To castrate means to literally hack of the balls of a male.  I feel a little queasy at just the thought of it.  It is common practice in the horse world, but has seen serious momentum among humans over the last 40-50 years.  I mean, we don’t actually separate a man from his nut sack, but we might as well.  To pervasively tell him that:

• he is no different than a woman
• he is unnecessary in the family dynamic
• that he needs to get more in touch with his feminine side

I’m surprised we’re not all lactating about now.  Instead of elevating all that is glorious, mysterious, and beautiful about women (see my post about my wife, “Intoxicated”), they simply sought to dismantle our masculine identity while replacing theirs that resembled something more like ours.  It sounds ludicrous and preposterous as I write it, but it is the predominant world view that most of our lives have operated under.

The battlefield is strewn with angry, pissed-off women that can’t become the men the world has told them they should be, and castrated men who feel out of place and de-toothed in the gender-neutral equality of our time.  Is it no wonder their is so much sexual ambiguity, marital discord, and relational collateral damage of all kinds.  Nobody has any clarity around who God created them to be!  Easy for me to point my finger at all that…all the ills of society reeking all the damage in ways I don’t like.

Interesting how it isn’t all their fault.  The sadder reality is that wounded men wound others…inexplicably and without intention possibly, but they would others.  That is certainly my story.  Out of a broken and confusing home life as a child, I intentioned the perfect Christian family and the perfect children.  I loved my wife and kids, but their behavior, appearance, and holiness was the basis of my identity.

I didn’t just want them to look and act a certain way, my very life depended on it.  I desperately fought to preserve they way I thought things should look; my marriage almost failed and we’re still dealing with the collateral damage in the lives of our kids due to my fathering.  The most discernible impact was born on our incredibly gifted, but dutiful son.  He got the worst of it.

He recently blogged, “For the Love of the Game” from Spain about beginning to believe in himself.  Starting to trust all that God put in him and is grabbing the mantle of leadership God so graciously placed over his life.

http://knoxschroller.blogspot.com/

The great Restorer of the broken hearted has come to heal and set free.  The Father is mending the broken places from the father.

I sat at our younger son’s little league game yesterday and wept as I read his post.  I love to see the full weight of Jesus’ Isaiah 61 ministry manifest in the life of a man…helping him find freedom and healing for all the broken places  But when it is your son and the broken places are partially the work of your hands, it is something altogether.  It holds the promise that healed men can help bring healing to other men.

The benefit of this was that I started to find life, meaning, and story in the media I was processing life through.  More than most I suppose, I tend to find imagery, clarity, and significance in the handiwork of the “giants of culture”, film makers.  It can get real “noisy” trying to watch a movie when story, significance, and application are jumping off the screen.  I am often brought to tears by stuff I view that doesn’t really seem to resonate with anyone else.  Upon further inspection, however, deep meaning for me is found in the story.

I saw a trailer to a movie “We Bought a Zoo” last Fall:

We Bought A Zoo Trailer

So, what does the trailer say?

ATTEMPT TO START OVER

BE UNPREDICTABLE

DO SOMETHING CRAZY

EMBRACE YOUR WILD SIDE

How could that not lure you into the theatre?  My wife, our three eldest kids, and I, all went to see it opening weekend during the holidays.  All of us were brought to tears and I couldn’t have told your completely why. (Okay, I am a geek about these things, I had a pretty good idea why.)  But upon further inspection, it became glaringly clear.

Benjamin Mee is trapped.  A recent tragedy has him paralyzed and he is way over his head trying to be both a mom and dad to his young daughter and teenage son…especially his teenage son.  They are all in a rut and the sadness of his son has started to manifest itself in some pretty dark ways.  Benjamin is walking dead and desperately needs something to shake his slumber.  That is where the zoo comes in.

Now, I might be a bit jaded, but I feel like we are living life fairly alive.  Compared to the crawl we lived in a few years ago, it looks a lot more like warp speed.  My wife and I happened to get several viewings of this movie on an Ipad and some extensive plane flights recently.  Within about three days last week, she texted and told me two things:

“Life can’t look like this a year from now.”

“Praying for what our zoo is.”

I have a core desire for adventure and between the wild ride of my business as ministry adventure and the manifestation of men’s ministry in my life, both one on one and in leading men’s weekends, I am pretty much finding it.  She is obviously not.  The good news is that one of her core desires isn’t “adventure”.  The bad news is that one of her core desires is “to have an irreplaceable role in my adventure”.

It would be far easier to burden her with figuring her own deal out, but this actually requires something of me.  It calls my headship of the family and our marriage into question.  I need to chart adventure for her and my kids and invite them up into a larger story imperative for their lives.  My adventures need to be crafted in such a way as to woo her into them.

My wife is praying for our “zoo” and so am I.  I am going to find what it is.  The same Father who set those core desires in each of us, the Author of our lives, desperately wants us to know what that is as well.  We simply need to be still and quiet enough to hear and then have the courage to follow the opportunity He visions for us.

(Need some additional clarity on this issue?  Read Ch. 9, ‘How Jason Saved His Family” of Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”)

Bruce Bowen? He was a defensive player with a decent three shot, but certainly no super star, right? His jersey will hang next to the likes of David Robinson, Sean Elliot, and Avery Johnson. A lot of pundits, and more than a few players around the league, came out criticizing this move by the Spurs. The idea that a utility player deserved such a position did not sit well in the world.  As the ceremony began, Sean Elliot rose to do the MC duties. He began with a description of the stats that Bruce Bowen racked up in his years with the Spurs.

• A starting player in 3 of the 4 championships that the Spurs have won.
• Started in 500 contiguous games for the Spurs. (A virtually impossible feat in the NBA)
• All Defensive 2nd team in 01, 02, 03, and 1st team for the next 5 years. (He got better as he got older)
• Nearly 40% field goal percentage overall and on 3 point attempts.

But Elliot was quick to point out, and the highlight reel demonstrated, that his greatest asset was his consistent play as a defender against the best shot makers in the world. David Robinson got up (a man who was known as one of the best defending centers in the history of the game) and extolled the virtues of Bowen on defense. He characterized him as a player that would crawl up a players shorts and irritate them the entire game. I thought that was very funny, a description you won’t soon get out of your head, but makes the point really well. Nobody wanted to have Bowen defending against them. Highlight after highlight showed Bowen deftly knocking the ball out of players hands as if by magic, blocking shots with a simple soft touch from behind, sneaking up on players and stealing the ball, and standing up to the greatest players in the game, putting a hand in their face that tracked their eyes relentlessly .

A look into Bowens past reveals a long and winding road to the Spurs locker room. Foreign play dominated the beginning of his career, and he bounced between several teams in the late 90′s before landing at the Spurs. He worked the entire time to perfect a strategy that began to pay off under the guidance of a Spurs organization that became focused on defense as a strategy to win championships. Player after player spoke of his dedicated hard work, whether on the practice court or the playing court. I should mention that each person who spoke about Bowen also made the point that he has been consistently involved in the community. He may have been the most involved player when it came to using his position for good, and that is saying a lot considering he lived in the shadow of David Robinson.

So why am I going on about this sports enigma in a Christian blog? It is not because Bowen trumpets his faith, he does not. It is more because I was surprised by how his story moved me. I felt a lot of emotion watching the “blue collar” player as he is called, receive amazing accolade. I pay attention to my heart these days, and if it is moved, I ask God why. The word consistency was what I heard.

Ah yes. I have been struggling with consistency in my life lately. My prayer life, scripture reading, attitude, and energy. It has been bothersome, maybe like something has gotten up my shorts and is irritating me.  As I process this, I begin to hear the accusation. “You are not consistent Alan, you kind of suck when it comes to that”. I can’t argue. More comes. “It is too late for you to play 500 consistent games”. It feels true. Then this. “All Bowen really did was stick his hand in peoples face and stand on the perimeter waiting for the outlet pass, just like you”. Now I am getting mad. The fruit of these whispers is not good, it is quite the opposite. It is a path being laid to the old tried and true ground of the enemy. Straight to Romans 3:23. We are all sinners and fall short of the glory of God. My inconsistency is disappointing to God, and if I could just get it right, He might finally love me. But I probably can’t, so why try.

Once again I am faced with the bait and switch. If I can do enough things right, God will love me. This is a twist on the truth of God. The truth is that God loves me, and the realization of that causes me to want to do things right. That is where I live most of time, and where I want to live all the time, consistently. From this place, I hear God. Words of affirmation and encouragement. Words of correction and counsel. Good coaching. I know I belong. I am a member of the team and my impact, though not necessarily glorified by the world, brings glory to God.

God takes us on journeys like this. Pricking a response out of something as benign as a jersey retirement ceremony to get our attention. Ah, if we could always hear. This time, I stayed with it until I was compelled to write it down, and in the process, the war ensued. Satan fighting for my resignation, and God fighting for my heart. I have come to recognize this battle, so I accepted the counsel and rejected the lies, this time anyway.

Bruce Bowen’s achievement in the arena of basketball and community service stands now in the record books and hangs in the rafters of the AT&T center. While it is a worldly achievement, in the end, at least for me, it pointed to a picture of something larger. Consistency in the calling of our lives, in loving God for who He is regardless of the current circumstance, and fighting the fight, every day. His journey demonstrated a good way to live.

A last thought as I ponder this. In the same year that Bruce Bowen has received high praise, he has struggled with personal issues. Business failure, divorce, abandonment of freinds, all part of his current journey. It happens that way for all of us. It is a result of the world we live in. But the world that awaits us cheers every second of the day that we glorify God; and the day that we accepted Jesus as our lord, I would like to think that our jersey was hung high as a sign of honor. That would ba a good thing to never forget when this world turns on us. Be consistent for God, like God is for us.

After all, imitation is the best form of flattery.

“Oh great God give us rest
We’re all worn thin from all of this
At the end of our hope with nothing left
Oh great God give us rest”   David Crowder

With a marriage approaching failure and all I had hoped from life hanging in the balance, I shook my fists at the heavens and cried out to God.  He answered.  He comforted me.  But he didn’t commiserate with me or affirm how awful everyone and everything was in my life.  He wooed me into a deeper knowledge of Him and showed me all the things I was seeking identity from would never requite.  When He became my source…the object of my desire, gardens began to bloom in every corner of my life.

Work transformed from effortless drudgery to missional and purposeful engagement of many men.  The frustration of parenting became the promise of endless possibilities…each child an arrow of privilege to launch into a fallen world.  And my wife…baby, oh baby.  Where I once found her frustrating, crushed her under the weight of unrealistic expectation, and saddled her with my ridiculous need for validation, she transformed before my eyes.

She was finally free of the unnecessary and crushing weight of me.  The veil that shrouded her beauty, was removed.  She is now the most captivating and alluring creature I have ever known.  I am intoxicated by her.  I am dizzied and light-headed by the sight, smell, feel, and taste of her.

“I’ve got a girl she tastes like rain on my tounge
She’s got the moon in her hips
And her eyes burn up like the sun
When I’m gone from my girl
When I leave her alone
There ain’t nothing that I’m running from”  Fiction Family

The Kingdom.  The garden.  The everlasting promises of God and the glory of eternity.  They are at hand.  I need to look no further than the beauty that lays beside me in my bed.  She is as she always was.  As she was always intended to be.  She is the very hope and promise of God’s great love for me.  She is glorious and I am undone.

However my favorite thing about this movie is that from beginning to end it dignifies true manhood and exalts masculine strength.  Throughout the movie’s action, one of the SEALS who is soon to be a father, is putting his thoughts on paper, leaving a written description of manhood for his son in the unfortunate event of his death.  The essence of what he said is this, “A man starts to feel like he is no longer a man when he is no longer described as dangerous.”  Oh how beautiful is this insight.  This is so true.  If at his core a man feels he has lost the ability or the right to be dangerous, he is a shell. For 111 minutes of the film you watch men who are willing to give everything for something they see as bigger than themselves.  It will inspire every man to dream again about being dangerous.

Authentic masculinity has a very needed place in this broken world.  Jesus said “The kingdom of heaven is forcefully advancing, and it is forceful men who take hold of it.”  Gentle Jesus meek and mild was anything but.  One open-minded pass through the gospels and you will conclude that Jesus was not a man to be tangled with.  He exposed lies and liars knowing well the cost he would pay.  Then he told his followers that if they were unwilling to pay the same high cost, they were not worthy to follow.

God’s purpose, in part, for man’s particular design is to bring justice to the world and put up a fight for righteousness.  We are his partners in this.  As I see it, the Navy SEALS, along with our local law enforcement officials, are ministers, bringing justice to a world that would suffer all the more without men (and some women) who would put it all on the line to keep their loved ones and their countrymen safe.  The desire to fight, protect and defend is as natural to the average man as hunting is to a lion. Some may not see it as a part of their divine design, but we must consider that we are made in his image, and scripture very clearly states that the Lord is a warrior.  I think this is the truth that made me resonate so strongly with this film.  I was watching real men who were far more in touch with this aspect of their God given design that I am.  It challenged me to find the battles God intends me to fight, and to fight them with courage and single mindedness.

Act of Valor was realistic and intense.  The performances from actual active Navy SEALS were authentic and refreshing (although a bit stiff). I was inspired watching the actual men who are considered the best in the planet at what they do.  I also love that they took great care to communicate the eternal truth that a man’s greatest power and strength come from love.  In this case love for both for nation and family.

Go see Act of Valor.  It is awesome and inspiring.  And lastly I will leave you with a poem one of the SEALS left for his young son.

 “So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about their religion;
respect others in their view,and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people and grovel to none.
When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself.
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.
When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”

~ Chief Tecumseh

Act of Valor is a film about dangerous men who have given themselves over to something bigger, loving it and their brothers in arms more that they love their own lives.  They are dangerous for good.  My heart, as a man, cries out to be dangerous for something good.  Watching it brings truth to a man’s heart and tears to the eyes.  We could all use more movies like this.

I was by myself with the windows down in Big Bend National Park. Mine was the only car on the highway,  meandering through painfully beautiful landscapes and listening to a playlist I created for just such quintessential Texas moments.  With the red granite cliffs of the Chisos Mountains to the left of me and the desert to the right and in front of me, the imposing landscape begged to be complemented with loud music from the masters of Texas songwriting: Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, George Strait, Robert Earl Keen and Patsy Cline.  20 miles from my destination at Santa Elena Canyon, one of my all time favorite country songs came on by Toby Kieth and Willie Nelson.  As Toby, Willie and I crooned together, a familiar joy surfaced as I belted out the chorus, describing how a hard day’s work of fighting bad guys deserves a good stiff drink at the end of the day in celebration.  I thought  “What about this song stirs me?  God?  Help me out with this one.“

“Justice. And then peace.”  I heard.

I try to get away with God alone at least once a year (wife and time permitting).  So here I was on this road trip and my first order of business was to invite him into our time together.  ”Come Father, however you want to come.  I want you.  I want truth.  However you choose to come doesn’t matter to me.  Just be here with me.  This is our time together… you and me… father and son.”  Well, He came, like He always does, but only after I wrestled a lot with the fear He wouldn’t.  (But like I said, He always comes).  He was intimate and strong and true.  He spoke into some very deep places, faithful in his perfect and lifelong pursuit of my most precious asset, my heart.  I could easily go into all that.  However, this is about the song.

Now the “Justice, and then peace” that I heard was surprising, but not out of the blue.  As I sang I realized the parallels between the lyrics and what my faith in the eternal God had led me to look forward to some day in the future: an end to all evils, the source of evil finally obliterated, and a celebration that involves lively music and adult beverages (consumed responsibly, of course).

Rev. 19:11     I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.  12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.  13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.  14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 

Rev. 19:19  Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army. ²⁰ But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf… The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. ²¹The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.

 Rev. 19:9     Then the angel said to me, “Write: ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’” And he added, “These are the true words of God.” 

Scripture’s purdy dang clear about the Judge, his posse and the fact that we’re all going to round up the bad guys on horseback. I have my doubts about whether beer and whiskey will be  served at the bar, but I would be willing to bet a large fortune that wine will abound from the generous and extravagant heart of God at that Wedding Supper.  He may even make a little too much.  (That was over 900 bottles Jesus made at Cana.  And it was really good, apparently.)

With the hard work done, with Jesus in the lead, with so many of our questions finally answered, our bellies filled with the greatest of fare, and the wine of Christ having gone to our heads, I do believe we will have good reason to lift out glasses.  A few toasts will be in order.  A few jokes will be told, and no greater joy will have ever been felt.

"Well Justice is the one thing you should always find. You've got to saddle up your boys. You've got to draw a hard line. When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune and we'll all meet back at the local saloon. We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses."

I love that song.  Willie makes it good, but God makes it true.

The reality is that all of us make choices that inexplicably put us back in the crosshairs of our wounding story…we inadvertently tee up a brutal and determined enemy.  My wife says that I sometimes become a different person around my family.  Instead of confident, cocksure, healed and whole, I am petty, irritated and easily sucked into superfluous battleground.  For many of us, revisiting family, the mouth waters of our wounding, is a journey into arrested development.  We become that little boy again.

Even out of the brutality of childhood, we seek the familiar:

• The physically abused girl marries an abuser
• The boy with a super controlling father finds a boss just like him
• The boy with an overbearing mom, marries the same
• A sexually abused girl falls into promiscuity

Logic would dictate a completely different response, but these are matters and decisions of the heart…the source of either glorious things as whole and healed, or tragic as broken and in disrepair.  And the most brutal thing of all, our heart is the core of our being, our identity.  Without healing, the wound transforms from the thing that happened to us into the thing that we are.  We embrace it and make it the hallmark of our life.

There is some family that I rarely see anymore.  There are some friends I quit calling back.  There are organizations and affiliations I walked away from.  My associations are going to either drive me toward more healing, freedom, and missional living, or remind me that I was once a little boy whose heart wasn’t handled very well…and drive me back into that reality.

I fully embrace the fullness of Jesus healing and restoration ministry.  I take on and try to live fully into the new heart and identity I have been given.  I have walked quite a bit of the hard journey it takes to remember and restore.  I am no longer that boy. Through the discernment of the Spirit, I am going to do everything I know to do…to hold fast of all that He accomplished for me.  I want citizenship in the new covenant.

I was watching a show called House on TV a few nights ago. In this episode, a series of events culminated in one of the doctors being stabbed with a scalpel and almost dying. An investigation ensued in an attempt to figure out who was to blame. That is the natural tendency of us, humans, we want to assign blame. In the face of something terrible, there is some comfort in hunting for the culprit in the whole mess.

One version of this is when good meaning Christians determine that a person befallen with a tragedy must have deserved it through some wrong they did. It forms itself in a question. “What did you do to make God so mad?” Now, to be fair, there is plenty of Old Testament scripture to support this thought process. Over and over again we are told by the prophets how God will wipe out his people for their disobedience. In fact, they do get wiped out on several occasions. God reveals in pretty graphic terms what their sins were, and what He was going to do because of it. We learn in these scriptures that God does not get mad at a specific incident of one man or within one event, so much as a decline in the faith of his people over time, or a movement away from Him and into sin. God sees all time and space, and His perspective is impossible for us to see when we are in the forest, so to speak.

I tell my kids all the time that disaster usually does not strike based on a single decision. A person can usually think back to realize that there were 5 or more decisions down a road of destruction that led to the disaster that befell them. I tell them that each decision they make to move away from God, or morality, or even common sense, is the beginning of a journey that will end in disaster. It is really hard to see when you are in the trees. It is also true that sometimes disaster strikes for no discernible reason at all, but that is really hard for us humans to accept.

In the case of the tragic events that have happened recently, I have tried to develop, or surmise, some understanding of the bigger picture events that may have led to the specific tragedy. I confess that this looks a lot like pop psychology. I try to pull in events of the larger story to provide an understanding of the circumstance. I look to see if the underlying problem might be the brokenness of a broken upbringing, or a behavior adopted. A bad habit passed on from parent to child, or a good behavior not passed on. I realize that I am doing this to relieve myself of the burden of carrying the sadness that besets me when learning about a tragedy. Often in these cases, I know just enough to make me dangerous. I am probably right about the cause and effect of some things, but I think I only go about one or two layers deep in the diagnosis. The reality is that there is a whole lot more going on than I realize. There is just no way to know it all, and there is certainly no way to explain it all.

Take the story of Job as an example. In the story, Job is just trying to mind his own business when he gets stricken and afflicted and seemingly punished for no good reason. God is behind it, making a point to the devil, but this is impossible to see from the ground. Job is befuddled about what he has done, but the story tells us his friends are right there to suggest a few things. In the end, God restores Job, but not before telling Job how little his story is, and how big God is. There was a whole lot more going on than Job or his friends could possibly imagine. As for his friends, they had spent much more time trying to run some pop psychology on him to determine his fault, than they did just sitting with him and mourning with him.

I confess Lord that I spend more time trying to assign blame, and come up with explanations, than in praying to you for understanding. I spend more time diagnosing than just feeling the sadness of it and letting you work in that. I am sorry. I don’t need to understand everything. I want to live more in faith. I need to live more in an understanding that I just cannot understand some things. I believe you are in control, but in that knowledge, it is not helpful for me to then blame you when I can’t blame anyone else.

Every morning I turn left on Bluebonnet heading towards Broadway, taking my daughter to school at 6:25 in the morning. It is dark and cold, and it is hard to be cheerful that early. But last week, there in front of us was a very bright full moon. Spectacular and surprising in a breath catching kind of way. I can’t imagine how humans have managed to get to that glowing ball, but that is nothing compared to how that glowing ball got there in the first place. God says to me, “that is not even scratching the surface of things I have done that you can’t understand.” In the darkness of the car, I blush in embarrassment.

• Sit in front of the TV watching a 3 hour game….easy.  Walk across the house to engage my teenage daughter in a relevant conversation…hard.
• Meet a friend for lunch and talk about the NCAA tournament, his business, or politics…easy.  Ask him how his marriage, his walk with Jesus, or his struggling college son is doing…hard.
• Asking my wife what she did that day…easy.  Ask her how she is feeling about her life…terrifying.
• Cutting a check for a ministry need I heard about…easy.  Going to the third world to live their life and serve on a mission trip…hard.
• Talking to a Christian friend about the pastor’s sermon…easy.  Talking to someone I don’t know about the life change possible…nearly impossible.

I sat in what some would consider a very large chair in the halls of corporate American.  There were lots of zeroes attached to the work and it mattered a lot in the overall scheme of things, but it was very easy…required very little of me.  I left to manage a company whose annual earnings are 1/1000 of the size of the investable assets I managed…it is incredibly hard and challenging.

The first was a J-O-B and the second is a cautious inch into significance.  While it may appear to be a step back or a step down, it is exactly the opposite.  It is stepping up in the larger story of God to take an assignment that He uniquely created me and called me to.  It has been terrifying at times, but more rewarding than I could have possibly managed.

Every step has been a progression in a long journey….a measured segment in a Mapquest multi-city trip.  From the couch to the arena to the colosseum floor.  From unknown to probable to very, very real.  A man gets asked in “Fight Club”…”Is that your blood?”  Answer?  ”Yeah, some of it.”.  It can feel painful and costly at times, but mostly glorious and intended.  So what if you get wounded and bloodied…lose a few pints…there is plenty more where that came from.

Even in life, the desperate quest for significance is opposed.  My wife and I plan some time downtown to reconnect and remember.  I have grand plans for updating our long-term vision for our family, to have a romantic dinner, and twist the sheets up…result?…disaster.  It was DOA…not really prayed up, but exhaustively thought through…full of the unreasonable expectation and the hope of decades.  It will be much harder to mount an initiative toward another one of those, but it will happen.  Again, I am bloodied, but unbowed.  I will, because though it is opposed, it is worth it.  As comfortable as it is from the couch or a seat up high in the colosseum, the arena floor is extraordinary.