stealth communications

A couple of days before Christmas, 1993, I was sitting in my parent’s living room watching a football game when I got a call from my uncle in Baghdad. After a very quick hello, he jumped right into asking if my father was home. I told him no, so he very quickly gave me a flight number for a plane that was coming into Dallas the next day. After twice telling me that it was very important to be at the airport tomorrow, he told me to give his love to my mom and hung up. The next day we went to the airport and met my cousin and his wife, who had just spent the last several weeks sneaking out of a war decimated Iraq.

When Sadaam Hussein ruled Baghdad, his government kept very close tabs on the people. In order to make an overseas phone call, one had to go to the post office and wait in line. Why? Because the government had agents who listened to all outgoing phone calls.

Whenever my family would call, all hell could be going on around them, but they said nothing: “Oh, everything is just fine! Nothing to report here. How are you?” So intimidated by this reality, my father would never even say anything about Iraq or family during phone calls that took place entirely in the United States.

*******

When I created this blog I attached a site meter, which basically tells me how many people visit my blog. One of the features of the site meter is that it will tell you what city, state and country a visit originated. It does not tell you the IP address of the computer, just the location and company of the server the visit was routed from.

For example, whenever my mom checks out the site, it registers:

Verizon.com: Carrollton, Texas.

Since we moved, whenever Jenn or I log in, the site meter registers:

Cox.net: Fayetteville, Arkansas.

A couple of weeks ago, at the start of the Muslim fast of Ramadan, I sent a very small email to my family all over the world. In three sentences I told them that the move had gone well, gave them our new address, and signed the message with “Happy Ramadan.”

The next day I noticed a change in the site meter. Whenever Jenn or I logged into the blog, it no longer came up as being routed through Fayetteville, Arkansas. Instead, our internet traffic is being routed through:

Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana.

Huh?

So I ran a little experiment. I took my laptop up to the chapel office, and logged in using the router there. It registered Cox.net: Fayetteville, Arkansas. I went back home and logged in using our neighbor’s router. Again, it registered Cox.net: Fayetteville, Arkansas. But sure enough, when I logged back in using our router, it let us know that we were being routed through Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. I tried the same experiment again, but this time with Jenn’s laptop. Same result.

I called Cox. The first guy I talked to laughed uncomfortably and said, “I don’t know why it is routing through an Air Force base, but I have a pretty good idea.” He sent me up the chain of command, but they also could not tell me why everyone in my apartment complex was being routed through their local server, but I was being routed through an Air Force base.

Finally, a little Google search informed us that Barksdale is the home of the Air Force’s communications and listening center. Well, that makes perfect sense.

*******

Last Saturday Jenn and I scalped tickets to the Kentucky – Arkansas game. The singing of the National Anthem was punctuated with a flyover by an Air Force B-2 Stealth Bomber. As the black sliver approached from the north, the crowd began to whip itself up into a frenzy. But over the cheers I heard the public address announcer state that this very bomber was part of the initial invasion of Baghdad during Operation “Iraqi Freedom.”

The flyover was impressive. I have never seen a Stealth Bomber in person. Those suckers are big, loud and very intimidating. And as the plane passed right above us, with its roaring engines completely drowning out the roaring crowd, I couldn’t help but think of the irony:

This very Air Force plane dropped bombs over Baghdad to “liberate” the Iraqis from an oppressive government that listened to their own citizen’s communications. And now that very same Air Force is listening to mine.

The USAF Stealth Bomber as it approaches Razorback Stadium.

Click here for another First Born story of football game flyovers.

desert people

Bed·ou·in |bed(ə)win|
noun
a nomadic Arab of the desert.

God’s people have always been desert people.

In reality the desert is not just sand and heat, but solitude and silence. The desert that God leads his people into is both literal and figurative. It is the furnace of transformation for the sake of becoming set free from our false selves and more like Christ.

After they were set free from slavery in Egypt they wandered in the desert for forty years before they could enter the Promised Land.

Christ Himself spent forty days in the wilderness fasting and being tempted by Satan before beginning His public ministry.

In the 4th and 5th centuries, the Desert Fathers and Mothers fled to the desert in Egypt for years in order to be stripped of their false and sinful selves so that they could be transformed in the image of Christ for the sake of the world.

The Benedictine Monks based their prayer and work on the ideas of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. And when a group of monks fled the French Revolution and landed in Boston, they immediately set out to build a new monastery by asking where they could find the desert in America. The answer? Kentucky.


And that is where I found myself… at Asbury Seminary, just an hour down the road from that very monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani.

In the “desert” of Estes Chapel & Gethsemani I prayed and was silent, wept and danced, had nothing and had more than enough. At the altar I said good-by to my church and home of over twenty years, dealt with a war, interceded for my father’s health, confessed my sins and woundedness, was reconciled to my family, met and married my wife, and was called to pick up and go again.


In the Exodus story, God led his people with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. This meant that whenever they looked to see where they were going, they could only see God. And so now the same pillar of fire that moved us from Texas to Kentucky has moved us to another place I never would have imagined: Arkansas.

I have no idea what I am doing. I have no idea what will happen. But when I try to look beyond the dunes, all I can see is a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

We have more junk than the Bedouin. So our pack camel was a 26 ft. truck with a trailer for the car. Jenn drove behind me and took this picture as we crossed the Mississippi River.

For a very good book on the desert and the spiritual life, check out this book.

life on the farm

This parable was first shared with me by my good friend John David Walt:

A young boy went to spend the summer on his grandfather’s farm. The grandfather took his grandson to the back pasture, which was covered with brush, trash, weeds and old farm junk. “Your first chore this summer is to clean up this back pasture so we can till the soil and plant some fruit,” the grandfather said.

After the old man left, the young boy looked around at all that needed to be done and became overwhelmed. The pasture was so large, and the brush and junk was so deep, that he had no idea where to begin. Completely overwhelmed, he sat down in one spot and spent the rest of the day there, trying to figure out where to begin.

The next day, he walked back out to the pasture and was once again overwhelmed by the amount of work to be done. He again became paralyised by not knowing where to begin, and so again he picked a spot, sat down, and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out where to begin. This became the young boy’s routine every day for the next several weeks.

With just a week to go in the summer, the grandfather trekked out to the back pasture to see how the boy had done. He was astonished and confused to see his grandson sitting on a pile. Not only had the trash and junk not been cleaned up, but the weeds had grown taller and the brush was thicker. “What happened?” the old man asked his now ashamed grandson. “I didn’t know where to begin,” the boy replied, and he went on to tell his grandfather about his being overwhelmed and of trying to figure out where to start.

The grandfather looked at the young boy with an even mix of disappointment and compassion, and after a small moment of silence said, “You know, if you had just cleaned up the spot you sat in each day, your work in the pasture would be almost done.”

I have come to love this story because I used to spend parts of my summers and most of my holidays working on my grandfather’s farm as a small boy. But I have also come to be bothered by this story… because I am that boy in the back pasture. I have such a great amount of reading, writing and other work to do that I constantly become overwhelmed with where to begin. And I become so paralyzed by my perfectionism that I end up doing nothing, and so the weeds get higher and the junk remains on the ground.

My goal and hope this semester is to renounce perfectionism and simply work in the spot I find myself in each day. As John David has shared with me, a writer writes, and great is the enemy of good.

I hope to have many more stories and observations here and in other places in the days and weeks ahead. Pray for me to renounce perfectionism, clear out this pasture, and grow some fruit.

My grandfather and me heading out on the tractor to work
on the farm during one of my holiday visits many years ago.