The Unclad Soul

While walking the track the other morning at the large high school behind where I live, I saw something that disturbed me. As I was making a turn there was a small group of boys at the end of the football field that is in the middle of the track. Standing far above the others was a big kid, maybe 6’2’, 250 pounds. He was waving something in his hand. There was a much smaller boy a few feet in front of him with his hands up in front of him. From a distance, I thought the big kid had a small football in his hand because he was waving the smaller boy out onto the field as though to catch something. Just as I got near them, I saw the big kid had a cell phone in his hand. He threw it long and high in the air. The smaller kid was awkwardly running to catch it, but it hit hard on the ground and bounced twice. The big kid just laughed along with the others and walked off. The smaller kid picked up his phone, put it in his pocket, and walked over to the group and sheepishly stood wi...

Parenting is one of the fantastic experiences of life. Of course, it comes with some of the most exasperating experiences as well. Jerry Seinfeld has said, “Having a two-year-old is like owning a blender you don’t have the top for.” So true. Not everyone can be a parent, and some people simply choose not to have children. I have friends like that and they are perfectly wonderful people and have fulfilling lives. Most of them do have pets, though! I always wanted children. Maybe it had something to do with how I was loved as a child. I’m not sure. But thankfully, I have two beautiful sons, both grown now with their own families. I adore all of them—my sons, their wives, and their children. They also have pets, too, which I also love. I suppose like many people, when my wife and I divorced, our home was deeply disrupted. My divorce affected my career, my friends, but worst of all, it caused a lot of sorrow and confusion for my sons. My oldest was 15. My youngest 13. Crit...

Ingrid and her cousin Hannah and I walked the entire March For Your Lives in Dallas last Saturday. Ingrid was a bit hesitant when I invited her to join me. She was afraid there might be problems. Maybe a bomb. Or violent protestors. Or a shooter. I told her there would be plenty of police and security, though I knew in my own mind there are always risks at these kinds of events. She decided to go and Hannah came with us as well. I wanted the girls to have a sense of social conscience, to be a part of something historic and hopefully, a catalyst for change in our violent weary nation. The crowd was energetic, diverse, and respectful. There were chants and tons of creative signs and posters. There were ongoing conversations in the crowd. I sensed that people are genuinely worried about our nation. And they want change. Now. I never saw one protestor. There were no hecklers or angry people pushing back against the march. That says to me that most people realize something ...

The Independent , a UK online news source, reported this week that Jack Wood, a 15-year-old boy from South London rescued a baby and a grandmother from a burning house. Jack was walking to school when he saw smoke coming from a neighbor’s house. He knows the family and knew a baby and grandmother lived there. He called his mother and told her to call the fire department. Then he ran into the house and grabbed the baby and put it on the lawn outside. He then went back into the house and got the grandmother and led her out to safety. Then he went back into the house, found a bucket, filled it with water and proceeded to put out the fire until the fire department got there. “I just wanted to get the baby and the gran out and make sure the fire was out,” Jack told reporters. All three were treated for smoke inhalation, but Jack was called a hero for saving the lives of the baby and the grandmother. Kids today, like kids in all days, are so easily dismissed. But young people today are ...

I suppose nearly everyone has now heard of Keaton Jones, the Tennessee middle school boy whose mom’s video of him went viral. Keaton apparently has had surgery for a cleft pallet that sometimes interferes with his speech and his appearance, although he’s a handsome boy with bright eyes. After kids at school made fun of his nose, called him ugly, and said he didn’t have any friends, they then poured milk on him in the lunchroom. Broken hearted and ashamed, his mom came to school to pick him up. Thankfully, celebrities and others have covered him with affirmation and offers of friendship. He knows now he’s not stupid or ugly. And what child doesn’t need to know that, always? As parents, we have the moral and human responsibility to teach our children to treat all children with respect and care. I don’t know where the teachers or monitors were when this boy was being so mistreated, but the real responsibility for bullying others lies directly at the feet of those of us wh...

The movie, “Collateral Beauty,” deals with vitally important themes. For me, it fell short in many ways. There were moving moments, to be sure. The all-star cast made good attempts, but they distracted me. I kept seeing them as the movie stars they are and not as real characters in a difficult story. The film centers on an advertising executive, played by Will Smith, who three years earlier lost his young daughter to a fatal illness. His grief has crippled him and he is lost in bitterness and silent rage. He spends his days building colorful, elaborate domino mazes that he then collapses. It’s an obvious metaphor of his life and the shattering of his spirit and soul. He created his ad company on the basis of three imperatives: Time, Love, and Death. These, he told his colleagues and employees, are what connect us to all things fundamental to our well-being. He wanted his ad agency to reflect these themes in all aspects of its work. And yet, in his tormenting loss, he sees thes...

What would we be like if the Garden of Eden story had ended differently? What if there was no Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to stay away from? Or, what if it had been perfectly fine to eat the fruit of that tree so that the first humans could learn all of the good stuff? The author of Genesis, supposedly Moses, was apparently doing his best to explain evil and suffering in the world. It's a shame he couldn't just say we aren't finished yet. The idea that we are born to be bad, to do evil, to sin, is so limiting to the human spirit. Do we do bad things because we learned from the beginning that we are bad? What if we had been told how beautiful we are, how gifted and intelligent, and how capable we are of doing good? Whatever else was going on in the author's world or life at the time of writing Genesis, surely it wasn't all horror and depravity and calamity. And if it wasn't, then where did that goodness come from? And how did telling us we a...

I attended Ingrid’s 4th & 5th grade Valentine's Dance last night at Larry G. Smith Elementary. She had been talking about this for weeks and wanted to know if she could go. Of course she could, I said. And she was so excited. But then I asked if parents were going and if I could go, too. She said she wasn’t sure about that and would have to get back to me. I asked if she would be embarrassed if I went with her and she sort of shyly grinned and I so I promised I wouldn’t get out on the dance floor in front of all of her friends and do the Glide, or the Fist Pump, or the Shuffle, or that thing kids today call cwalking. She giggled and said, “Oh Poppy.” Anyway, I bought our tickets and decided to go as a volunteer. I kept telling her she needed to pick out an outfit for the dance but she insisted that she was just going to wear her skinny jeans and “a cute top.” Hmmm, I thought. Okay. So we went to the mall and picked out a cute top which she didn’t end up wearing a...