When we first married, I thought that our love and lifelong commitment was justification enough for our private lives—like many well-meaning spouses, I overlooked the possibility of lust in marriage; of using my spouse rather than loving her selflessly. In recent years, it has been my personal experience that learning to control myself in our married relationship has strengthened my self-control in private—I am not tempted as strongly to selfish or lustful behaviors, and I am able to resist these temptations much more easily.

It is no accident that great warrior traditions from the world over insist that our greatest enemy is ourselves, that our greatest battles are within. As men, we are called to love our wives as Christ loved the Church: to death. Jesus came to serve and to die for his Bride, and we must do the same. This is the heroic calling—the great and noble deed — that we seek as Catholic men, husbands and fathers. Chivalry is not dead. It lives in the romance and teachings of the Church, and in the life-giving love and example of our Creator.

Resources

Suggested reading on marriage, sexuality and the Church:

  • The Good News About Sex and Marriage by Christopher West
  • The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan by Blessed John Paul II
  • Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
  • Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

Blogger’s Note: I originally wrote this article in summer of 2009; it was published in the local Knights of Columbus newsletter. In the years since, we’ve added another cub to the pride—hard to believe she’s five already!

The Second Third, Week 26: The Roots of the Family Tree

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

This particular Second Third post is 90 percent inspiration and 10 percent shameless self-promotion in the form of an opportunity to cross-promote a post I wrote two months ago — a post that I loved, but according to Blogger stat-keeping technology, was largely unread.

Back on St. Patrick’s Day, I posted a piece explaining precisely how Irish I am, and in what ways. (Go on, read it!) I talked about an ancestor who used to go looking for Catholics to fight. Dad reminded me over Easter that this ancestor supposedly became sheriff of Tuscola County, Michigan, during Prohibition, however, and supposedly ignored the moonshining operation of one of my mom’s ancestors in return for a package or two left in the culvert up the road from the farm. Mom’s family was 100 percent Polish Catholic, which just goes to show that a drink between adversaries can occasionally sew the seeds of peace and religious tolerance.

All at once, we fell to googling ancestral names. My sister pulled out a handwritten family tree she’d worked on with my Grandma Thorp, and I quickly turned up a few graves in the cemetery records of rural Tuscola County, then some old obits. Pretty soon we had learned that the sheriff was likely a deputy sheriff and was probably a brother to our brawling ancestor Dad had named at first. We also learned that the particular branch of the family we were investigating appeared to have moved in fits and starts to “the Thumb” of Michigan from a particular area of Ontario, Canada, and that their surname, Hutchinson, may trace back to English royalty in the Middle Ages.

This lit a little fire under us due to a pair of old stories passed down among the Thorps: first, that we are somehow distantly related to an English Queen (Victoria is what I heard as a boy), and second, that a woman among our ancestors was alone in her cabin in the wilds of Canada, and killed an attacking bear with the butcher knife from her kitchen. An hour or so on the internet began to suggest that these stories could, in fact, be true!

We all have great stories and intriguing twists among the roots of our family trees, a few of which I remember (vaguely) and hope to verify:

  • My Grandpa Thorp was stationed in the Philippines, I think, at the end of WWII, and was crawling through the underbrush when he found himself beside the largest snake he had ever seen. He didn’t dare fall behind his crawling companions, and his heart raced as he prepared to encounter the head of the serpent, which appeared to be hidden in the foliage ahead…until he realized it was just the snake’s massive shed skin!
  • My Dziadzi (JAH-jee, or Grandpa Galubenski) was stationed on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska during WWII and was the company bugler, though he couldn’t play. He paid another guy with cigarettes to cover for him!
  • We had always thought my great-dziadzi, Bronislaw (BRONE-ee-swaff, aka Brony, Bruno or Brownie) Galubenski had come to America from Poland, but according the digitized documents on Ellis Island’s web site, he seems to have come by way of Russia, where they had been living. (Also, he may have been a bootlegger…)
  • We are rumored to have some American Indian blood in us; that, coupled with the fact that some Pacific Northwest Thorpes (with an “e”) traced themselves to us, has fueled speculation that I may, indeed, be related to the great Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, who, I just now learned, was given the name Jacobus Franciscus Thorp, was baptized Catholic, and was said to have French and Irish blood. Interesting…
  • One of my great(-great?)-grandfathers on my dad’s side rolled into Michigan from New York state in his 20s to start a grocery in the Thumb. He stopped by a local farm, introduced himself, stayed for supper, then stayed the night. In the morning, he told the farmer he was starting a business and was in need of a wife. He asked the farmer if he might part with his oldest daughter (age 13), and the farmer reckoned he would — ask, and ye shall receive. According to all I’ve heard, they had a long marriage and many children!
  • At Yale, a Polish language professor told me she had never heard of the name Galubenski (Americanized pronunciation: Gal-yoo-BEN-skee; Polish pronunciation should be more like Gah-loo-BEHN-skee). It’s a style of name that should have a meaning; you should be able to see Polish words or roots in it, but they aren’t there. Within our family, at least three different spellings of Galubenski have evolved based on how my great aunts and uncles were taught to write it (by grade-school teachers who didn’t speak Polish and just sounded it out as best they could, I think): Galubenski, Galubinski, and Galbenski. Googling any of these names turns up no results in the old country. These facts make me wonder if, in fact, the original misspelling may have happened on Ellis Island. Perhaps a more common Polish name, like Golubiewski (pronounced roughly Go-lum-BYEV-skee) was misheard and thus misspelled?
There are others, no doubt, which I will add as I can. The point is, our histories are rich with story and tradition, humor and adventure, if we can uncover it. My grandfathers and maternal grandmother have passed away, but in my Second Third, I have stories to gather!

Touching the Supernatural

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

I suspect it’s fairly common for faith-filled people to nevertheless long for a sign of some sort — something to let them know for sure that God is really there, that there’s an Almighty Hand on the tiller. I was a skeptic for a lot of years myself; even called myself an agnostic, which I thought was sensible, even clever, and didn’t recognize until later was a lukewarm atheism at best, and at worst, a lukewarm faith:

“I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” — Revelation 3:15-16

Even when I began to come around to faith, I was, like Thomas, a doubter, and wanted to touch and be touched by God. And I believe I was once — an event I recorded in an essay of sorts called Thomas and Me. (Weak title, I know, but I was emotionally weak at the time, and who ever heard of a soft-hearted editor?)

At any rate, for a few brief moments I felt full-up with God. After that, I’m been hesitant to ask for more signs.

It’s not that I don’t still wish for something tangible, or want to be closer to God. And it’s not that I doubt more or less than I used to: distance and time has diminished the certainty I felt in that moment, but in the years since, I’ve met so many people (who I know and trust) who have experienced soul-shaking, life-altering, heart-changing conversions — and yeah, even miracles — that the tendency to raise an eyebrow is now tempered.

But touching the supernatural is a scary thing. First, there’s the immensity of it all, of a God who exists outside time and created everything of which we can conceive. Then there’s that feeling of smallness, which may translate in our tiny human hearts into insignificance or desperate unworthiness, misguided though it may be. Then hits the enormity of the implications: that if we are not the be-all-and-end-all, the bomb-diggity, all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips, as it were, maybe we owe something to Someone who is…

So when a friend mentions a miracle in his or her own life, I only pursue the conversation so far, and when my own close encounters crop up, like last week’s God-Incidence, I find myself both shaken and stirred. And I don’t think this discomfort is mine alone. Another friend of mine talked about his own unease with anything to do with the Catholic Church’s teachings on the devil, demons, or even angels. And watching the mainstream media’s coverage of the beatification of Pope John Paul II, you could hear and see the journalists’ discomfort with miracles and intercession…they’d like to believe, but it would shake their very sense of who they are.

Then on Saturday morning I went to daily Mass at St. Michael’s with my bride. The gospel reading was from John, which recounts Christ walking on water, but was a telling I’m less familiar with:

That evening the disciples went down to the shore of the sea and got into a boat to make for Capernaum on the other side of the sea. It was getting dark by now and Jesus had still not rejoined them. The wind was strong, and the sea was getting rough. They had rowed three or four miles when they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming towards the boat. They were afraid, but he said, “It’s me. Don’t be afraid.” They were ready to take him into the boat, and immediately it reached the shore at the place they were making for. — John 6:16-21

These men, who had been with Jesus and seen him perform wonders, were again amazed, this time by his appearance on the stormy waters. And guess what? They were afraid, too, and doubted as to his very identity (as evidenced by his very loving response, like a father to a child: “It’s me. Don’t be afraid.”).

I take comfort in the fact that his disciples, too, were frightened to encounter the supernatural and continuously awestruck and terrified by the power of God. But I took something else from this passage. In the better-known version (at least to me), Peter steps from the boat to walk toward Jesus, but falters in his faith and begins to sink. But John’s account is different. Read that final line again: “They were ready to take him into the boat, and immediately it reached the shore at the place they were making for.”

Here is a kind, gentle, and generous God: just welcoming Him aboard is enough to get us where we need to go.

Blessed to Bear Another’s Suffering

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

Last Thursday, May 5th, I drove to work like any other morning. The commute wasn’t great, but it almost never is; the sky was overcast, but that’s been the norm this spring, and sun was expected soon. Work was work, and I didn’t listen to the news on the way in. But as I walked from the parking garage to my building and office, I felt deeply sad. The birds were singing; the trees, finally beginning to bud; the students busy about their classes and exams — and I felt none of it. Instead a great hollow ache slowly spread within my ribs. I had no idea why.

I fired up my computer, checked my work e-mail, then logged into my Facebook account. I typed “My heart is aching today.” — then, not wanting anyone in my network of friends and family to assume I was having chest pains, amended it: “My heart is aching today (in the emotional sense). No idea why.”

A friend, L, suggested it was the Rainy-Day Blues and assured me that “The sun’ll come out tomorrow!” I told her that a colleague had written the very same thing on my white board earlier in the week, but that this felt deeper (and more soulful) than the weather.

Then another friend, B, made this observation: “Maybe you’ve been blessed with bearing someone else’s suffering for the day…what a gift!”

That struck me, not only as especially Christian and profound in some sense, but as true — I thanked her, and fell to contemplating who it might be, and whether one so blessed could ever learn whose suffering he bears.

Not an hour later, a dear friend of mine learned that her mother, who has been battling cancer for some time now, was dying. She dropped everything to book a flight down South. It was the same colleague who had left the sunshine-y message on my white board. My friend B was right: I knew it now, and I believe my colleague thinks so, as well.

This is not to suggest my momentary sorrow compare to hers in any way. I don’t know how much of the load I carried — in the big scheme of things, perhaps it was only the last straw. But it’s tweaked my thinking, about friendship, and prayer, and suffering, and especially coincidences. I knew something was wrong that morning, and that it wasn’t just the rain.

My love and prayers go out to my friend and her family in this time of loss. I’ll bear whatever I can — whatever I’m blessed to — for you.