my careless contagion

What is love? No, not the song by Haddaway. But, really. I want to know what love is. No, not the song by Foreigner. You may ask, "What's love got to do with it?" No, not the song by Tina Turner. Oh, stop, Joshua.  People use the word "love" casually. They talk about how they love their shoes, their favorite shows, and pumpkin spice lattes. Has our concept of love changed? Have we changed?  I like those stories of couples who are married for 60-some years who die within hours of each other. OK, not the dying part, but the rest of it. They spent their lives together and couldn’t exist without each other. But is that love or something else?  What is love? Is it loyalty? (If so, then dogs take the cake.) A feeling in your gut? (Which you may or may not be able to trust.) Cake and a card on your birthday? (All purchasable.) Is there a definition of love?  Love is defined in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 as, "Charity (aka love) suffereth long, and is kind; ch...

What is the nature of failure? What defines failure?   No, this isn't another post about how much I hate myself or my life. Really, I'm just asking questions and positing the truth. So, before you say, "Here we go again," relax. This isn't another I-hate-my-life post. It's just an honest assessment. A child has many people to look up to. But, a child also has many people telling him (let's assume it's a boy for our purposes) he's wrong. Tell a child this often enough and he becomes angry or sullen. And then he assumes he is always wrong. How do I know this? I was that child. In fact, I am still that child, and those same people who told me I was wrong back then still tell me I am wrong today. In fact, I feel I've never been right about anything. I've been swimming in a sea of wrongness my entire life! On a fairly recent and random Saturday, I realized in many people's eyes (or, potentially, if they have all the facts), I am a fa...

Shh, I'm just going to sneak this post in here.   The above photo is a painting my mom did of my son. And a dog. Looks pretty good, huh? Well, this painting is inspired by a photo. See below.  Yes, this neat father-son photo was turned into a painting. And I was erased. And replaced by a dog. That's my mom for you.  I'm pretty sure my son doesn't even like dogs. He's afraid of them. The above picture was taken about two years ago. It was taken by the river in a town I used to live in. My mom says it was taken in a different part of town in a different park. She's wrong. But that's my mom.  I've begun to accept the fact that dear old Joshua isn't so dear to his parents, and this is just one example of how not dear he is to them. Maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age, but I like the photo better than the painting. My son means so much to me, I don't even have words. It would have been a nice thing to see in oil or acr...

My parents in 1984 surveying the house they were having built. I have this memory, but not because I actually remember it. I was too young to remember it, but the story was retold often enough by my mother that it seems like I actually have the memory.  I was very young. It was the mid-1980s. My parents had a house built (which went wildly over budget) in 1984 on Happy Hollow Street in a little town in the Southern Black Hills in South Dakota. Parents raised their kids a little differently then than they do now. There was also the matter of finances, which meant that a babysitter wasn't always possible. My parents had a colleague leave their company and start up a competing business across the street. In order to compete, they were putting in 100 hour weeks, both of them. This continued for years.  My mom didn't want to work, but my dad was the boss and women were working a lot in those days, so he said she should too. She started out as the bookkeeper, setting ty...