Nikon D90 Giveaway!

Do yourself a favor and enter this contest at http://www.ohsoposhphotography.com/blog/?p=5458.  This would be a perfect compliment to help capture those Christmas time memories!

Best of luck!

The More I Open My Eyes The More I See

The epidemic of bullying and the cascading ramifications throughout the youth of today requires us each to open our eyes and ears.  Having been in a position where I leveraged ignorance to gain what I thought to be social status at the cost of others I recognize the need to help all people realize that our brokenness connects and unites us.  We are all the same, we are all working to create our place in this world.  We are all vulnerable, we all need love, we are all trying to overcome something.

Silence

Wednesday night sometime around 1 a.m. my wife woke me up to tell me that our son was saying that something hurt.  I went over to investigate and while he didn’t immediately tell me that anything hurt, it was clear that he was uncomfortable.  After some time he mentioned that his stomach was hurting.  I thought nothing of it and encouraged him to go back to sleep.   

A little while later his little body curled up and he began to vomit.  He wasn’t feeling well and now his body was trying to get rid of what was causing the problem.  His vulnerability was on full display and despite his four years and two months, he was in that moment a little boy who was feeling sick.  I scooped him up and we made our way to the bathroom, his vomit on me, his bed, and the floor to the bathroom.  After he finished he began to plead with us to make it stop.  Make the puking go away, reset him back to normal, sign us out so this could end, pay us out so we can leave this terrible place of feeling so bad.  He wasn’t joking at all; all he wanted us to do was the one thing we couldn’t, make this stop.  I felt hopelessly powerless over the situation; I knew that all we could do was try and get him comfortable.  He kept asking us to make it stop, to pay us out and let us leave this awful feeling.  As I sat with him and rubbed his back to comfort him I was confronted with the reality that all parents face, no matter how badly we wanted to change this situation we were essentially powerless to make it stop.   

We could only sit in silence with him and wait for the end.

I was reminded of a poem that I read from Li-Young Lee, here it is:

A Story

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don't go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!

But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.