Blink of an Eye

I'll admit that I have been on a tear through the collection of Ted Dekker books at my local library. I just finished his 2007 thriller Blink of an Eye (adapted from his 2002 novel Blink). The story takes place in two worlds with two very different protagonists. One world is the western United States where we find 26 year old Seth Border. Seth, who grew up with an abusive father, is attending Berkeley. He has an IQ off the charts and has grown bored with the pointless games of sparring with overmatched and boorish professors who fear his intellect. He is looking for purpose and thinking more and more of finding adventure. The other world is Saudi Arabia where we find Miriam, a royal princess. Her world is very typical of the well-to-do elite, but she is a woman who is expected to conform to the customs of her people. When the forced marriage of one of her teenage friends goes awry, it marks an abrupt end to her fairy tale upbringing.

The framework of the story is around the role that Miriam was unwittingly bred to play in a planned coup attempt by a royal prince and Miriam's father. Her father is a powerful sheik who controls a sect whose support can sway the balance of power in the nation toward a new king. However, when Miriam is told that she is to marry the royal prince's son in 3 days time, she flees for the sanctuary of the U.S.. Here she meets up with Seth, who for reasons not initially understood, has started to show signs of clairvoyance. This new ability, coupled with his brilliance and pragmatism, makes for a captivating storyline as Seth and Miriam evade the U.S. authorities, the Saudi intelligence, and the son of the royal prince and his nasties.

The story ends up back in Saudi Arabia, where Seth and Miriam outwit all of the forces against them and finally break free of the ties that have bound each of them. Along the way, we gain a glimpse into how two very different lives can find love, can impact the world for the better, and learn some truth about the God of the universe when they don't expect it. A very enjoyable read.

Crotchety Old Man

Several times I can recall where I have been talking ugly about someone when they were within the sound of my voice and I didn't know about their presence until later. One of those times was when I was an undergraduate at college. I was ripping on one of my professors, who, unbeknownst to me, was sitting on the other side of a room divider just 5 ft away. It only takes a few of these painful and embarrassing occurrences for one to learn to watch their tongue. However, given how I can sometimes behave, I guess that these experiences were not quite painful enough for me to stop the practice altogether, just to be more mindful of where I vent and spew. This just goes to show that, somehow, even after all of the years I have been kicking around on this rock, I am still very much a work in progress.

To wit, I was doing some gardening in my front yard the other day. I happened to be very near the street when the kids from the house directly across from mine came out into their front yard to play. This large, extended family has recently moved in and they spend a lot of time playing in their driveway. As kids tend to do, their play involved lots of screaming and yelling and hijinks. As my peaceful and serene environs quickly vanished, I found myself grumbling about the dang kids. I remember wishing that they would just go away. It was at this moment that one of the children, a small girl who couldn't have been much more than 5 or 6 years old, wandered up to the edge of her yard. She called out to me, "I like your yard very much, you do a good job of making it look nice." With that she wandered away to join the festivities with her family. I just sat there for a few moments feeling like a terrible neighbor. A grumbling, crotchety old man. However, I think that this experience has permanently changed how I view these kids, and that is a mark of progress.

Adventures in Store

Although I take pride in how my daughter is growing up and maturing, and love the person she is and is becoming, it is such an overwhelming emotional struggle for me. The baby, the toddler, the pre-schooler, the grade and middle schooler, and now the teenager. With each season in her life I have struggled to make adjustments and to find a healthy equilibrium. It seems that just as I start to find my way, the rules suddenly change. She is growing more and more independent with each passing day, and I have come to really miss the younger versions of my daughter, even as I love and fully embrace the young woman that she is evolving into.

The other day I needed to reduce the clutter in my daughter's bedroom. Her bookshelves had become overfilled and I wanted to pack up the books from her childhood that she had long since outgrown. A job that should have taken 30 minutes ended up taking a full evening as each book that I picked up overwhelmed me with memories:

• Stories I remember reading to her when she was sick and she wanted to be nowhere else than snuggled against my shoulder.
  
• Pages we strolled through over and over again because she loved the pictures.
  
• Tales that I used to read to her that she ultimately read to me after a time.
  
• Stories we read together when my life had broken apart that brought us a measure of comfort.
  
• Series that we followed eagerly with each and every volume released.
  
• Childhood adventures that pulled us into discussions of future dreams and possibilities.
  

There were even several books that I had bought for her that she outgrew before we got around to reading them. Now all are packed away in boxes not to see the light of day again for some time. I pray someday that they are shared again between a parent and a child. There is so much opportunity contained in those pages. Maybe my daughter might even share them with her family one day.

Right This Way

I was in charge of logistics at a professional workshop that I was organizing several years ago at my University. In order to assist with helping the many off-campus visitors find their way to the meeting rooms, I had made up some large arrows that were to be attached to walls and signs along the path. I ran up to the printer, picked up the arrow signs, and brought them back to campus. I neatly stacked and aligned them, and then handed them to my secretary (I will refer to her as Mrs. Moneypenny - not her real name) to put into position. I told her to give me a call if she had any questions and sent her off on her way. Pretty simple job that I figured would not result in any issues ... right?

About 30 minutes later, with the workshop set to begin in just about an hour, I got a panicked call from Moneypenny saying that something was wrong with the signs. She asked me to please come over and help her. I stopped what I was doing and hustled across campus to the meeting venue and met her in the lobby. She was still holding half the arrow signs that I had given her. When I got up closer to her, I could see that she was quite flustered and concerned. She said to me, and I quote, "There is something wrong with these signs. They only printed arrows pointing to the right." I took the stack of signs and rotated them by 180 degrees in her hands. She looked to the ground sheepishly and said, "Oh". I turned around and walked silently back to my office. We never spoke of this incident again.

Obsessed

I have just finished reading the dark and beautifully moving thriller Obsessed by Ted Dekker. The story unfolds in two times and in two locations that are inexorably linked by love, tragedy, and pure sacrifice. It begins in Los Angeles in 1973. Stephen Friedman is a 31 year old realtor who is making his way through his usual day-in, day-out routine. Things change when he learns of a connection to an old Jewish widow who recently died by the name of Rachel Spritzer. Stephen was born during World War II and grew up as an orphan, never having known his parents. It seems that Rachel was his mother and had devoted her life to searching for him with all that she had, yet she never succeeded in finding her boy who had lived for years within 30 miles of her home.

The story then takes us back to a work camp of female Jewish prisoners taken by the Nazis. Women who did not go through Auschwitz, who could be used as slaves for the German war machine, came to this camp, Toruń. A camp ruled with a ruthless and iron fist by the Nazi SS commandant Gerhard Braun. Gerhard viewed the Jews as vermin and lived to build his power by raising their hopes ever so slightly before snatching it away. Ruth and Martha found each other on the train to Toruń and bonded together. We learned that each of them was pregnant. A condition that normally would have gotten them hung. A German work camp would not allow hope and life to infiltrate its walls. Yet the love, strength, and spirit of these two women allowed them to survive and ultimately to give birth to their two children. Ruth gave birth to Ester and Martha to David (who was renamed Stephen). Gerhard decided to kill Martha, but Ruth stepped up and took her place. Gerhard's son Roth viewed this substitution as the moment his father's power had been taken from him. A moment that fueled the rest of his life to take back what had been stolen from his father and from him.

On one hand, the plot takes us on an obsessive search as Roth and Stephen go after a priceless biblical treasure that Martha and Ruth had taken from the Nazis back in the work camp. However, the true search from Roth's viewpoint is a very clever and diabolical search to restore his father's power and finish the job that he should have during the war. For Stephen, the true obsession is to find out about his mother Rachel and the role she played during the war in that camp at Toruń. But more than this, Stephen's main obsession is to find love and fulfill his destiny. It matters not whether this costs him every penny he owns or his own life. It is all about love. An absolutely wonderful story that kept me focussed and thinking from start to end.

Battery Algebra

There is a children's clothing company named Carter's that has a slogan that kind of tugs at my heart, "If they could just stay little til their Carter's wear out." Awww, now if that doesn't cause your eyes to get all misty and puffy, then you clearly have no soul. But the point is clear, they hope something "X" lasts (your kid's childhood and their insouciant sweetness) for a certain time period "Y" (until their onesie busts its seams and they go off to college). But what happens in the scenario when Y far exceeds X? This is the kind of algebra problem that will make you sink to your knees. Let me illustrate with a chilling tale from my own life.

I have a Friday afternoon group meeting at work that is slated for 1:30 to 3:00 p.m.. I don't know about you, by usually by Friday afternoon my brain is half scrambled and a long meeting only exacerbates my cranial condition. Trying to prevent my brain from spontaneously combusting takes some significant effort, especially on those occasions where my meeting goes on past its allotted time. When this happens, you can witness folks slowly edging their chairs toward the door in an attempt to escape given the slightest chance.

At my last Friday meeting, something unspeakable happened. The meeting outlasted the battery on my laptop! Now, this isn't one of those batteries from a decade ago that held power for 12 minutes before decaying into dust. This is a battery that can hold its own for nearly 4 hours before it conks out. If X represents the lifetime of my battery and Y represents the length of that meeting, X came and went long before Y ran its course. Even today, nearly a full week later, the cloud of fatigue that resulted has still not yet cleared my body.

Leadership

Before we get too deep into today's post, I would like to begin with the following disclaimer:

I am not perfect and am deeply flawed as a human being in every aspect of my life.

Now that I have made this pronouncement, I have full license to go on a bit of a rant about public leaders. People who should be aware that what they say and what they do matters. As a group, they need to live and carry themselves with integrity and forthrightness at all times. They need to continually strive to be caring, respectful, and aware of the people that they serve, direct, or represent.

Now I am not crass enough to embark on a public shaming. There will be no actual names listed here. Although some of you may be able to figure out who I am talking about, that is not really the point. The point is really to wag our fingers and shake our heads, because we would do a better job in their place, wouldn't we?

• A well-known pastor goes to a busy public pool with his children. His young son comes to him as he needs to go to the bathroom. The pastor does not want to be bothered getting up, so he tells his son to just go pee in the pool and to leave him alone.
  
• The chief executive and public face of an oil company responsible for a catastrophic and unprecedented oil spill grows tired of the media and government pressure in the aftermath of the incident and mewls that he just wants his life back. Meanwhile, there are people who have died in the event and many local economies have been devastated for years to come.
  
• A pastor of a big church thinks he is being humorous and tweets just after a hurricane has passed through his area that the storm was no big thing and people should stopping whining. However, the death toll tops 40 and there is more than a billion dollars in damage along the storm's path.
  
• A queen who lives in over-the-top luxury and decadence hears that her people are starving to death and have no bread to eat. Her reply is that if they have no bread, then they should eat cake.