bleeding out loud

Last Friday my nose started hurting. By Saturday night I knew something was seriously wrong. My face, from my eyes to my upper lip, was swollen and bright red. I could feel every heartbeat in my nose. It felt like my face was going to explode. I called a co-worker to let him know that I might not be at church in the morning. Just as church was about to start the next morning, my friend who is the pastor at our church called and asked, “What’s up with your face?”

I thought I knew what the problem was. I explained that it was the result of an ingrown hair in my nose and that it had gotten infected. But that I had one in both nostrils. Double Barrel. “So, like, what do you for that?” he asked. “I dunno. Right now I’m icing my face.” He laughed. “You’re icing your face, right now? That’s awesome. Well I think I’ll ask the 9am service to pray for your right nostril and the 11am service to pray for your left nostril.” I laughed. It hurt.

Trisha thought I was overreacting. “It’s just a zit inside your nose,” she said. “It’s not a zit,” I shot back. Our 3 year old was playing nearby but obviously overhead the interaction because about twenty minutes later she came up and said, “Daddy how’s your zit?” “It’s not a zit,” I said, frustrated. I could hear Trisha cackling in the other room. Braylen, perceiving that her mom thought she was really funny, has asked me at least 5 times in the last day, “How’s your zit?” Now I just sigh in response, and I can see Trisha’s shoulders start shaking and tears forming at the corner of her eyes as she tries to keep from laughing. Of course Braylen sees this and thinks it’s hilarious. The beautiful women of this family are already aligning against me.

I was hoping that when I woke up this morning things would be better. They weren’t. My nose looked like the snout of a water buffalo, and there was no way I was going into public with that thing. “Dude, did someone hit you in the face with a golf club or have you been plucking your nose hairs again?” So I called into work again, then phoned the doctor’s office for a visit.

The doctor took one look at me and said, “Oh yea. That’s an infection and it’s gotten into your skin and is spreading.” He felt my lymph nodes and I winced. “Your lymph nodes are fighting the infection. That’s a good sign, but if it gets into the cartilage in your nose, it could be a real problem. I’m giving you a prescription for some intense antibiotics. If you don’t see a reduction in the redness or swelling within 48 hours, you need to go to the emergency room.” I immediately had visions of having to have my nose amputated and spending the rest of my life looking like a metro-sexual Porky the Pig. For the record, I don’t think of myself as metro but the accusation has been leveled against me on more than one occasion.

The antibiotic prescription came with this warning: This medicine may cause swelling, soreness, or breakage of tendons. Breakage of tendons? My tendons could just snap off while taking this medicine? Ah. Yes. I’ll have three with every meal for the next ten days please.

Seriously how does a nose hair wreak this kind of havoc? I never paid any attention to nose hair. I never had to. But the older I’ve gotten, the more they seem to grow. And when Trisha started asking if there was a daddy long legs hiding out just inside my nose, I figured it was time to do something about it. I bought the nose hair trimmer, and things were good for a while. The only trouble is that when you cut hair it seems to grow faster. Then one day the lady cutting my hair said, “You know. I can wax your nose for you and won’t have to trim it for a long time.” At the moment, it seemed like a reasonable and even thoughtful gesture. I thought it was really nice of her. Having now lived through a nose waxing I would have heard her invitation very differently. On this side of the waxing her offer would have sounded something like this: “Would you like me to pour hot wax up your nose and then yank on your short hairs until every last one of those little bastards is gone?” It was awful, but at least it was over quickly. What she extracted from my nose looked like a small gerbil. It was hideous. But once I breathed in, it was like a whole new world.

About two weeks after that waxing was when I got the first “situation” inside my nose. Lesson learned. Don’t wax. Don’t pluck. Trim.

There are a handful of people-friends, speakers, and writers-who have dramatically shaped how I have come to understand the world.

Mark Baas. Steve Weber. Matt Krick. Rob Bell. Walter Brueggemann. Lawrence Kushner. Phyllis Tickle. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Eugene Peterson. Henri Nouwen. NT Wright. Frederick Buechner, and my wife, who on more than one occasion has offered prophetic insight in the form of what she calls a “newsflash.” These are intensely truthful and rarely pleasant.

All of these people share one thing in common: The power of words.

In Hebrew davar means word, but it also means event-which is to say that words are eventful. They make things happen. As Brueggemann says, “Our words create our worlds.” So in Genesis 1, God speaks and a world is created. Words have the capacity to get inside your bloodstream and bounce around inside you for days, weeks, and months on end, sometimes even a lifetime.

Words are powerful in that they have the capacity to create life and to destroy it. A few years ago I did a sermon on words from the book of James. James talks about the tongue being a great evil. “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” I bet James cursed like a sailor.

But the description got me to thinking about the phrase linguistic napalm, the power of words to explode in life giving or life taking ways. I asked a few people what they thought of the phrase and one particularly genius woman said, “It makes me think of inflammatory words that leave lasting scars.” An apt description.

I put experiments in linguistic napalm as the sub-title of this blog, because sub-titles seem to attract publishers (just kidding, but seriously they do). It’s the sub-title of the blog because I hope to subvert the phrase for life giving purposes, to speak and to write words that create worlds, words that get on people and leave lasting marks.

Earlier I mentioned doing a part deux post regarding the pure in heart. I figured instead of posting a lengthy note that I’d just link to the sermon.