6IXTH MAN CHARACTER

What holds people up, makes them stand vertical? There’s simple answers and complex ones. There are God-fearin’ folk who would say, “God is the skeleton that supports the human frame.” But if I’m asked a similar question, I’d assume the asker wanted a more specific articulation. So I’d offer, for starters that people prop themselves up by one of two things. Either they take joy and affirmation in the feeling that, “I can produce.” Or  they affix themselves to causes bigger than themselves that can be but aren’t always spiritual. There is something that motivates people to make their own lives count and the efforts toward that objective quickly become skeletal.

As with the human skeleton, and I know little about bones, I imagine our pride is regularly subject to bruising and breaking. Bones and egos are brittle due to deficiencies and when weak skeletons are exposed, the result can be toxic as people attack one another.

Pure ignorance cripples us all at times as we judge, complain and pout because we can’t have what we want. It’s a brittle bones disease beyond compare. In fact I once met a young man with the physical version of this disease and he was quite cantankerous, throwin’ attitude and nearly runnin people down with his wheelchair. Wouldn’t you protect your Achille’s heal?

And so the word skeletal has more to do with the depth of the strength you exude than the remains you leave behind. The operative word is depth. We can choose to fortify our emotional and spiritual core, unlike our genetic skeletons. The irony is how we leave that to chance and blame the world for our failures. Make the skeletal work of you a beauty.

Preachers used to tell this story about a guy who prayed for help after his boat capsized out at sea. Apparently the story goes that a man was treading water when passers by offered a life preserver, a raft and even a ladder from a coast guard chopper among other forms of rescue. Nevertheless the man rejected the assistance exclaiming, “I’m waiting on God to save me but thanks anyway. He’ll come through for me.” I used to love when the preachers told that story thinking, even as a young man, “Really? This dummy is too dense,” only to realize later that I have a lot of fantasy in my theology. There’s a lot of mysterious-ness that wards off the help that would rescue.

And I wonder if you’d be able to provide an anecdote that affirms this truth in your life? I used to pray for ways to be involved with sports as a mentor and poof, a coaching position opened and was offered to me. It was a head coaching position but I hemmed and hawed about how coaching would take time away from refining my character development business. (Sometimes it’s like I really am high.) Then after about a year of being a head coach I decided to hone in the services my business offers so I said, “I’d like to concentrate on mentoring.” Soon after that statement, I found myself back in a classroom teaching a reading intervention course, Language Arts and A.V.I.D., a college-bound course for secondary students in the United States that focuses on drawing on individual determination to help kids get to university.

The prayers, most fervent, are often in the breathy utterances. They are heart fueled and felt and they stream forward through the conscious mind and the open mouth. They’re powerful beyond measure and the God who hears those prayers propels you into the thing you’ve been wanting to do. The rub is the vehicle, the package, the casing, the housing, the apparatus… You saw it worked out in a different place, a different way. Drowning is terribly unnecessary so much of the time and yet we choose it because the story the preacher told was just so “fable”ous.

Ten years later I still remember that it was a Tuesday morning. I remember that I was watching it all in real time on one of those old tube televisions. I didn’t have a flat screen. But on 9-12-11 I stand before kids who range in age from 11-13 and they genuinely don’t remember what is so vivid to me. Suddenly I’m like the contemporaries of Dr. King on April 4, 1968, the enamored American admirers of the Kennedy administration on November 22, 1963 or the generation of my grandparents who knew the visceral nausea of December 7, 1941. I’m that guy trying desperately to communicate the ghastly reality of an event that is purely historical to the unaffected under age 25.

As objective as I am, I couldn’t shake this burden I felt to try and give kids a chance to ask questions, to feel, to offer their own insights. So I did. And I was amped on the notion. Shoot, they’re lucky we don’t have school on Sundays because I could’ve rambled for hours or at least listened to them for equally as long. Such an incalculable deluge of emotion for me arises each year this time, probably more so now that my sister is a New York resident. I’m big on context, seeing the backdrop and foreground of a lifetime. What events shape your life? How do you ever allow the images of people jumping from 80 story windows, or the freakish scenario of a commercial aircraft loaded with jet fuel being thrust into a stationary structure and not coming out of the other side? Best believe I’ll never forget. That was never the issue. It’s about 9-12 and how you live with 9-11 etched.  What perspective does something like this yield, knowing that worldwide atrocities have shaped and unraveled lives? All I know is that I can’t wait to visit the footprints at ground zero and pay my own respects. For real…I feel linked to the millions throughout history who wanted me to witness the “real life” in context.