Daily Grit by Wes Thorp

Baby-boomers: Do you pray with your grandchildren at their bedtime?

Are you a baby-boomer and do you have grandchildren? Do you pray with them, especially at their bedtime?  

1. What do you pray for?  
2. Is it one of the standard bedtime prayers, like "Now I lay me down to sleep?" 
3. Is this important?

I faced these questions this past spring when we visited our daughter and family and our grandson who was about 20-months old.  He had his own room in their home in Bosnia where one night I had the chance to put him to bed.  

After putting his pajamas on and brushing his teeth and saying his good nights, we read a story and then I put him in his crib.  As an almost two-year-old, he was still filled with energy and moving in his crib.

What should I do, I thought?  Pray?  What prayer?  I grew-up with "Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep and if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. And this I ask for Jesus sake. Amen."

His attention span wasn't there.  It was maybe four words wide.  I grabbed his little hands and prayed, "Thank-you Jesus for a great day."  

I know that my daughter and son-in-law pray with him.  

When I got up last night for the second pee of the night, I prayed for him and his pre-born sister that they would come to depend talking to Jesus and learn the power that comes from that conversation with the Creator.

That night in Bosnia will go down in my list of top memories.  It was me, my grandson and God.

 

 

A gift for my grandson and his pre-born sister from the U.S. Army

There's not much positive I can say about my experience in the U.S. Army during the seventies.  All I can say is that I did my part and that I never had to serve in Vietnam.

But, there was one positive thing from the Army that has stuck with me during all those years.

I was sitting in an outdoor assembly with several hundred other soldier types.  We were listening to a whole line-up of officers talk about the rules.  One stands out and I've never forgotten him.  He was a colonel and a West Point graduate.

As he was going up the steps to the platform, he tripped and fell.  A bunch of guys laughed.  This was in basic training meaning that we were slick-sleeve privates and under their total control.

Instead of an angry response, he used it as a teaching moment.  He told everybody with the voice of a teacher and an Army leader that the issue is not about falling, but how you get up.  And he went on to explain that everybody would fall and make mistakes.  The secret is how you recover and what you learn.  It's how you get up.

I've made plenty of mistakes.  I thought of that day and what that colonel said.  I've tried to learn from them.  It was all a matter of getting back up.

My grandson is two-years-old plus a couple of months.  His sister will be born in the late fall.  

I pass this story and its lesson on to them.

Check out this quote from Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, about the power of a story

When I was on the adjunct faculty of the Michigan State University School of Journalism, I had a newswriting exercise for students just starting in the field.  

The assignment was to interview a class member and then write a news story about the information they were able to get during an interview.

During the three hour evening class, I tried to drill into their head that everybody has an interesting story to tell about their life.   It was just a matter of taking the time and interest to find it.  My students did not disappoint me.

I still remember the story about a female student from New York City who had been born in the backseat of a taxi cab.  Then there was the student who told this amazing story about how she was the reigning Miss Michigan and was getting ready to be part of the Miss America Pageant.

As they heard about the individuals in their class, students were transfixed by their fellow students and what they had experienced in life.

My experience with the class really connects to this Donald Miller quote about stories:

"Never underestimate the power of one great story."  

This is from his Facebook page a few days ago.  He's the author of Blue Like Jazz, a New York Times bestseller from a few years ago.  It was recently released as a movie.  It's a story about his life and it has connected with thousands who are his age.

Does your story have power?  How about mine?  Can mine help some readers gain insights about themselves or others they care about?

Do I have the skills to tell it?

I'm anxious to see.

I almost hesitate to say this about the Lutheran church

I appreciate a comment on my Facebook page about a series of posts I'm writing to tell my story.  

I wrote a post on my personal blog DailyGrit about how I feel that my faith in God survived my sixty-plus years in the Lutheran church.  I was born and raised in the church, went to Sunday School, went to services every Sunday, went to a Lutheran grade school, married a Lutheran school teacher in a Lutheran Church, served on many committees and boards.

My struggle was trying to find the relevance of God to everyday living.  I got the great news about what happens when you die and go to heaven.  But, what about everyday life.  

Pastors never seemed to preach about the everyday stuff of life, like when the bottom seems to fall out of everything, you lose somebody or the bad guy seems to win in every situation.  Then there's everything else like relationships, marriage, jobs and stuff like that.

My Facebook commenter said, it's not the job of the Lutheran church to connect the dots from God's Word to everyday life.  The relevance is supposed to come from reading the Word during the liturgy and from taking the Lord's Supper.  He seems to be saying that's all you need.  

Because of this lack of connection to everyday life, I started take notes from sermons at a very young age.  I found myself asking at the end of a sermon, so what?  What is this guy saying?  Why is it important to me?  Every Sunday, it was always the same.  I heard the Gospel which is the source of all hope.  Amen!

But, the Gospel got stuck at Gologotha and was not tied to life in Bay City or whever?  What would it look like to live out the Gospel in northern Michigan?  How would it affect in the way I relate to the circumstances of my life as a student, as an adult, as a married person, as a dad and as a son?

The Lutheran church seems to be telling only part of the story.  The Word of God is relevant to everything.  I'm learning that and I see more of the light than I did before.

I wish I would have learned this earlier in my life, but as I get ready to turn 66, I'm glad that I've recalibrated my thinking and my focus.  

It would be great if my old denomination did the same.  It would be wonderful to see Lutheran churches packed out on Sunday mornings and Saturday nights.

Back to my Facebook commenter, yes, I firmly believe it's the church's job to connect the dots between the Word of God and everyday life and beyond.

 

My faith survived the Lutheran church

Baby-boomers, what would you tell your grandkids about your experience with the local church?

Should they go?  Valuable?  It really strengthened your faith in God?  It helped make Jesus Christ real to you?  Other believers made a real positive difference in your life?

I found my faith there.  It grew for awhile and then I went through many years where it eroded like the shoreline on a Michigan lake during a really hot summer like this one.

A lot of good things happened to me in the Lutheran church.  I was baptized there.  I went to school for eight years there.  I was introduced to Jesus Christ and then I became a teenager and then an adult and my faith started to slip through my fingers like Jello.

If you had asked me a couple of years ago if I had a mature faith, I would have confidently said, yes. Then I got older and I started to look over my shoulder at my life.  

My wife and I talk often about serious life questions, including faith in God.  I recounted where I was at and she suggested that perhaps I never grew out of my baby-faith.  Do you know this term?  I was baptized and confirmed.  In between, I memorized all the verse in the Lutheran Catechism.  I went to church every Sunday.

I was never taught how it was relevant to my everyday life.  As a result, my faith would slide in an out and around.  One day, it was there and then it was over there.  I had trouble grabbling hold of it.

I got involved in local church politics and that only made it worse.  Sunday School classes were pro-forma and seemed more focused on filling blanks on a page than helping people respond to the Word of God for real change in their lives.

We finally got up the nerve to leave.  We tried another and that didn't work.  We've been going to another that seems to connect the dots between God and his word and life.  He's now taken a seat at our table.  

I feel I'm growing spiritually.

The day I cursed out the trap beneath my kitchen sink

I really thought I could fix the pvc pipe that became disconnected from the trap beneat my sink.  I have absolutely no-confidence in myself as a do-it-yourselfer.  But, we needed to use the sink and it looked as simple as sticking the two pieces back-together.

My background includes nothing of this sort.  I had no dad around to show me and my uncles, well, they had their own kids.  I felt left behind with that kind of thing.

When I emptied out the cupboard beneath the sink, I crawled under.  I looked at each piece and tried to size up the situation.  It didn't seem complicated.  I kept asking myself what I'm missing.  I would join the two pieces and they would come apart again.  Keep in mind that they had been joined together for the more than ten years we had lived there.

I used every neuron in my brain that had been developing over six decades.  The two would not stick together.  I've tried home repairs before and I seemed to have a similar outcome.  

That's when the tapes started playing in my head.  I could hear them plainly.  "You're stupid.  You're a shithead.  I'm an asshole.  This shit should be simple and I can't even do that."

Then I started to vocalize my feelings about what I tried and failed at.  The air started to turn blue.

The problem was that my son was in the living room and he heard me.  This added to my personal humiliation over something that anybody should be able to do.  I made myself look smaller in my grown son's eyes.

I'm sure he doesn't know how to do it either.  I never showed him because I never learned.  He has a pretty good self-concept though and he knows where his strengths are.  

He loves me, I know, regardless of whether I can hook two pipes together.  He's a great guy who loves unconditionally.

A lesson for all the do-it-yourself guys and dads out there:  Pass it on to your sons and other young guys.  What a great project for guys in a church.  In my church where I went every Sunday with my mom, I don't think the adult guys even knew my name.

For my grandson, learn everything you can from you dad and your other grandfather.  Make use of their knowledge. I know they want to share it.  

I want my grandson and his sister to know who I am

I sat dumbfounded on my front steps listening on the phone to somebody who said he was my nephew and he was trying to learn about his grandfather, my dad.  It happened just about a year ago and I found myself trying to catch my breath.

Why is this important?  

Having a nephew means I had a sister who had the same father as me.  We had different moms.  She had died a few years earlier in the country of Cyprus.  In the process, I learned about two other siblings, brothers, both who had died.

Again, why is this important?

My dad abandoned my mom and me in 1948 by walking out one morning and never coming back. He never called, wrote or anything to indicate that he was alive.  This was during a period when social services were less than basic.  My mom dug her heels in and took on her responsbility with full force.  She was a fighter and she knew how to love without condition.

My dad had an invisible presence that made him a reality everyday.  Life for my mom as a single-mom was crushingly hard.  She talked about my dad and what he did a lot.  To me as a kid, at times, it seemed to be constant.  She would get angry and she would cry.  She had a hurt that never left her. She carrie it to the day she died.

My nephew put flesh on a family that I never knew.  We talked for more than an hour.  He had searched to learn about his grandfather, my dad, and for a long time found nothing.  He was told that my dad had been killed in a plane crash.  His mom, my sister, did not want to talk about him.  

Then he Googled my dad's name and found posts I've written on this blog about him and then he emailed me and we talked on the phone within minutes.

So what?

The veil had been lifted a little and for a short time.  I saw a little of my family on my dad's side.  

It's a couple more pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle that covers my life.  Fewer pieces are left in the puzzle box.  I'm starting to see more of the whole picture.  It's been a lifetime of trying to fill a giant-sized hole in my identity.  

I've learned that I want my grandchildren, right now, it's just my grandson Xavier and soon to be sister, to know who I am.  I want them to know my part of who they came from.  It can range from the simple of why  Xavier and his mom's chins come in two part.  Same with his uncle Justin.  It can be the more complex family traits like a temper.  

I want him and the others to know.  God has laid some unique challenges in my lap.  I was never sure how it would turn out.  But, I'm getting a sense.  Can he and others learn from my story?  Can they find something to identify with?

I think so.  At least, that is my prayer, God willing.

I've changed the name of my father on my birth certificate

How many of you have never known one of your parents?  

Perhaps your mom or dad just flew the coop and never came back.  They didn't call nor did they write.  Nothing.  Maybe you got your last name from that person.  Maybe you got a dimple in your chin.  There might be a few facts from the left behind parent or from an aunt and uncle and that's it.

It could have been a divorce where your parents split and you hear from your dad once a year and then it's a very short visit.  That's it.  There's so much you would like to talk about with your dad about growing up and living life, but there's nothing.  Your mom is busy working and making ends meet and she does her best.  She has nobody to go to either.

You are left to fend for yourself and you do it.  But there's always a void there that's left by your missing parent.

It's happened to lots of peope.  Most people don't like to talk about it.  They don't want to admit that they have an emotional wound that never healed.  And it leaves a big scar that touches almost every aspect of your life.

It happened to me.  My dad experience touched every area of my life.  Let me be clear, I'm not blaming my dad for anything.  I'm a fully-grown adult times three.  I take responsibility for choices I've made.

But, my story is a life lesson for kids who have been abandoned or set aside by one of their parents. I'm almost 66 and I'm finally getting it.  But finding that answer has taken me to all parts of this country, including New York City, Long Island, Punta Gorda and Gainesville.  

I've been threatened and disowned as I searched and didn't find any answers.  I've confronted myself and others.  

I still never found what I was looking for.  I've been searching all my life for some kind of acknowledgement or affirmation from my father.  Some interest in how and what I was doing and that fatherly nod of the head that I did okay.

That's when I discovered that what I was looking for was right in front of me.  It was so close that I couldn't see it.  I had found what I was looking for and I didn't realize it.  

I had a different dad.  The wrong name was on my birth certificate.  I know it would be dumb to try to have it changed.  I know the truth and so does my wife.  I'm adopted.  There's a story here and I hope I can do it justice as I share it.  

Maybe there are some kids of any age out there looking for their dads or their moms and haven't been able to find them.  Are they findable?

I found mine.

 

God answered my prayer by introducing me to a group of Christian guys in prison

I prayed that God would give me a group of Christian guys to hang out with.  I was looking for friends who would share a common belief in God and in Jesus Christ and wanted to live a life that reflected those values.  For much of my life that prayer went unanswered.

Growing up I found that church was not the place to find friends.  Most of the guys who were active in attending seemed more interested in the busyness of the church.  They ushered, maybe attended an adult Sunday School class and sat with their families during the services.  Before and after church, conversations centered around politics, sports and cars.

There were the guys who ushered every Sunday and who lit the candles on the altar.  They were interested mainly in that narrow sliver of their spiritual life.

But they were not interested in talking about their faith and how it applied to their everyday life. There was no sense of mission or purpose.

I found it hard to work in very secular environments and to maintain my faith in a God who loved me and who wanted me to reflect that love in my everyday life.  The distance between my God and me grew wider and wider.

Then through some incredible circumstances I ran into a guy named Ken.  I was in my forties.  We were in a Bible study together when I heard his story.  As a young newspaper reporter, I covered a crime he had committed.  For him, it was the beginning of a period that saw him going to prison as a teenager and getting out as a full-fledged man.  Inside a prison cell, he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.

When I heard his story and remembered who he was I was truly amazed by the change in him.  I was also somewhat skeptical.  He and I spent the next couple of years having breakfast together once a week.  I spent a lot of time trying to determine if he was real.  And he was.

He was asked to share his story with guys in the prison where he did his time and he invited me to go with him.  

It was hard to say no to a friend and it was an attractive offer to do something that would provide fodder for coffeeshop conversation the next day.  

We went to a chapel service at one of the most challenged prisons in the state of Michigan.  I was expecting to find a bunch of knuckle-dragging guys who had a chromosome or two twisted the wrong way.  I found guys not unlike me, but who had sinned in a way that got them into prison.

It was the beginning of a life-changing journey that saw me going into prisons all over our state and making friends with guys who had numbers behind their names, rather than designations for college degrees earned or for professional certifications.

There were no pretenses in my prison experiences as we sang "Victory In Jesus."  We talked about everything involved in daily and eternal living.  And we looked to the Bible and to Jesus for the answers.

This was a key piece in my growing closer to God.

I wonder what God has to say to single-moms in heaven

Does God talk to people when they are in heaven?

If they do, I hope my mom gets an atta-girl from the Almighty who put everything together and who keeps it going and who will come back to earth at some point in history.

The toughest job in the world is not being president of the United States, it's being a single-mom.  I know that some will shake their heads and raise their eyebrows.  Moms are only human and make mistakes.  Mine did.  

But she devoted her life to sacrificing her own well-being for mine.  She taught me unconditional love. It was constant.  There were moments when the pressures of being a single-parent could get to her and she could get angry about her circumstances and about what my father did to us.

I remember my mom making heroic efforts to find my father.  She called our local police department which sent out a detective.  He agreed to help if my mom slept with him.  Her reaction was swift and volcanic.  It served to sour her on the process.

It seemed like she had to recalibrate to get back to the place where she got her strength.  That usually happened on Sunday in the solace of a worship service.  She took comfort from the liturgy that included hmyns, Bible readings and a sermon.  It connected her to God.

When the service was over, it was back to real life and all its demands.  But her batteries were filled with power that you get from no other source.

Think about all the single moms in the past and in the present.  It has to be one of the loneliest jobs in the world and one of the most important.  

I hope that the Heavenly Father is giving my mom some much deserved recognition.  And I hope that single-moms everywhere are lifted up and helped.

I owe my life to one very special single-mom. 

 

 

My favorite teachers: Brewster Peasley, Louie Doll, Gerry Faverman and Bud Meyer

I think some of the most powerful people in the world are teachers.  The good ones know where to find the switch in a student's head to turn on the desire to learn and they make learning exciting.

It was that way for me as I went through grade school and high school, then our community college and then the university.  My grades didn't always reflect the quanity and quality of what I learned and my desire to learn more.  I had four teachers throughout my academic career who really knew how to push my learning buttons.

They left an indelible mark on who I am today, what interests me and my curiosity about a wide-variety of things.

There's one I owe my career to and that is my high school journalism teacher Brewster Peasley.  I took his class in place of regular English where you learn literature and grammar.  It was a pure gamble.  I never liked reading fiction and I was never very good at trying to figure out symbols in a story and what they meant.  I still don't.

But my journalism class was different.  I could see that from the first class where Mr. Peasley talked about how he had been involved in some pretty important stuff during the Eisenhower years.  That got my attention.  My memory of his story that day is a little hazy, but he told about how he played a role in the Republican National Convention in Chicago that nominated Ike.  At first blush, I was really impressed.  Then he shared how he had intentionally mislead us.  He didn't lie, but he didn't tell the whole story.

Journalism opened the world to me.  As a reporter, I could learn about anything about anybody on any given day and that turned me on.  I found a career.  Until then I said I wanted to be a lawyer.  I don't know if I had the intellectual firepower to be an attorney.  Without that class, I'd probably still be living in the small northern Michigan town where I was born and raised.

Dr. Louis Doll was a history professor at the community college that I attended.  He was tall, tolerably arrogant and had a passion for going back to original documents in history.  But, he also had an insatiable desire to debunk the Bible.  Students had to buy a paper he wrote showing that God's Word was nothing more than myth.  Some of my fellow students were really changed.  I just got more stubborn in my beliefs.  

Another professor at my community college was Dr. Gerry Faverman.  I took a Russian history class from him.  He was a huge man, had an imposing voice and seemed to have the ability to recall passages from any of thousands of his favorite books.

He had a booming voice that matched his provocative style.  I'd read through an extra armful of books just to prove him wrong.  And then I realized what he was doing.  He was helping me think and explore stuff that really interested me.  Back then that was politics, particularly as it related to the old Soviet Union.  Our paths crossed again in Lansing where I spent most of my working career.

I owe a lot to Dr. Bud Myer who taught at the journalism school at Michigan State.  I was part of a regular line-up of students outside his office door who waited a couple hours or more just to talk to him.  I took every class he taught.  He helped me take a person or an issue and lift it up and look at it from all sides.  I always wanted to learn more as a result of his class.

He the reason that I have the question "so what" burned in my mind.  After his class, I could never read or hear anything without asking, so what?  

A couple of years ago, we went to an Easter Service where the title of the sermon was "The Easter Story: So what?"  That made me listen and it made me think of Bud.

There were other teachers who impressed me, but it was these four who really left their stamp on me and who I am today.

 

I am counting on Jeff Manion being right

I listened in the auditorium as Jeff Manion talked about a passage from Ephesians 1 that says we have been adopted by God.  We have become part of his family.  We are his beloved sons and daughters.

He went through a whole litany of places and positions where people get their identity.  For many it is their jobs and their position in the community.  It can be athletic skill.  Musical skill.  For many it can come from being a parent.

And then he got to my part of the list where he said many get their identity from having been abandoned by someone.  He talked figuratively about being thrown off the train by a parent who just plain walks out and never comes back.  He had my attention.

As long as I can remember my identity had been calibrated from that point where my dad made a statement by just walking out on my mom and me.  I wasn't important enough for him to stick around, hence, I always felt I wasn't that important.  This is a feeling that would come and go.

It was like a monkey on my back that would ride there for weeks and then one day kick me in my side with big spurs on its feet and I would be reminded of who I really was.  I was the person that my dad wanted my mother to abort when she was pregnant.  

Then I found him in my late twenties and he totally disowned me.  I went to his door on the other end of the country expecting at the very least that he would at the very least acknowledge me as his son. He threatened me if I didn't leave.  Not knowing what he would do I left.  I was devastated.

His reaction to me was another big piece in the puzzle that went into the make-up of my identity.

I've gone through periods where I would mentally call myself a loser, shithead, stupid and all other kinds of stuff.  

This didn't stop me from living life, but it took some of the quality and the confidence that you need in daily living.  I did stuff.  I worked at some really neat jobs and knew a bunch of important people.

But there was always the dad piece in my identity.  And then last October, Jeff Manion, the pastor where we attend church started talking about how we got our primary identity.  This is the one that really counts.  

It came from being adopted into God's family and this happened through what Jesus did on the cross to pay for all the crap of mankind.  

Jeff kept saying, "Remember who you are.  Remember who you are.  Remember who you are."  He said that I was adopted. paid a price for and firmly sealed into God's family.

I really need to hear that everyday and today is no exception.  So do my kids and my grandson and grandchildren to come.

I had heard pastors say this kind of thing before, but it always came across as a bunch of spiritual blah, blah, blah.  I could never wrap my hands or my heart around it.  This spiritual truth seemed unreachable and unreal.

Maybe I need to have it tatooed on my arm or on my hand so I can constantly see it.

I'm counting on this being the truth.

 

 

 

I don't know why this stuff still bothers me

Do you remember the poem from the Antionne Fisher movie where he talks about the little boy still inside of him?  He had been abandoned by his mom, never knew his dad and grew up in some pretty bad foster homes.

Sometimes, I can really relate to that poem and I remember showing that movie to guys inside of the prison where I volunteered and watching their reaction.  Many had tears in their eyes.

I still feel that way when I see movies or stories about fathers and sons.  There are tears just beneath the surface waiting to come out.  

I felt that way when I saw a picture of my son-in-law and my toddler grandson walking hand-in-hand around a track carrying a basketball.  You could see it in their eyes.  They enjoyed being with each other.  I want that picture hanging in my family picture shrine in my study.  

It's the same with two pictures of my son and me taken on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol.  The first was taken fifteen years ago at Stand In The Gap where  a million guys got together for a Promise Keepers event.  A few weeks ago, we took another picture in the same spot.  In the first, he was a newly-minted teenager and in this one he's a married man.  And I'm really proud of him.

I can't change what happened to me.

But I can encourage my son, my son-in-law, my grandson, grandchildren to come and other guys with kids.  

The real payback in life will come from those moments together where you are talking and caring for each other.  It doesn't take a lot, but the effort can change somebody's world.

I wonder if my dad got much attention from his father

I often wonder how well my dad knew his father.  Did they spend time together?  Did my dad understand what made his father tick?  Did my dad ever get an atta-boy from his father?  Did they talk about life?  Politics?  God?  Girls?

My dad grew up somewhere in New York.  I've heard Millerton mentioned.  I think he came from a small town environment and somehwere along the line moved to New York City.

I think my biological grandmother on my dad's side died when he was a child and that my dad had a step mother.  

But, the big question is who did he have as male role models.  Was it his dad?  What was my grandfather like?  My mom met some of these people and shared some of this with me when I was very young.  But, I was too young to be really interested.  Because of the intense emotion involved in talking about my father, I remember more of the strong feelings and less of what she learned.

Did I ever have a male role model who took an interest in what I did and what I was thinking?  In a way, in a kind of, sort of way I did.  I had some uncles who took some time with me occasionally.  And I'm thankful for that.  

I will wonder about my Grandpa Thorp.  Did he spend much time with his kids?  Did he take an interest? My guess is that he didn't.  Did my dad show more interest in his other kids than he did with me?  I got none.

What's the cost of this lack of "daddy-interest" through the generations?  It has to be huge.  I still look for that older guy to say atta-boy.  That's becoming less of a desire as I get older and as my perspective changes.

That started to happen last October.  I was told to "remember who you are."  My real identity doesn't come from being my father's son.  What do I mean?  Do I really buy that?  Do I understand what that means?  

There's more to worshipping God than page five and fifteen

I grew up believing that real worship of God meant going to church on Sunday and using an order of service from the hymn book that started on either page five or 15.  It was always the same.  The hymns were always in the same place.  The readings were done in the same order and there was always just one place for the sermon.

There was the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed and they always had a reserved spot in the service.  

When I got to a certain age I could recite all these without thinking and I could run through most of the liturgy in a way where my mouth would say the right thing, but my head would be someplace else.  I'd leave church thinking that was worship.

It was something that you never questioned while going to a parochial school and my aunts and uncles would rarely talk about it.  My uncles would shrug their shoulders and then change the subject and a few of my aunts would move into a mini-sermon about the holiness of what was done during the sermon.

In my teen years, I started to raise questions revolving around the service, particularly sermons.  I had to be among the first in my denomination to take notes to try and understand.  I tried to outline what pastors said.  I would ask.  I grew up feeling that my faith hadn't evolved enough to truly understand how it applied to my life or that I was just slow in the head to understand.

 

My mom always had a Portals of Prayer under her pillow

After my dad left, I know that there were days when my mom was not sure about where the next meal would come from.  She always had a small notebook on the kitchen table with literally every penny she spent carefully listed.

Next to her notebook, she always had her church envelopes which she was very diligent about using every week.  I remember lots of weeks where she had nothing more than a coin or two to put in the offering for the week.  She never looked to get anything in return, but wanted to give back a share of what she had been given.

Another constant in her life was a copy of the Portals of Prayer was always under her pillow.  It was a devotional book published by her church denomination.  I know that she would use it and I know that she would say the prayers in the back.  There was a prayer for each day of the week and ones for special occasions.

I know she prayed.  But in the denomination I grew up in prayer was something that lay people didn't talk about a whole lot.  Prayers were either written in a book or booklet and others were usually said by a pastor.

Just sitting down and praying together was unheard of at least in my experience.  

My mom would listen to me say a "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer every night."  It was the same prayer every night for years.  I'd always tack on the phrase at the end where I'd ask God to "bring a message from my daddy."  It never happened.  But, I did find him when I was in my late twenties.

He did give me a message when I knocked on his door.

He wasn't happy to see me.

 

I often think about the humanity of my father

It's always been too easy for me to look at what my father did and not who he was as a person.

I saw how he cheated on my mother with other women during the short time they were together and I saw how that hurt her deeply.  Then I saw his complete abandonment of me and my mom.  It was like we were tossed off a train in the middle of the desert left to die.

Now let me emphasize that I know how much I've been blessed.  I will talk about that, but not now.

But, I never spent a whole lot of time looking at who my dad was as a human being.  There had to be more to who he was as a person.  My mom married him.  She must have seen something in him.

How much did she know him before they were married?  

He had to have some goodness in him.  What about his childhood?  His teen years?  Young adult?  His siblings?  His dad?  His mom?  What were the tipping points that changed him?

I grew up with the fear that I'd be like him and run away from problems.  When life pinched me, I would wonder if I had it in me to run away like my dad.

I'm still here.

Christmas celebrations are made for real families

Our world is made for two parent families, a dad, a mom and kids along with aunts and uncles who have kids and grandparents who are surrounded by their kids and their grandkids.  It's not tooled up to handle single-parent families where there's a mom with kids and no husband or dad.

That was my experience growing up in the near-northern reach of Michigan where the memory of past Christmases is still very clear.  It was a time to be happy, at least for a few minutes.  But, I found that it never lasted.  There was a whole lot of sadness and emptiness.

It might not be too strong to say I hated it when radio stations, the music played over loudspeakers downtown and other places would be Christmas Carols.  It wasn't real.  It wasn't my reality.

My mom felt the full sting of being left alone to raise a sickly kid during the late forties and she had the entire responsibility to make sure that we had something to eat and a roof over our heads.  What part did my aunts and uncles play in helping her?  The church?  Other people?  There are lots of stories that I remember.

What stands out are church and family functions during Christmas.  I may not have had this formed thought in my mind as a kid, but I grew to feel that the Savior came first for real families where both parents were present and then if He had time for the rest of us.  

Aunts and uncles would quite often invite us over for dinner on Christmas Eve and Day.  There were great dinners and lots of laughing and talking.  But I never felt connected to the family chain.  It could have been the times, but my uncles never seemed to want to connect with me.

As I grew I found a doorway to a connection and this was politics.  I became interested in how we as a people governed ourselves through the political process.  They were interested in that too.  So, at age nine and ten, I could raise questions about President Eisenhower and the U.S. Congress and Republicans and Democrats and unions.  There was a connection there for a while and then it would go away for a bit and then come back later.

I was part of one children's Christmas program that I never forgot.  I was in first or second grade at Mount Olive in Bay City and I had a piece or a verse to memorize and recite.  It was John 3:16.  It stuck with me throughout my life and never left.  There was one verse that was seared into my memory and that was it.

My views about Christmas have transitioned quite a bit.  But now I'm part of a real family.  I'm now a grandpa and I'm married.  But I see more clearly the hope that the birth of Jesus ignites.

Growing up in the Banks neighborhood of Bay City

I grew up in a neighborhood called Banks because it's situated right on the Saginaw River which runs out into a bay.  I grew up with boats big and small going right by my house.  There were gravel boats and big foreign ships.  There was a shipbuilder about a half-mile down the river where guided missle destroyers were built.

I can't wait for my grandson Xavier to ask about where I grew up.

It was a world onto itself that had an old rickety bridge as its main doorway.  When bigger boats wanted to pass through,it had to swing its center span open where there was a bridge tender in a neat little house. As a kid, I'd stay on to get a free ride that would disconnect me from both sides.  As I got older, I'd go down there on Sundays during the spring and summer when the bridge would open and close constantly.

Riding the center span provided an escape from the rigors of growing up in a single-parent home in the fifties and sixties.  It also fed my imagination as big freighters and tug boats passed through.

Next to the bridge on the shore were big gravel piles that were replenished on a frequent basis by boats that would come in right in front of our house.  They had big conveyor belts that took the gravel from the boat to the shore.  As a kid, those gravel piles were my imaginary mountains that could be climbed with some risk that the rocks would move and cover you.

On our street, there were two separated little business districts with bars anchoring each end, the Town Tavern and the Last Chance Bar.  They were patronized by neighborhood people and by a regular group of bar flies.

Our neighborhood had a couple of convenience stores, a little restaurant, a city dairy, a fire station, a barber shop and when I was four or five years old,there was a milling company kitty corner from our house that made wooden pallets.  I remember the day that it burned down.

This is the neighborhood where my mom and dad bought a big old house that had to be way over a hundred years old.  My mom talked plenty and with some detail about the circumstances of moving there when I was a baby.

But most of the details went in one ear and out the other.  She talked about such things often.  I'd listen and nod my head and acknowedge what she was saying.  Now I wish I had taken notes.

I feel some pride in being able to say I grew up in Banks.  I'm not sure why.  It was a place where there were no pretensions.  There were no country clubbers where I grew-up and a minimal amount of fanciness.

This is the house where we were living when my dad walked out one day in 1948 and never came back.  He left for a carpentry job and just vanished into thin air.  

It's where I grew up.  I did a whole lot of learning here.  It's where I became a man.  A lot of my personal history took place right there.

What would I say if my grandson asked me about where I got my identity?

What if my eighteen-month-old grandson Xavier called me up on the phone and asked me where I got my identity?  Now he's smart, but he's not quite at the point of asking those deep questions.

But he may very well ask that at some point.  Just who was or is his Grandpa Thorp.  What defined one of the patriarchs of his clan?  What made him tick?  What gave his life purpose?  Where did he find true meaning?  What did he accomplish in his life?  What was he most proud of?  What would he do differently if he had the chance?

I could go the job route.  I got a good chunk of my identity from the various jobs I've held.  I worked as a reporter at a major metropolitan newspaper covering a big neighborhood in a large city.  It was there that I talked to a really big-time mayor, a mob boss and a local minister who became a national political figure.

I spent a chunk of time at a series of smaller newspapers where I covered city council's and township boards right next to another major metropolitan area.  My by-line was in the paper multiple times a week.  I knew lots of people and they knew me.

At our State Capitol, I reported for a chain of small newspapers through a column that was in 40 plus papers every week.  Then I was the pressroom manager for lots of years at the Capitol Building where I served as a conduit between reporters and the legislature.

I could go the family route.  I have really enjoyed being married.  I love having the title husband on my resume.  Doing stuff together, facing life challenges as a couple has been super beyond description. There's a buzz that comes from being part of the synergy of being a couple who love each other.

Then I could tell Xavier about the dad role that I've played for almost 30 years.  I love everything about being a dad.  What tops it?  Nothing, in my opinion?  I can remember every moment when his mom was born and I can remember just about every event of her childhood that I was involved with.  Same for his uncle.  

What about sports and my performance in that arena?  I didn't really play any.  I tried out for Little League once to get a baseball cap, but I didn't make the cut.

For several years, I played a lot of golf with his uncle.  That was fun, pure fun.  We had fun trying to get the ball to go where it didn't want to go.  I wasn't very good at it.  But my grandson's uncle, my son and I, had a grand time.  

I'd put being a father in all caps in resume.  I have a life's worth of fathering memories.  These are pure gold to me.

Next I could point to my various involvements in politics.  I got a big chunk of my identity there.  My political interests gave me at a young age an entry into the world of my uncles.  They would listen to me and I would listen to them.  My involvements in this arena grew.  

I became a page in the state Senate during my high school years and got to know a lot of legislators.

After college, I returned to the legislature and never left.  I retired from there.

There was another title that was part of who I am and that's being a son.

I was a son to my mother and that was important.  She was a vital person in my life.

But the other half of that was always a dark hole.  It was filled a whole lot of nothingness with the exception of bits and pieces of information about the person who contributed to the other half of me.

I always wanted to be the son of a father.  I wanted a dad who could say he loved me and who was proud of me.  That meant more to me than anything at certain times of my life.

It never happened.

That hole was not filled in until I was firmly in my sixties.