Writing done well, I believe, is art. Most writing is not art anymore, and some that is art isn’t necessarily good art. In a utilitarian world perhaps we can do without words that aspire to art, and art altogether for that matter, along perhaps with any words other than those necessary to explain how the video game must be plugged in, the DVD loaded, the internet accessed.

Perhaps we can get along without anything whose purpose is not clear, but I like unnecessary things, and so I try to fit my words together like a meandering brick path, or perhaps a forgotten forest chapel. Any wisdom I have offered is not my own, and anyone possessed of a Bible and the Church guidance necessary to understand it can glean all he needs without me. I have written all the same, first because to write, for me, is to hold on to sanity or soul or maybe both, second because somewhere along the way I developed the ridiculously self-serving notion that it is a “ministry,” and third—in the pages of WORLD, anyway—because Marvin Olasky, who I admire probably more than he realizes, asked me to.

I have written, here and elsewhere, and told myself I am doing good in the world. I’m exercising my God-given talent. Finding my ministry. All that sort of stuff we tell ourselves because most of us want to believe that our place in the universe is much bigger than it actually is. I’ve always aspired to be something big in the big world, but as I look at my life I see that I have become very small in the little patch of world that is all, in the end, that matters to me.

Every artist imagines that his work edifies mankind, and I am no different. But God didn’t give me mankind to care for, did He? Instead I received this enduring wife and these four little boys who need to find their way to manhood. They need me, and I have failed them too often, and now on top of it I find myself in the little dinghy that is my faith amidst a storm the likes of which I have never seen, and me with scarcely the courage to plead with the Lord to bid me onto the waves. Many things I thought I knew I don’t know at all, perhaps most of all myself, and now that I look fully in the mirror I see a man who has been holding out on God, and by extension his wife, his children.

I told Marvin, and Mickey McLean, that the word “sabbatical” makes it sound far holier than it is, but I think the word is apt because what I’m seeking lies somewhere in the Sabbath. I don’t know how long I’ll need to be away, maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe for good. I feel like the Lord has me stretched out on a great wringer, which is something I’ve resisted for years and can resist no longer. While at times there’s great peace in it, at other times the struggle leaves me with little left to offer. I think our readers deserve, I explained, someone healthier and wiser than I can be right now.

What’s the first thing each of them replied with? That they would pray for me, for my family. It’s no small thing to have men like that running the show.

So this is the part where I tell you goodbye. If I had anything left I would dredge up some word of wisdom for you. All I know to say is that each of us is given a scarce little scrap of time and, if we are lucky, a handful of people who love us no matter what. Love them back, with abandon.

During our recent vacation at Table Rock Lake in Missouri, my family and I spent some time in Branson, the entertainment capital of redneck, red-blooded, red-letter Christian America. We caught a showing of Noah, The Musical. It was everything you might imagine, much more of it good than I expected, the worst a surprise appearance by the cheesiest Jesus since Jesus Christ Superstar.

What stuck with me was how the actors portrayed Noah and his family, before their trials and tribulations struck, as exceedingly gleeful. They didn’t just say good morning to one another, they practically burst into song (actually, it was a musical, so they might have sung it and I just forgot). Noah was tickled pink to milk his cow. His sons were practically giddy about a day of work in the fields. Is this, I wondered, what we think good Christians are supposed to look like?

Right now there’s a pedantic commenter all set to point out that Noah and his family weren’t technically Christians. But you get the point, and the question. Is this what we expect of ourselves, of one another? Incessant, almost irritating cheerfulness?

Perhaps that’s only a question that occurs to a curmudgeon like me. And perhaps the answer is an obvious “yes” to better Christians. Then again, the Psalms don’t always speak of joy, and so I wonder if there is room in the Christian heart for sadness. Did Noah ever have a bad day? Did he ever grumble at the stink of the cow and the bite of the flies? Did he ever doubt, for only just a moment, whether God really cares?

He was a righteous man, the Bible says, and maybe righteous men don’t doubt or cry. But I do, and maybe you do too, and so I wondered as I watched from the audience if there were people sitting around me who don’t know much about Christianity, soaking up the inadvertent message that loving Jesus means never a wistful sigh. At the same time I know plenty of Christians who keep their pain to themselves for fear of the inevitable “count it all joy” admonition, so perhaps this isn’t a misconception limited only to unbelievers. I think we know the Christian walk entails suffering and sadness, but I think it makes us uncomfortable. If someone is sad he must be fixed. But often when we are sad we just need someone to be silent and present. Presence and silence are two things a good many of us could stand to practice more.

I have deliberately abstained from consuming Michael Jackson death coverage. That’s what it’s become now; even a disgusted abstainer like me can see that—a marketed delicacy. I don’t even know what the “news” media (the very word evokes the image of glittering baubles served up not because they are healthful or helpful, but because they are novel) currently claim is the source of Jackson’s early demise. Occasional glimpses of cable news banners and supermarket tabloid headlines indicate a predictable slate of conspiracy theories and blame assignment, which are good for the news business, insofar as they are continuously replaced with newer models.

I heard talk as well of a “tribute,” which brought to mind the tacky, largely talent-free spectacle not long after James Brown wiggled out of his mortal coil. All manner of entertainers lined up to bask in the melodrama of Brown’s death, pretending to honor him by dancing and singing and generally increasing their public profiles on the back of Brown’s achievements. Having studiously avoided the Jackson coverage, I can only hope a similar pack of irreverent nonsense didn’t occur. Given the incentives in play, however, this is likely a vain hope. There’s just too much publicity potential here, as the affected gravity of seasoned huckster Al Sharpton, strolling from photo op to photo op, reminds us.

Perhaps I’m being overly critical. Wouldn’t it suit people like Brown and Jackson—men who made a practice of selling themselves to a hungry public—to have a big party celebrating their lives? Most likely the answer is yes. Then it seems only fitting that their followers would celebrate accordingly.

But I think there’s something not right about it. No matter how irreverently—or irrelevantly, or infamously—someone lived his life, we ought to mourn his passing, for death is the destruction of a creature made in the image of God. All this business of treating the funeral as the celebration of a life that has passed—which has wormed its way into even conservative Christian circles—seems to neglect the reality that there is a time for weeping. Are we so frightened of dying and the judgment to come that we need to pretend that death is just a seamless transition to bliss, that nothing tragic has occurred when a human being breathes his last?

By all means, celebrate the life that has passed, if one can find anything worth celebrating in it. But let’s not pretend that existence has ended, that the deceased has been frozen in time like a photograph, forever smiling, forever happy. There is eternity ahead for everyone, some blessed, some horrific. And tragically, because of the Fall, we all have to die to get there. When that happens, we ought at least to pause and consider what it means for life to exist at all, and for creatures formed by God to perish. I think if we do that, we’ll find it hard—at least for a little while—to sing and dance. And contrary to popular opinion, I believe that’s a good thing.

It’s a tough row to hoe, making the case that Jesus is a capitalist. For example, there is the fact that the first church appears to have adopted voluntary socialism. And that business about seeking not the treasures of this world—that hasn’t stopped conservatives from spilling gallons of ink to refine our understanding about the camel, the eye of the needle, and the rich man until that discomforting verse almost seems to cry out for leveraged buyouts and complex derivatives. When we put our minds to it, we can work the Bible around to supporting just about anything we like.

This is all to say that it’s a bit unseemly to use religion to justify one’s policy preferences. This observation would have been less welcome at the height of the Christian Coalition’s power. After all, isn’t a believer in the flat tax and a strong missile defense a believer in truth, which is another way of saying a follower of the Truth? It requires a bit of smug self-assurance, this logic, but let’s be honest: We conservatives know we’re right. And while Jesus never released a comprehensive economic plan, we can be pretty sure he didn’t favor self-delusional economic thinking and the waste of resources.

Still, we have to admit He has more important things on his mind. Whether or not we get global warming legislation is probably toward the bottom of the list. This isn’t stopping a new coalition of leftist organizations from taking their case to the pulpit, arguing that failure to enact sweeping environmental regulations is an act of poor stewardship, i.e., sin.

It’s hard to imagine, inside the echo chamber of the right, how global warming could be a real phenomenon. I mean, we all just know it’s junk science. Likewise, it’s hard for anyone inside the left’s echo chamber to imagine how global warming could be anything other than a dire emergency. We know, of course, that we’re right and they’re wrong, that we’ve considered the matter objectively while they’ve just listened to Al Gore. But still, it’s hard to fault them for making a biblical case out of this and other policy matters, given the precedent conservatives have set over the past 30 years. When prominent self-styled Christian leaders opine on everything from health care reform to “taking out” Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez, it’s hard to put the genie back into the bottle now that liberals want to get in on the if-Jesus-were-a-presidential-cabinet-member routine.

All of which, I think, serves the name of Christ poorly. By bringing policy disputes into the faith arena, we bolster the notion that Christianity is just a bunch of self-interested talkers using the Bible to get what they want. We create divisions among brothers and sisters who ought not to be divided. This is evidenced in our affinity for political comrades over faith comrades. By way of illustration, consider whether conservative Christians you know are more favorably disposed toward Ann Coulter or Jimmy Carter. Nothing in Coulter’s behavior suggests Christian love, whereas Carter endeavors to live it out, even when this means giving a hug to every tin-pot dictator he can reach by chartered flight. When politics get elevated to the level of faith, it’s no wonder that we begin to forget who are our real brothers and sisters.

All this is not to say that Christians should be silent about public policy, especially those policies where there is a strong case for biblical guidance (e.g., protecting life, treating prisoners with humanity, caring for the elderly). In fact, maybe it’s a good thing that leftists are coming out now to argue that Christian ethics demand this or that policy prescription. It would be nice, however, if we could all do so with a bit more reverence for the flaming sword that is the Word of God, and with a good deal more charity toward people who are, after all, striving toward the same home as we.

I heard a very wise man of God talk about abundance. Don’t think, he admonished, that you have a nice home and fancy clothes because you work hard; there are plenty of people who work hard and have very little. Everything good is a blessing from God, he observed, but don’t conclude from your more abundant blessings that you have more than others because you are more faithful. You have these things, he said, because you couldn’t endure the poverty other Christians have faced around the world and throughout history. You have been appointed this time and prosperity not because of your strength, but because of your weakness.

It was a bracing tonic, even for someone like me who rejects the notion that America (and by extension, Christians in America) is more favored by God than other nations. Our wealth and relative safety are blessings, to be sure, but what if they’ve come not because we or our Founders were somehow more righteous, but rather because God knows how easily we’d forsake Him if we endured the hardships, say, of early Christians in Rome, or even of our brothers and sisters in modern China?

Of course, rather than thankfulness, too often our abundance leads to neglect of God instead. What need has man of God when he has 500 satellite channels and pills to ease afflictions? While some forsake God for entertainment and distraction, others conflate the soul’s deliverance with the body’s titillation. God wants you to have that new watch, that big car, I’ve heard a preacher exclaim. You’ll have (material) blessings, promises another, when you’re faithful enough to believe God is aching to give you all that stuff.

It’s a welcome message to hear, then, that while all those good things certainly come from God, they aren’t merit badges, but crutches. This is not to say that physical comfort is sinful, or inherently a distraction from God. But His work here is the refinement of souls, not the filling of bellies. And somehow a great many of us have gotten the notion that the fullness of one’s belly is an indication of one’s rightness with God.

Perhaps we’d do better to think of it as an indication of one’s inability to faithfully serve Him like the early Christians. There’s a humbling thought, and I suspect a great many American Christians—perhaps myself most of all—could use more humbling thoughts. The full belly and the humbling thought are proof, perhaps, that God loves all His children, even those of us with well-paying jobs and fancy churches.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve recently abandoned the teaching of Calvinistic predestination that I am so troubled when I hear about the death of someone like Michael Jackson. There are a great many soul-sick people in the world, and we know that no temptation comes upon anyone except what is common to man, but still there is something particularly gut-wrenching about seeing a human being come gradually unglued on the national stage. The temptations of man are common, but a man with uncommon wealth and privilege can indulge his temptations far more extensively than the driver of a garbage truck.

Having peered into the sorry state of my own soul, I won’t presume to gauge the state of another’s. I am newly struck, however, by the reality that when a person contorts his soul into a monstrosity, this is not part of some cosmic plan, it is a great tragedy. And though none of us are appointed—thank God—as judges of Michael Jackson’s soul, any reasonable person can see that—inner life aside—his observable life was a tragedy. I’ve already heard a few people proffer indifference at Jackson’s death, but I think the right attitude, reflecting a right understanding of creation and our Creator, is that a life that never came untwisted is to be mourned at its passing.

When I hear that someone whose life was a public train wreck has died (Anna Nicole Smith comes to mind), I wonder what might have helped her or him grasp hold of a lifeline. Could no one have offered this man a drink of cool water? Perhaps many did, only to be scorned. It gives me pause, however, when I consider the train wreck lives whose tracks I tiptoe across for fear of getting run over, of getting dragged alongside. Then I consider the cliff toward which I’ve pointed my own life more than once, only to have people who love me stand on the tracks, refusing to let me go.

Those of us who are saved are saved by grace, and those of us who claim to love God are called to love our neighbor. So I think it’s worth asking: Who needs me to step in front of his runaway train? I suspect if we look around, we’ll find plenty of runaway trains, driven by scared, angry, desperately lonely people. Step on the tracks. Not with a lecture or a handy verse, but with the wild love of a God who adores the likes of you and me. Step on the tracks.

Every good Christian knows he’s supposed to label himself a sinner and go on in vague terms about his wickedness, so consequently it doesn’t mean much to say that I am a sinful person. Sometimes it can have the inverse effect—the more someone decries his sinfulness, the more an illusion of sainthood is generated. After all, didn’t Saint Paul call himself chief of sinners?

Most of us don’t air our sins in public. This is a good thing. We confess them in private, and I wonder if that fosters the illusion that our evil is localized. What I mean is that wickedness, like love, probably ripples and surges far beyond where we see it. Take one of my recent sins, something small in comparison to other sins of which I stand guilty but that is embarrassing all the same: I made an obscene gesture at another driver. I’ll spare you the details of what he did to earn such ugliness; suffice to say that this gesture was likely invented with people like him—and me—in mind.

Now, I can tell myself that the consequences of that particular sin are limited to the stranger and myself. But that would be a lie. Every act of wickedness has a deadening effect on the soul. After all, this is how we accomplish the searing of our consciences by playing with fire repeatedly. Giving someone the finger is a relatively small thing—so are all sins aside from the “big” ones, the ones we Christians like to rail on with special vigor until we get caught doing them. But do you know how we work our way up to big sin?

What’s more, given this stranger’s driving behavior, he was no more in control of his passions that day than I was. So does he simply ignore my ugly signal and go forward into the lives of others with just as much love as he was carrying before crossing my path? Or does he go forward a little angrier now, a little more cynical about the worth of his fellow man? What effect does this—and a hundred other sins to which he is subjected and in which he participates— have on his marriage, his relationship with his children, the likelihood that he’ll volunteer at a homeless shelter rather than sit on his couch watching television?

We are called to be the body of Christ in the world. I suppose that when we sin we are not simply failing to do that, but instead serving as the body of the evil one. How does the devil accomplish his work in the world? Through my hands, through yours. It’s a dreadful thing to consider, that the very rocks cry out because we daily poison the earth with our sin. It’s so much easier to imagine our transgressions contained, limited, relatively harmless. But we murder the world with them. We murder our souls.

There is no small sin, and not just because of some cosmic debit and credit column. There is no small sin because it travels far beyond the hand of he who commits it. This is why we battle daily. This is why the Christian should never forget that he is at war. Keep fighting.

I used to believe that a man’s performance as a husband could be separated from his performance as a father. I may have messed up a lot of things as a husband, I would tell myself, but at least I’m a good father. I figure not every man’s sin looks like mine, but in my case a great deal of my failures are wrapped up in pride and self-deception. Submitting to God in the slow work of having these sicknesses healed has been an occasion for reconsidering all it is that I think of myself. Therefore, I’m reconsidering all the things I’ve come to believe about myself as a father.

What precipitated this particular bit of painful introspection was the smallest thing: a little snippet of video with my daughter in it. As many of you know, she is dead now. This scrap of video is part of something we shot for my workplace years and years ago, featuring the children of many people I worked with back then. Seeing her face reminded me how I cajoled her to be part of it, to say her small line for the camera. She was sick by then, though we didn’t yet know it. She didn’t want to be on camera, or to do much of anything else. But I nagged and fussed at her until she did it, because I didn’t want to be one of the parents whose child wasn’t in the video.

All that came rushing back to me yesterday. It was a small thing, I suppose—who hasn’t been insensitive to his children at one time or another? But it made me think of all the other times I’ve put my wants or feelings over those of my children. This reminded me in turn how that’s been my habit toward my wife for so many years. That’s when it occurred to me that if a man isn’t cherishing his wife, he likely doesn’t have the kindness or state of mind or sense of self-sacrifice to lay down his life for his children, either.

So here we are approaching Father’s Day, and I’m holding one more broken piece from the edifice of pride I’ve tended around my ego all these years. My children will give me their drawings, my wife will give me her presents, and I will think to myself that I don’t deserve any of it—not in that humble way that we Christians know we’re supposed to speak of ourselves. I really don’t deserve any of it.

Perhaps pride and selfishness and any other habitual sins are like alcoholism, in that admitting them to others and ourselves is a first step toward recovery. I certainly hope so. Because while I haven’t been anything like the husband or father I once imagined I would be, at least now I’m finally seeing it for what it really is. My intentions—your intentions—don’t really amount to anything at all in the great accounting, do they? In the end we’ll be called to answer for how we’ve lived. When it comes to being a spouse and a parent, I suppose it’s just as much how we die, for we have to lay down our own lives in order to raise theirs up. Otherwise we exalt ourselves at their expense.

That is at least how I see being a husband and a father. Maybe I’ve always believed that in my head. Now, as that understanding makes its way along the painful road to my heart, I see myself in comparison to it and how far I fall short of it. In that regard, the eyes of the heart see much more clearly than the reason and rationale of the head. The eyes of my heart tell me I’m not nearly the father I thought I was. Mercifully, there is forgiveness. There is as well, for those of us graced with more life yet to live, another chance. There is always a second chance, so long as we draw breath. I know what I’m doing with the rest of my second-chance days. How about you?

My children have this game they like to play: They wait until we are flying down the highway with the wind blowing and their mother and I trying to have a conversation and they begin to ask questions from the far back of the minivan. The result is much like what you’d get if you situated the old folks who are hearing impaired on opposite sides of a dance floor and asked them to talk about kids these days, or the price of gas.

“Dad! Can I have a motorbike when I’m 13?”

“We’ll see!”

“When they’re free???”

“I said ‘we’ll see’!”

“But they’re not free!”

“We’ll talk about it later!”

“What?!?”

“Stop talking!”

“WHAT?!?”

And so on. If our military tried this on Muslim terrorists I am sure the ACLU would take issue with it. And I’m not sure I’d disagree with them. With the aim of preserving what remains of our sanity, my new strategy is simply to answer every question “No” while we are driving.

Which brings me to my point. I’ve noticed that when I tell them no without explaining my reasons, my children make up their own reasons. Recently I told them we couldn’t go to McDonald’s. My oldest explained to his brothers that this was because they hadn’t gotten their chores done in time. The truth was simply that I am sick of McDonald’s. But I noticed in his behavior something I have done often, which is to attribute motives to God. When something doesn’t go my way, I develop a story about why God has “done” that to me. He wants to teach me something. He’s punishing me. He has something even more wonderful in store.

Notice how all of those narratives put me at the center of things. Maybe I didn’t get what I wanted simply because God wanted someone else to have it. Or maybe—here’s a blow both to my pride and my lingering Calvinist leanings—I really did have a chance at it, but the person who got it instead simply worked harder for it, or just got lucky.

What I’m pondering more and more these days is that there are things we are not meant to know. The early Church fathers used the “not” form to approach God in their speech: inexpressible, incomparable, unfathomable, and so on. There’s wisdom in that, and in cultivating within us a humility that doesn’t try to deduce God’s will from events.

I once heard someone ask a very wise man of God, “How can we counsel those who have just experienced some horrible, inexplicable tragedy, like the loss of a child?” His answer was that we should weep with them, grieve with them, and not be quick to try and discern purposes. Sometimes the answer is simply that it is not for us to know.

I’m not a very good friend, and so there’s irony in being asked by an editor at The Wall Street Journal to write something about modern friendships. Then again, I’m sure the devil himself knows all the saints especially well.

I am neither a good friend in the particulars nor in general. As to the particulars, I have walked away from many friends during my miserable tenure on earth. Never with notification, mind you, because in addition to being a poor friend I am also a coward. Instead, I left by shrinking away from them in times of crisis—theirs or mine—and letting contact atrophy. There is the friend in college whose devastation over his girlfriend’s betrayal made him unbearable to me. The friend from high school whose email asking for renewed contact sits in my in-box a full year later, unanswered. The friends who surrounded me after I had worked myself into a dark, squalid little corner of self-destruction, all of them asking in one way or another, “Why didn’t you call us before it got this bad?”

There is my general failure, as well, which is my failure to befriend all people I meet, even my enemies. In writing the Journal essay, I happened across one intellectual who tried to imbue friendship with an essential reciprocity—you can’t be a friend to someone, he explained, unless that person is a friend to you. Of course, that’s nonsense, because we see in Christ the God-man who befriended all of humanity when they did yet revile Him. It seems to me that reciprocity-friendship is precisely the problem with the world, insofar as it captures man’s unwillingness to give himself away without calculation.

I would like to love my fellow man better, or at the very least the people I call my friends, and it seems that the best way to begin is by favoring myself less. There’s years of habits to be undone in that regard. In this, at least, I have some good role models, for while I have been a poor friend, many of the people who call themselves my friends have been very good to me. Which is one more bit of evidence that miracles are not as rare as we think.