bleeding out loud

Not long ago I was lamenting to a friend some of my doubts and fears. The usual doubts and fears of a self absorbed, image conscious young communicator, things like “I don’t have anything to say.” “Why do I even try to write or preach?” “I’ve got nothing compelling to offer the world.”

“That’s not the Brad Nelson I know,” he replied.

And it stopped me short like a slap to the face.

“The Brad Nelson I know is tenacious and never stops. He overwhelms things with determination. He keeps at it. And besides, you do have stuff to say.”

It was such a gift and a much needed reminder. And it was true. For as long as I can remember that was how I operated. As a soccer player I had decent talent, but what I lacked in talent I made up for in effort. There were plenty of guys more talented than I, but I breezed by them by putting in the time before practice or after. In high school, I’d spend hours in the side yard perfecting my kick or juggling. I didn’t have a big frame, hadn’t even lifted a weight until college in fact. Once in college I somehow always ended up playing opposite a huge Nigerian forward or a ridiculously large, ill-tempered Swede. Their size never deterred me. I went at them fearlessly.

Now that I’m a father, I am seeing the same tenacity in my daughter. She fears nothing, and one of the gifts I am most excited to give her as a father is the periodic and timely reminder of the truth of who she has been all along: Fearless.

Where did the fearlessness come from? Was it innate, planted in us from the day we were born-something related to God’s “I knew you before you were born and I knit you together in your mother’s womb?” Or was it learned? Did we simply adapt to a large world because we Nelson’s tend to have smaller frames?

Thinking about all of this reminded me of an experience I had as a five year old. Our family had gone to visit my mother’s parents on their farm in Oklahoma. The farm was a magical place, hidden in the Ozark Mountains by endless pine trees and almost no hint of society. There were cows, horses, chickens, and goats. There was also no shortage of cow-shit, horse-shit, chicken-shit, or goat-shit, all words I wasn’t supposed to say.

My father particularly hated the goats. He often tells a story of running out to his car one day only to discover one of the goats on top of the car, walking around on the roof. They’d try to eat the bumper. As a five year old, I liked them. They were small. They weren’t anything like the massive bulls or horses that you thought could trample you at any given moment.

At the time, I was very into Mr. T from the show the A-Team. Why my parents didn’t let me watch the Smurfs but did let me watch the gun toting, violence threatening Mr. T is beyond me. I was always walking around throwing out Mr. T quotes. “Put em’ up chump.”

On this particular day, we were standing near the goat pen when I must have made a Mr. T reference because my father suddenly turned to me and said, “Hey Brad, get in the goat pen and tell that goat to “put em’ up chump.” So I did.

I got in the pen, locked eyes with a goat about twenty yards away and confidently put my dukes up and said, “I pity the fool. Put em’ up chump,” and that son of a bitch put his head down in Hollywood fashion, pawed the dirt three or four times, and got a twenty yard head start and rammed me right in the stomach.

When I fell to the ground it was like there was no more oxygen in Oklahoma. I tried to breathe but nothing was happening, like one of those dreams when you try to run from a bear but your legs don’t work and you wake up just as the Grizzly is taking a swipe at you. It hadn’t occurred to me until just now that all of this happened at the encouragement of my father. Knowing him, I’m sure he felt bad, but I’m also sure he and whoever else was standing there laughed until their abs hurt. After all, this was the same man who would drive around town with my uncle and me as a baby, dropping my infant shorts at intersections then honking the horn while mooning people with me, sticking my bare baby butt cheeks up against the window.

This morning, as I ponder where the fearless tenacity came from, I’m wondering could it be the goat?

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.

Every now and then, without fail, someone asks me about the name of this blog. “Bleeding out loud? That’s kind of dark don’t you think?” So here’s the story behind it.

Last year I went to see Over the Rhine at Calvin College. Talk about soul. Everything about their music communicated a kind of depth and richness that people only come to through suffering. Their opening song set the pace. “I don’t wanna waste your time with music you don’t need. Why would I autograph a book that you won’t even read? I’ve got a different scar for every song and blood left still to bleed. So I don’t wanna waste your time with music you don’t need.”

It’s a bit like the writing advice given by Red Smith. “Writing is really quite simple-all you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and open a vein.” Frederick Buechner seems to have caught onto this saying, “I wish I had told my writing students to give some thought to what they wanted their books to make happen inside the people who read them…for my money anyway, the only books worth reading are books written in blood.”

And of course the metaphor resonates because of our own experience with grief and loss. I recall lying awake in bed after Rich’s funeral with an acute sense of God’s presence and the simultaneous and overwhelming absence of His comfort. Neither Trisha or I were asleep. We just laid there, awake for hours in the dark to the sound of sniffles and breath, which, in that moment, struck me as the sound of souls hemorrhaging, having been torn in two by sadness. Then I happened across the story from the book of Genesis where God confronts Cain for having killed his brother Abel. “Listen,” says God. “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

Lament, I came to understand, is the faithful process of expressing loss and complaint, a kind of bleeding out loud. Except that lament seems to be lost in our culture. And why wouldn’t it be? The idea of lingering in your sadness is depressing. Except that in doing so, Trisha and I have stumbled onto one of the strangest paradoxes, that our wounds can become portals through which God breathes new life into the world if only we steward them well. This is basically the paradox of Jesus’ being killed by Roman crucifixion.

Being crucified was what happened to people who crossed Rome. It was a very painful, very public, and very shameful way to die. Yet it was through the cross that Christ came to be resurrected. Suddenly what was a symbol of imperial power became an imaginative symbol for new life. I think for anyone who tries their hand at the way of Jesus, this paradox rings true. The very things that ought to ruin us can instead become sources of profound hope not only for ourselves but for the world. And that, Frederick Buechner, is what I want to make happen in the people who read or hear the words I write or speak, that they will come alive in others in even a fraction of the way they have come alive in me.

Traveling with small children is a stupid idea. Not so much because of the kids, but because of all the stuff that comes with them. Before we had our two girls, our home was clean, orderly and quaint-the kind of place you wouldn’t hesitate to sit down and entertain guests in. All that changed with the first baby shower. That’s when the stuff started arriving.

That stuff quickly mixed in with all the other stuff we already had, and before I knew what was happening, our house was no longer an abode of Shalom but a gauntlet to be survived. There are the train tracks to walk over, the building blocks to be avoided, the random toy cars that can take out an ankle with precision accuracy, not to mention all of the deadly accessories that come with a toy house. This was all fine until one day I nearly brushed my teeth with diaper rash cream. Why in God’s name would someone design a tube of diaper rash cream that looks just like a tube of toothpaste? And then why would anyone put diaper rash cream in the same cabinet as the toothpaste?

Leaving home for vacation doesn’t mean leaving all the stuff behind. Oh no. It means taking as much of it as you can with you to wherever it is you’re going. Where we were going was Orlando, and getting there meant taking the kids and all their stuff through Detroit’s Metro Airport.

Maybe it’s just the culture of airport personnel, or maybe it’s just the culture of airport personnel in Detroit, but every airport worker I encountered shared one trait in common: Absolute disinterest in my plight. With airport personnel, I feel like you can get a range of different people. There are the professionals. They’re nice but in an all business kind of way. Then there are the perky ones whose bubbly energetic banter just irritates me. Or there are the bitchy ones who have learned how to give someone attitude while at the same time asking, “How can I help you?” Then, there are the airport personnel at Detroit Metro, and they are just flat out disinterested. When they talk to you, their faces are expressionless. The woman at the airline counter didn’t even look me in the face when giving me instructions. Instead she was looking behind me. I was trying to listen but I kept looking behind me to see who or what she was looking at.

Then there was security. Moving through the airport I looked like a pack mule. Every inch of usable body space was saddled with a diaper bag, a breast pump, two personal bags, and two pieces of carry on baggage. Plodding forward in ass-like fashion, I tried to corral our three year old-keeping her in line and getting all our things through the scanner. The TSA worker obviously didn’t care that I was tending a child. I was trying to convince Braylen to follow me when I made eye contact with him. He looked at me with incredulous eyes as if to say, “Let’s go. What’s the hold up? Step through.” Then my three year old came into view. I thought then that he’d soften. I was wrong. “Come on. Let’s go,” he said rudely. The TSA is not an administration of people concerned with transportation safety as much as they are a compassionless race of human beings with no capacity for mercy, the result of Social Darwinism gone wild. Toting Braylen around always wins me compassion. I was thinking, “She’s got braids in her hair for God’s sake. Braids!”

His disinterest was shared by the woman working the Caribou Coffee store in the terminal. Our flight had been delayed, and I needed a cup of coffee, but the aluminum rail that closes over terminal stores at closing time was half drawn. I asked the woman at the register if they were closed and without even looking up from what she was doing she nodded as if to say yes. She didn’t even look at me. I could’ve been anyone. I could’ve been Jesus Christ come down from the right hand of God the Father, standing in the Detroit Metro Airport in a bathrobe and something like birkenstocks asking her that question, and she’d have been clueless.

The flight itself was mostly uneventful, and gave me the opportunity to study the passengers seated around me. Over the last month I’ve been watching the first three seasons of LOST. So I looked at everyone around me and tried to match them to characters on the show. There was a bald man two rows in front of me. He was John Locke. There was a forty-something guy with headphones on near the front of the plane. He was Hurley. Bernard and Rose were seated next to me, snuggling obnoxiously and snoring loudly.

I wondered what life would be like with these people if our plane were to crash. Then it occurred to me that our flight path was over the continental U.S. and not the South Pacific. If we crashed, we’d be lost in Kentucky rather than a deserted Pacific island. After ten minutes of thinking about how we were in the back of the plane and would land smack dab in the middle of “the others,” (and I could totally see rural Kentuckians being “the others”) I decided that I’d given too much thought to the whole thing.

In the end, I didn’t mind being the donkey, and watching Braylen roll her Hello Kitty carry-on through the airport was nothing short of hysterical.