A Journal and a Velcro Ribbon

Hello again, Dick Foth here, a known story to make sense of it all. It's been a while since we were together and I hope that you're doing well and I hope that after this podcast you're doing even better. It's been a little while since we interjected other broadcasts in the reading of the book that Ruth and I wrote back in 2017 entitled Known Finding Deep Friendships in a Shallow World. So we're coming back to it. We're on Chapter 9. And if you hear something in the background, those are jets flying over. There's an air show this weekend, not far from where we're sitting. And so you might be hearing F-16s or A-10 Warthogs or any number of things. This is real life folks. I'm not in some studio that's protected. We're just out there. So Chapter 9 of Known Finding Deep Friendships in a Shallow World. A Journal and a Velcro Ribbon. Frederick Beakner and Telling Secrets says it this way. My story is not important because it's mine, God knows, but because if I tell it to anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Ice and snow blasted the cockpit windows of the bombers as the lead pilot scrambled for a place to land. It was January 1943, two hours earlier, 21 B-17s had taken off from Wendover Army Air Base in Utah, bound for England to enter the fight. But for the moment, they were fighting a blizzard over Central Nebraska. As they dropped low out of the storm toward corn-stubbled fields, they saw an airfield, while not exactly an airfield. It was a makeshift air strip on a farm and none of the pilots knew if they could pull off the landing. Twenty of the planes made it. One crash landed. The 200 young crewmen with 45 caliber cold strapped on their hips, climbed out of their planes, dropped onto the frozen ground, and huddled together. As wind and snow whipped their faces, vehicle lights appeared in the distance in it. It turned out to be a convoy of cars and pickups. The citizens of North Platte Nebraska had arrived. John Weldon, one of the navigators, described that experience to Ruth and me 60 years later, as we rocketed across Nebraska on the California Zephyr in an early February dawn. He and his spouse had gotten on the train somewhere west of Chicago during the night, and we had been seated with them in the dining car for breakfast. From the first sip of coffee, it became clear that John had lived quite the life. We were being made privity some pages from his old journal, a journal stained with sweat and blood and cherished over the years. A journal of life, I am a journaling failure. I have dozens of journals in my study, each with a few weeks worth of notations in them. I admire those who journal well, authors like David McCullough, who write of historical figures, Truman and John Adams, and Doris Kerns Goodwin, team of rivals, read personal letters and journals to discover the thoughts and feelings of the persons about whom they write. Those are intimate, aren't they? They're places we deposit what we know, think and feel. They reveal who we are and what we value. Den Allander elaborated on that. Our ideal self is revealed in what we value, parentheses, passion in parentheses. How we understand the world, parentheses, belief, end of parentheses. And what we do to reach our ideal parentheses, behavior, parentheses. Our passion, belief and behavior fit together so intimately that I can say this with confidence, Allander writes, what we do is what we really value. What we value enough to do tells others what we really believe and what we really believe shapes what we will become. But the up close personal details of our lives are actually walking journals. When I tell you of a critical event in my life, it's a page for my journal. When I disclose attention that is still unresolved, it's a page for my journal. Journals are powerful because they offer the two things so many of us crave, authenticity and vulnerability. At our core, we desire what's real. We don't want our lives altered like a document in Photoshop. The old adage life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, kept ringing in my head as John talked with us on that train. Early in our conversation, I'd simply ask by any chance, were you in World War II? He took it from there. He shared with us that he finally got to England and flew eight missions. The first ended with a crash landing in the English channel, with the whole crew rescued by the Royal Air Force, within range of German guns on the Normandy coast. The eighth one ended with the crew bailing out over Czechoslovakia and spending the next 21 months in a POW camp. He told me that by the end of the war, their guards were young teenage boys who didn't want to be there any more than the prisoners did. Some of them became friends. He'd never forget the day he stood talking with one of them, on hearing the sound of the tanks they looked up to see some of General George Patton's spearhead 10th Armored Division, rolling up on the far side of the river. The unguard turned, handed John his machine gun, and just walked off into the woods. I have eaten thousands of breakfasts in my lifetime, but breakfast that morning in an amtrak dining car will stand out as one of the most moving conversations I've ever been a party to. John's candor and telling if his story drew us in, he didn't just tell us the good parts. He told of the fear when they were shot down and captured, then marched to the stalague, passed what looked like ordinary factories with Chimney's Belchich's book, only later to learn they were death camps. The fear of starving was always there. They had no reason to believe they would ever see home again. We, of course, had never come close to experiencing what John had, but we'd known fear, we'd known our own kind of suffering. Truth be told, we identify more readily with suffering than we do with victories. Victories are unique. Suffering is universal. We talked all through breakfast, and he asked if we'd join them for lunch, and when lunch was concluded, he said, Dick, before we leave, could you say one of those opened-eyed prayers with us? I told him earlier about a lawyer I prayed with one time who did so with one caveat. I don't close my eyes. Work for me. With people walking past us in the narrow aisle and the waiter serving lunches, we talk to the creator of the universe. The distance from a death camp to a dining car is the time it takes to offer up a few journal pages from a rich life. John's vulnerability made it possible. He didn't try to hide who he was, and it made him real. He reminded me of some words Ruth wrote years ago about playing dress-up. Playing dress-up again, just like a kid, with clothes that don't fit, shoes that are too big and a hat that covers my eyes. Just a harmless little disguise, I think. But the longer it's worn, not only does it hide me from you, I no longer recognize myself. The Velcro Ribbon. When you share parts of the journal of your life, it becomes a Velcro Ribbon to which another person can attach. They can connect with places, people, and experiences. They identify with your challenges and your pain, and scripture is full of journal entries. Listen to Luke's account of Jesus' birth. In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David because he belonged to the house in line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him, and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. The whole scenario revolves around a dictator doing what dictators do. They take your money, and sometimes your life. We're told the name of the governor. We know that Mary and Joseph Bethlehem trip was to please the Roman equivalent of the census bureau, but the tax shackles were small potatoes compared to the other thing. They were only engaged, and she was already pregnant. In their culture, that was a dead end road. That was the real trip. Jesus was born in a cave in the middle of the night, attended by sheep, shepherds, and singing angels. A while later, King Herod upset about another king in town, decides it's killing time, which means the new family had to run for it. If we are political leaders, engage couples, or unwed moms, we connect to the story. If we come from poverty, live on sheep ranches, have been in danger not of our own making, or found ourselves refugees, we connect to this story. It's a Velcro ribbon. Two thousand years later, in six thousand miles away, I stand in a five-star hotel about as far as one can get from a Middle East stable. We're doing small group things with leaders from Japan, the United States, Canada, and India and Russia. My co-leader asked me a simple question, wherever you born, Dick, and I reply, Alameda, California. At that moment, a Japanese man to my far right speaks up at perfect English. Isn't that near Oakland? Why, yes, how do you know that? He replies, that's where IBM trained me. When the session finishes, he makes a beeline for me. Turns out, I was speaking to the President of IBM Japan. It's a Velcro ribbon. Risk and reward. To be vulnerable is to risk, to be authentic is to tell the truth unvarnished. Ruth and I met Charles Greenaway in the 1960s. A long time missionary in African Europe, he was a consummate storyteller with the gift for challenging listeners to go and do and give. If you asked him, how are you doing, Charles? His response would always be going to make it. Not going to look like much when I get there, but I'm going to make it. One day I said, Charles, when did you start saying going to make it? And he told me this story. I was brought up in the cold fields of Pennsylvania during the Depression. They were terrible times. Families were large and poor and sometimes children would have to be sent to state-run orphanages because the families couldn't handle one more mouth to feed. I'll not forget the day my daddy died. His body was laid out on the table in our small house. I was just a little guy and as my brother and I stood by that table with my mom, she said, Charlie, don't you worry, we're going to stay together. But something happened over the next year. I don't know what and one day she sat me down and said, Charlie, I'm so sorry, but you're going to need to go to a home for a while. I'll come and get you as soon as I can. I didn't hear anything else she said because the bird stopped singing, the band stopped playing and the lights went out. I'll never forget the day the man from the orphanage came to get me pulling up in a black Ford Model T who were a boulder hat and had a big cigar clench between his teeth. I was hiding around the corner of the house when he stepped into our little front yard. He just stood there and said, well, where is he? Like I was a sight of meat or something. My knees knocking together, I came out from my hiding place and when it stood in front of him, scared to death. The next thing I knew, I felt the warmth of my mother's body next to me as her arm slipped around my shoulders in a fierce grip. She looked to that man in the eye and said, Mr, I've changed my mind. Charlie ain't going, we're going to make it. The lights came on, the birds started singing, the band started playing, it was the greatest day of my life. Apart from the tears in my eyes and a lump the size of a baseball in my throat, I was so struck by the plain vulnerability of the story that it has stayed with me for all these years, the great depression seared certain values into that generation. They valued small things and worked unceasingly their whole lives. Many of those young men never had a new pair of shoes until they enlisted in the army in World War II. And they saw leadership in a simple way. At least Charles did. Over lunch one day, I asked him a leadership question. He said, Charles, what's your philosophy of leadership? He said, simple dick, protect the person above you, protect the person below you, and everything works. I said, that's it. He said, oh, one more thing. If you ever cross me, there's no redemption. Stand high, stammered, but that doesn't sound very biblical. He grinned and said, oh, I don't think it is. It came out of the depression. If you didn't stay together, if you weren't loyal to each other, you died. I'm not espousing Charles's philosophy. I was just touched by his authenticity. He didn't try to say he was right. He simply told me the truth of his experience. He put it out there. I could make my own judgment. Friends do that. They try to understand then they argue and scrap and try to convince because the relationship matters. Getting scarred, feeling trapped. Sometimes we don't want to expose parts of our lives because we have scars for moon, some of which may still be tender. We're embarrassed by them or afraid or try to explain the pieces. No one's journey is a straight line. No story is without travail. Pat Conroy and beach music said it beautifully. No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws. The truth is, if we're looking for someone without scars, we're living on the wrong planet. Everyone has scars. Jesus has scars. Maybe especially he has scars. He uses those scars to prove his humanity and start the restoration journey for his frightened and sometime believing disciples. Scars aren't bad. They just tell you where you don't want to go again. The other fear we have is that we're trapped by our history. I know people who live believing that lie and they are trapped but Jesus has come to unlock our doors and let us out. We don't need to be trapped by our history but we're absolutely shaped by our history. Every experience has left an imprint. That's why to read through that journal and share it with another is so revealing and freeing. That's why taking the chances worth it. Over the years, I've reflected on some thoughts by Ernestel's sketch that put the authentic, the vulnerable friendship and God all in the same room. It's our reads. That's my soul lying there. You don't know what a soul is. You think it's some kind of ghostly sheet-like thing you can see through and it floats in the air. That's my soul lying there. Remember when my hands shook because I was nervous in the group? Remember the night I goofed and argued too much and got mad and couldn't get out of the whole mess? I was putting my soul on the line. Another time I said that someone once told me something about herself that she didn't have to. I guess that she told me something that could have hurt her and I guess I was asking you to do the same. I was asking you to let me know you. That's part of my soul too. When I told you that my mother didn't love my dad and I knew it as a kid when I said that my eyes water when I get hurt even though I'm 34 and too much of a man to cry. I was putting my soul out there on the space between you and me. Yep. That's my soul lying there. Oh, I've never met God. I mean, I've never met that old man who sits on the cloud with a crown and staff and knows everything and is everything and controls everything. But I've met you. Is that God in your face? Is that God in your soul lying there? Well, that's my soul lying there. I'll let you pick it up. That's why I put it there. It'll bruise and turn the rancid like an old banana if you want a man handle it. It'll go away if you want to ignore it. But if you want to put your soul there beside it, there may be love. There may even be God. I've read those words for decades, yet they still move me. The risk and reward of authentic vulnerable living is worth it a hundred times over when when we take a chance and offer a page of our journal to be read by another. Something happens that happens no other way. Why is that? What's the risk and reward principle and even biology in play? Here's a quote, in a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there's a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate and share our stories of struggle. We do this because we feel the most alive when we're connecting with others and being brave with our stories. It's in our biology. Neuro-economist Paul Zach has found that hearing a story, a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the unique human abilities to connect, empathize and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA. What a gift each of us holds in the owning and telling of our stories, the sharing of our journal pages with other people. No other person on the planet or in all of human history has what you cradle uniquely in your head and heart. Frederick Beakner sure got it. This is how he says it, maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track you and I of these stories of who we are and where we've come from and the people we've met along the way because it is precisely through these stories and all their particularity. As I have long believed and often said that God becomes known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished, not only humanly but also spiritually. If the original premise of this book is true, that we deal with money and relationships our whole lives and it's the relationships not money that make us rich. Let's be sure we don't end up impoverished. Let's read another page of that journal. Just turn to the page where you stopped, you know, the place marked by the Velcro ribbon. That's almost the end of chapter nine but there's another part because in the writing of this book I'd write some chapter and Ruth would agree or say I think I might have sort of another angle on that or some further thought. And so we're going to share what she recorded when we did the audiobook some years ago and here are Ruth's thoughts. The first time I looked at her little face, I lost my heart to her. I wanted to hold her, protect her and spend as much time with her as I could. Allison was our first grandchild and it was then I knew I had made the right decision. During those cold days of the preceding December, we held a secret close to us that warmed us, one that would change our lives. We were going to become grandparents and for this child I would do something to keep us close even when we live far apart. I would keep a journal of our days together. If you have grandchildren, you understand. There really aren't words to describe the moment you first see that little baby that is your child's child, the beginning of a new generation. It isn't just pride or catch your breath, love or joy. It's all of these and more and you begin wanting to capture the moments you have together. When our own children were young, I was in survival mode and there weren't enough hours in the day. Today when my grandchildren asked me what their parents were like when they were young, I'm often at a loss for words. I know I've forgotten many special moments. Once I thought at the time I had catalogued to my brain. Now I wish I'd taken time to write some things down. Why is it that those years seem overwhelmingly long when you're living them but are over in a flash as you look back? I determined to be more intentional as a grandmother. I wouldn't let memories with my grandchildren slip away. I would record them. Each time we had a visit, I would record their likes and dislikes, their interests, their growth, what we did together. And I would keep the artwork they sent and their photos. Then when they were young adults, I would compile everything in a little book and present it to them. Allison was born in Eugene, Oregon. We got to be in the hospital waiting room. We held her in our arms just minutes after her birth. I thought she was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. Dick and I made the trip from our home in California to Oregon as often as we could. When her parents moved near us, we were with her every week. Then we moved to North Carolina. That's when my journaling began to play a more important role in our relationship. I wanted Ali to know that even if we live far away, she was always in my thoughts. The words in her journal came easily because I was recounting my impressions of our special times together. I recorded all the amusing and wonderful things she did when she came to visit because this was a priority. My task grew as other grandchildren were born. From the date we learned of their impending arrival, I began writing. For many, I got to be with their parents when they were born. For some, it was shortly afterward. Each one was wonderfully different. When Ali was a teenager, I asked her when she would like to have a copy of her journal. She told me when I graduate from high school. So that became my goal. I would combine my writing with her pieces of art, her awards at school, and photos of her I had been collecting. The journal would be my gift to her when she graduated from high school. Since then, I have given our second granddaughter Claire her journal. Sam, our first grandson, is next on the list. I pause in real time here to interject just this other thought in Ruth's comments and that is since that time she has completed several more so at the recording of this podcast, she is just completing the eighth journal for an eighth grandchild. Here's Ruth's final thought. It's fun for me to read through the journal pages I've kept and reminisce about all the times we've had together. Chapters of their lives that give me pause to be grateful for them and to pray for God's continued guidance in their lives. Prayer seems to go right along with journaling. I see keeping these journals as a way to encourage our grandchildren and a special way to keep that relational tie between us strong. We want them to know that their stories are important to us that we are honored to be part of their lives and that we love and know them not only as grandchildren but as friends. Well, that's it for today. Remember, your life and others are journals and those journals are read by the asking of questions like how do you read a walking book. The thoughts in a journal are my closest experiences, the things that I treasure and when we share that part of our stories. It's really a new ball game, a fresh angle, a clearer understanding of who we are and who we might be as we share our lives with another. Please feel free to check us out, subscribe to the podcast if you wish on any of the platforms that you're aware of or the one you're listening on today. That's it for now. Hope to catch you next time on stories to make sense of it all. This is Dick Foth saying, I'm out.