You may have noticed a lapse in content around these parts.

Well, it's because we're working on something new. A new site, to be exact. The one we told you about last year, and are just now finishing up.

We're excited. It's going to be good. The best part is we won't have to put up with our currently awful backend. Oh, we can't wait.

Anyway, there are a few points I'd like to make.

1) There's still plenty of content over at the Burnside Blog. You can read that for the time being.

2) Or you can peruse our archives here!

3) If you have submitted an article and have not heard back, please hang onto your piece. Our new site will have a streamlined submissions process. Really streamlined. You will like it. The point is, hold onto your piece until the new site is launched and the new submissions process has been laid out. If you haven't heard from us, it's not that we didn't like something...honest!...it's just that our current format for accepting new submissions is deeply flawed.

Right now, I cannot give an exact date for the change over, but we fully expect it to be ready by the end of summer. Probably before.

Thank you for your readership. You will like what we have in store.

Sincerely,
Jordan Green
Editor-in-Chief

Graceway was located in the largest slum (Tuwani) in Kitale. I was told about the poverty we would come across, and all I could think about were the commercials I had seen on TV or the articles I had read about Africa. Commercials and articles so often give you the statistics on death, disease, malnutrition, and the list goes on (I hadn't seen this level of poverty in South Africa). Without even realizing it I had let those things shape my view of poverty. I thought poverty equaled misery. I thought it would be really hard to be in the slums and see how some people have to live. But what really struck me once I got there was not the misery but the joy I saw in the people I met. Many of them possessed more joy than I see in a lot of people in America.

One of my favorite families to visit in Tuwani was Beatrice and her five kids. Beatrice was around 25 and a widow, so she had to raise her four daughters and one son by herself. This is a somewhat common picture of what a family looks like in Africa. Many women are widows. Many children are fatherless, motherless or both. And that's usually where the story ends. You don't get to see inside their little mud huts where they somehow still find things to laugh about. But this is what I saw every time I was with Beatrice and her kids.

I met Beatrice and her kids through Graceway. Her three oldest girls attend school there. Because Graceway has a feeding program these three girls were getting enough food, but Beatrice's daughter, Esther, was too young to go to school. Her baby brother was still young enough to be breast fed, but Esther wasn't getting the food she needed. Her hands, feet, face and belly were swollen, and she wouldn't eat although she would drink a little bit. She barely had energy to move, and you could tell she was uncomfortable. We didn't realize she was malnourished until she was brought to the hospital. She needed more protein in her diet, but Beatrice wasn't award of that.

Families rarely have enough money to bring someone to the hospital, so my friends took Esther in. They spent much of their time with her there since Beatrice also had to take care of her four other children and couldn't be with Esther all the time. Another friend and I went to visit her shortly after she was brought in. I had never seen such a dirty hospital before! I was surprised that people could actually be helped there. Patients were treated in the same areas with nothing being washed or cleaned in between each one who came in. Children were being laid on top of a counter that had no sheet, no paper, no anything to cover the counter with. Doctors would check them, stick a needle in them (sometimes IVs were inserted into their heads), do whatever they needed to do, and then bring in the next child and lay them on the same spot. It was strange to see a hospital able to function like that. The floors were dirty, the walls were stained with I don't know what, and it smelled pretty much everywhere you walked, especially near the choos (a choo is a Kenyan toilet...a rectangular hole in the ground/floor). As many as three families were assigned to one bed, and there were multiple beds in each sectioned off room. It was crowded everywhere. Families would spend days or weeks in these conditions depending on how long someone needed to be in the hospital. Sometimes you could wait a whole night at the hospital (the top half of your shirt stained with blood - I saw this), in a waiting area, before you were even seen or attended to. The hallways and waiting areas were all out doors, but at least they had tin roofs covering them. They had a children's ward, maternity ward, and a few other wards that were inside with walls around them.

So, that is what I walked into the day Esther was brought in. The workers in the hospital knew right away that she was malnourished. They said she would have to stay in the hospital for a week, but agreed to release her after a few days since they explained to us what to feed her in order to get her healthy again. So, thankfully, only a few nights were spent there before they let her go home early.

I had known Esther for a few weeks before I saw her smile for the first time. It was after she came home from the hospital, and my friends and I were visiting them. Beatrice's older girls are some of the most joyful kids I remember meeting while I was in Kenya, yet I had never seen Esther as happy or as energetic as they were. On this particular day, as we were there playing and laughing with the kids, something made Esther smile...and we even saw her teeth! We talk about this day even now because it was so good to see her happy. I don't remember what it was that made her smile, but we even got a picture. It was wonderful to see the change in her as she began to get healthier.

But it wasn't just Esther's smile that made us happy. It was being with that family. Here is a mom with five kids, living in a tiny mud hut, struggling to even be able to feed them everyday. You would never know by their attitudes or actions how hard things were for them though. As we were walking to their house that day the older girls came running out to meet us. They jumped on us, hugged us, and brought us inside. I think we laughed the entire time we were there. And we don't even speak the same language! I know at one point the girls were making fun of us, I think just because we were white (and we had 'small eyes'), but even that made us laugh with them! And it was so good to see how Beatrice interacted with her kids. She knew how to make them laugh, and you could tell that they had fun together. They would only have to say a few words to each other before the giggles started. She struggled to provide for them, but she loved them! I just never expected to see that kind of joy, and hear that kind of laughter in such hard circumstances. It was so different to be in a place where people's joy is not dependent on the things they possess.

There was another day, towards the end of our stay, when my friend and I visited their home. Only Beatrice was there with her two youngest kids, because the others were in school. When we walked in, they were eating the powder out of vitamin packets. I wasn't sure why they were doing that at first, but after a little while, we realized she didn't have any food in the house. I asked her two or three times if she had anything at all, and her answer was always, "No". I kept asking her because I just couldn't grasp not having food. It's hard to understand poverty without seeing it, but I had actually stepped into it, at least physically. I could see and smell the trash all around, I could see how people were living, but I still could not comprehend waking up without any food. And there was Beatrice, smiling and welcoming us into her home. Her smile was always so big and came so freely. She must have been wondering where the next meal was going to come from and what she could feed her kids, but she was calm as she was telling us she had no food. The only reason I didn't start crying when she said that was because she was somehow okay. We left, bought some food, and brought it back to her. She just smiled and said 'Asante' (thank you) over and over.

Meeting Beatrice and her family made me think about why I don't smile as much as them, and when I do, if it comes from a true appreciation of God's grace in my own life. I was reminded, for the hundredth time while I was in Africa, that you can find joy in the most unexpected places. There is always something to smile about. Always something to be thankful for - by the grace of God. There is no other way to explain their smiles, laughter and hospitality alongside the physical destitution of their lives. God's grace, His undeserved goodness to us, is a free gift that we cannot earn. Some have much, others have barely anything. But when He gives anyone any good thing to even smile about, it's a gift from Him. I don't know how conscious Beatrice was of God's grace, but her smiles proved that it exists even in the midst of human suffering.

And everyone's fine with that. Except Malcolm Gladwell. And now me.

I recently read an email conversation between Gladwell and Bill Simmons on ESPN.com. At one point, the discussion winds its way to the concept of moral hazard in sports - the same concept of moral hazard that lead to the current economic crisis - and Gladwell points out that we make it comfortable for teams to lose by rewarding them with high draft picks. He states that everyone's understanding of how the draft should function keeps us believing "that access to top picks is the primary determinant of competitiveness in pro sports."

That's not true. Look at basketball in Los Angeles. The Clippers have picked in the lottery twenty times since the NBA started the draft lottery in 1985. Those top picks have amounted to three first round exits and a near-upset of second-seeded Phoenix in the second round in 2006. In that same time span, the Lakers have picked in the lottery three times. The Clippers will make their twenty-first lottery pick in June while the Lakers just wrapped up the parade for their sixth championship in the lottery era.

Teams like the Clippers, the Memphis Grizzlies, and the Minnesota Timberwolves keep showing up in the lottery - the opposite effect of the current draft setup. Ideally, the league should be cyclical. Bad teams should lose but gain good young players. Good teams should win but pick later, when the players aren't as highly regarded. Bad teams should build a nucleus of young talent and begin to knock off aging champions. It doesn't work like this. The draft is one of many pieces of an organization, but bad teams rely too much on it and the potential of having their ping pong ball come up when the next superstar is ready to leave school and carry their team to glory, banners, headlines and draft picks nearer the end of the first round.

Gladwell's idea is that "the only way around the problem [of moral hazard] is to put every team in the lottery." When the guarantee of a top pick is removed, as the losses add up, teams wouldn't be able to fall back on waiting till next year, on the potential of draft picks to lift the organization out of the lottery and into the playoffs.

I was intrigued by the idea of taking the safety net away from perpetually bad franchises, so Gladwell's words - "Every team's name gets put in a hat, and you get assigned your draft position by chance" - turned into my actions: I printed out every NBA team's name, put them in my 1984 Padres hat, and had my own equal-odds NBA Draft Lottery.

Actually, I had four. I drew a complete draft order four times. Each time, every NBA team, whether they made The Finals or failed to win 20 games, received their draft position by the same equal chance as every other team.

Here are the four different top fives this system produced:

Lottery 1
1. Washington (19-63)
2. New Jersey (34-48)
3. San Antonio (54-28)
4. Philadelphia (41-41)
5. Portland (54-28)

Lottery 2
1. Toronto (32-49)
2. Houston (53-29)
3. LA Clippers (19-63)
4. Atlanta (47-35)
5. Oklahoma City (23-59)

Lottery 3
1. Chicago (41-41)
2. San Antonio (54-28)
3. Golden State (29-53)
4. New York (32-50)
5. Charlotte (35-47)

Lottery 4
1. Phoenix (46-36)
2. Milwaukee (34-48)
3. LA Clippers (19-63)
4. Golden State (29-53)
5. Orlando (59-23)

Looking at the top fives shows how different draft day, and the league, could be if the winners are allowed in the lottery (I want to focus mainly on the top fives because that's where most of fans' general attention to the draft goes). Seeing 30-, 40-, and 50-win teams picking in the top five might feel odd at first, but it expands what the draft can do for all teams, not just the losers. I won't list all 120 picks here, but they are evenly dispersed with championship-caliber, mid-level, and lowest-tier teams dispersed throughout the draft orders.

Based on the results of the draft orders, the equal-odds lottery produced the NBA Draft has the potential to:

1. Give a Loser a Chance
This system would not forget the have-nots. The first team I plucked from my hat was Washington. Hello, Blake Griffin. Welcome back, Gilbert Arenas. Those two plus Caron Butler give the Wizards three building blocks to try and return to the playoffs. Washington fans could nickname Griffin "The Big Bailout".

This situation was highly probable this year. The Wizards had the third highest chance at the number one pick. I wonder if a low-win team would possibly feel more fortunate for winning the lottery and bringing in a player like Griffin in an equal-odds lottery than in a weighted system.

Would the fans and the team treat him less as yet another potential savior and more of a prize to be developed and supported because there is no guarantee of another top pick next year if the team continues to lose? Would they be more willing to fire a losing coach and seek out a winner now that the top prize falls to them? Would they swing a trade to swap quality veterans for younger stars who could grow alongside their new weapon?

Three of my four equal-odds lotteries gave a top-five pick to a team with fewer than twenty wins. Even if those teams didn't get the first pick but snagged the third (like the Clippers did in half my lotteries), they would have a chance at Ricky Rubio or Hasheem Thabeet this year, or someone like Deron Williams, Carmelo Anthony, Dominique Wilkins, or even Michael Jordan, as teams choosing third have had in past drafts.

2. Discourage Tanking
No league wants teams alienating fans, dropping attendance, and becoming the butt of Bill Simmons' jokes (or the object of his attempts to become a real-life NBA general manager) by intentionally giving away games. In current system, if teams tank, they don't guarantee the top spot; they merely increase their chances. If the prize is worth it, a la Oden v. Durant in 2007, bad teams might just say screw it and become horrendous teams for the sake of all those Next Years with a superstar on their roster.

An equal-odds system protects the sanctity of the regular season. Teams would be free to focus on winning, teaching young players to master strategies and game situations, instead of giving up before the opening tip.

This cannot be bad. If wins and losses don't effect draft position, games would be more entertaining for the fans who pay to be there, players would not develop losing habits, and teams would fight against traditions of losing instead of embracing the identity of a league-wide punching bag for the sake of a more ping pong balls in the hopper.

3. Give Back Momentum
My four lotteries produced seven different scenarios where a middle-ground team that has recently deflated possibly gets some wind back through the draft: Toronto picking first; Phoenix picking first; Philadelphia picking fourth; Golden State picking third in one lottery and fourth in another; and the two third picks for the Clippers.

Toronto has slipped from the Eastern Conference third seed to out of the playoffs in two years. Phoenix was the most entertaining team in the league for a good part of this decade. Now the organization is old and confused and desperate. The blessing of a top pick could give either organization some swagger and fan support back.

Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Golden State could use all use the good publicity of a top pick to recover quickly from the very messy and very public Elton Brand/Baron Davis/Cory Maggette fiasco.

The key here is that if any of these teams were to land top picks, it would be result of chance, not a direct consequence of being a bad basketball team. Experts and analysts wouldn't need to focus on how bad the team is. Instead, they could focus on what using this pick well could do for a team that has performed well in recent history, but is staggering a bit.

4. Catapult Good Towards Great
Portland, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago are all rising teams who exited the playoffs in the first two rounds. They all have an ethos of excitement. All the cool kids follow the Blazers on the Internet. The Rockets have a stat-crunching GM and nearly beat the Lakers without their two big-name stars. The Hawks took Boston to seven games last year as an eight seed and made the second round this year. Chicago is full of former NCAA tournament stars, has a #1 draft pick/Rookie of the Year starting at the point, and just played arguably the most exciting first round series in the history of basketball against the defending champs.

Frequent Bill Simmons readers will know that The Sports Guy holds to the idea that the NBA is best when there is a clear group of heavyweights. An equal-odds lottery could help one of these teams, already brimming with excitement and potential, move into that heavyweight division. They have histories of making decent to excellent roster moves; give them good draft position to keep stocking their rosters and they could quickly advance from the first two rounds to being a factor in the conference and league finals.

5. Reward a Well-Run Winner
The Spurs, a team with ten consecutive 50-win seasons (two 60-win campaigns in that stretch) and four of the last eleven championships, show up at number three in my first lottery and number two in my third.

Instinct says that's not fair. They shouldn't have a shot at Thabeet and an opportunity to groom a third dominant big man. They shouldn't get to pick up Rubio and add yet another star international guard.

They should. They are a smart organization. Yes, they've had timely number one picks with David Robinson and Tim Duncan, but they picked Tony Parker at the end of the first round and Manu Ginobili was a second-rounder. They consistently go after role players that fit their team needs: Steve Kerr, Robert Horry, Bruce Bowen, Brent Barry, and Michael Finley. They are well-coached and play good defense. Teams don't win consistently if they aren't well-run.

If we don't seem to have a problem with the current draft system allowing poorly-run teams to continue losing, I don't have a problem with setting up the draft to allow well-run teams to keep winning. The only reasons to say no are: a) the incorrect belief that high draft picks equal continued success; and b) championship envy. (If you think they should have no shot at the top pick, stop and ask: if I was discussing your team here instead of the Spurs, would you have a problem? If you have developed a dislike for San Antonio, what about a team you are fairly indifferent towards? Would you be okay with it then?)

6. Stack a Champion
The only team from this season's conference finals in the top five of my lotteries is Orlando. The Magic raise the possibility that a championship team could finish their parade and make an early draft selection in the same month.

This year, the fifth pick I drew for them isn't expected to be a future great, but you just never know. Dwyane Wade was a fifth pick. So were Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, Scottie Pippen, and Charles Barkley. If the fifth pick fell to Orlando, Magic fans would be ecstatic that their team just took out the Celtics, upset the Cavaliers, and captured the first Finals win in franchise history - and would currently be convincing themselves that James Harden is the next Wade or Jordan Hill turns into Round Mound of Rebound II.

This could also have ripple effect on the other top teams in the league. Maybe Cleveland sees the team they just lost to with a top pick on the horizon, as well as LeBron's to-NY-or-not-NY situation in 2010, and they decide to amp up their roster with significant trades and free agent signings in the offseason to beat their new rival and keep LeBron at home by proving they can win in Cleveland. We'd already be talking about their imminent collision next season.

7. Remind Teams the Draft Doesn't Fix Everything
The oddest occurrence in my four lotteries came outside of the top fives printed above. In the third lottery, 17-win Sacramento fell to the thirtieth pick: the team with the most losses picking last.

(Okay, technically, they also fell to the floor. I pulled twenty-nine teams from my hat. When I reached for number thirty, my hat was empty. There, on the floor, was a folded piece of paper: poor Sacramento. The NBA system would be safe from such miscues since they would use their sophisticated ping pong ball machine, but in an equal-odds lottery, the worst team has an equal chance at all thirty picks, so I skipped a redraw and stuck with the strange scenario.)

I have no problem with this. This situation is where ingenuity comes in. Sacramento's decision-makers would be forced to look at other ways to improve their win total - they couldn't sit back with their current roster and coaching staff and just wait for next year's big man on campus because they could easily be picking low again come June 2010.

First, they would scour the unheralded prospects for sleeper potential. Last year, Mario Chalmers was still on the board at thirty and he started alongside Wade in Miami and set a Heat record for steals in a game. Two years ago, Carl Landry, Glen Davis, and Marc Gasol were all second rounders and they've grown into contributors for their teams.

None of these players would be a franchise savior, but that might not be what Sacramento needs. High picks bring the baggage of expectations, whether they live up to them or not, and they might leave as soon as their rookie contract runs out if the situation doesn't improve. Picking and developing a Chalmers or Davis would help Sacramento build a team based on a system and playing together instead of just hoping the talent of a young star could bring them back to the top of the conference.

Sacramento might also entertain something like bringing in Rick Pitino to put together an all-full-court-press unit, like Gladwell and Simmons discussed. They could maximize their roster and build a specific unit to run intense pressure for certain parts of games. Instead of being a bad team, they could at least be a bad team trying to grow into a good team by using their roster 1-12, and a bad team with a fan following and media exposure because of their radical strategy.

This system could force innovation in other areas of NBA organizations. There could be leaps in the use of statistical analysis in building a basketball team; more risks taken in drafting, trading, and signing players; or an intensified focus on the effectiveness and ingenuity of coaching staffs. Maybe one team creates a position focused on finding creative basketball strategies, spawning a rash of copycat positions and new ideas in the sport that we have yet to conceive.

Instead of bad teams putting much of their hope in the potential of a high draft pick to develop into a franchise player, they would see those young stars as a piece of a larger puzzle. Maybe an equal-odds lottery would eventually lead to fewer poorly-run teams, more diverse team strategies and identities, and fans who aren't content to let their teams fold during a dismal season, take L after L after L, and wait till next year.

A few years ago I finally arrived at an age in which I could somewhat objectively reflect upon a fairly unconventional childhood. It may not have been incredibly different from yours - many of the elements of a "normal" American upbringing are there. As per the status quo, I had a mother and a father, two younger sisters, a rotating menagerie of pets, an insatiable curiosity and friends of both the real and imaginary variety.

We moved around a bit when I was younger, leaving the home I'd known as an infant and young child near Houston, Texas for San Antonio when I was five; leaving San Antonio for Dallas when I was seven; and finally leaving Dallas for Austin just before the start of my fifth grade year. My father was a youth minister in the Baptist church for over 35 years, and the moves were always an amalgamated necessity - church politics and more intimate reasons, some of which have only recently manifested as family secrets. As I'm sure many of you know, the life of a minister, the church behind the stained glass windows and plastic smiles, can be just as ugly as you may imagine the lives and scenes behind the doors of any prominent government office or corporate boardroom to be. I was aware of this gross ecclesiastical malady from an early age - I watched from the nursery hall; I listened to the adults talk in hushed voices after I had been tucked into bed at night.

I was aware of other things too - my mother's escalating descent into the basement of loneliness and depression, her diminishing respect and love for my father, my father's own skewed, albeit well meaning, priorities to the students in his church and anybody else who didn't quite fall under the rubric of immediate family. I've now come to believe that we - his family, were never consciously shelved (I know that we were never ignored) - but that in becoming an extension of his self and his life, we also became victim to his self-sacrificial predilection.

The move to Austin the summer following my tenth birthday seems to be a key moment in my life for a multitude of reasons, only a few of which are remotely relevant here. I'm convinced that my mental adolescence began long before the age of twelve or thirteen. At eight and nine, my cynicism and rollercoaster confidences were already bright and glowing with the emotional sweat that only a mind experiencing the loss of childhood notion and the gain of adult self-consciousness can ooze.

So, another relocation at age ten from a place I loved to a place I didn't know only precipitated this feeling of life-dread. In time, though, I came to love our new church home in Austin - it was different and exciting and much bigger than any community we had been a part of. The message was primarily of Grace, of Forgiveness, of Love. I can see now with the move and new church community, God was preparing my family for something of which these messages were most important in the healing.

The relationship between my parents grew worse than ever before. My mother moved out of their bedroom and into the guest room adjacent to mine in the fall of my sixth grade year. A few months later, sometime after Christmas, she moved out of the house entirely and out of town to her sister's in San Antonio. Divorce inevitably followed. This thrust my family into new territory - my dad into a new role as a single father and primary care-taker of three girls 11, 8, and 7, my mom as a still-young woman at 31 without her children, and us as the children of divorce struggling with a clueless dad and a mommy who became just a mother who felt thousands of miles away.

A million dinner disasters and frustrations and sad moments characterize the first few years of adjustment in a home that had housed five...and then only four. My mother soon remarried and started a new family, changing cities every couple of years like a pair of sneakers and, despite the fact that she has always emphasized how much she loves my sisters and me, our relationship flows a bit shallower today as a result. Truthfully, she is a very different woman than the mom I grew up with (she's even recently changed her first name), and sometimes it's hard to even remember my mother as I knew her in those new and naive days before my world began to cave.

My dad and I have only grown closer. During the separation and divorce and in the years to follow, he claims that my sisters and I taught him as much, if not more than he taught us. That's partly his intrinsic humility talking, but completely truth. I think that's the remarkable thing - for as my sisters and I were growing physically and intellectually, he was growing as well. We matured together in faith and wisdom, though his capacity for such strongly exceeds ours. He has always emphasized the importance of discernment, grace, mercy and compassion. Nothing was forced upon us, choice and autonomy prized, and though there have been some stumbles, even plummets, along the way, I have emerged from childhood relatively healthy and joyful and my relationship with the Lord remarkably intact despite so many witnessed horrors and manipulations even within my own church home - the one espousing Grace and Forgiveness and Love. My earthly dad has only served as a beautiful and challenging human model of my Heavenly Father.

My dad is one of my most favorite people. How many can say that? But I can read the enormity of the impact of the divorce in his tired eyes; I see how it has affected his health. He has not yet remarried and that predilection for self-sacrifice still remains strong, though he is now the sole victim. He has struggled to maintain balance between an emotionally demanding job as a minister and an emotionally demanding job as a single father. He encourages me to write, but does not allow himself the time to pen the thousands of books in his head and in his heart. My sisters and I are now out of the house and living in three very different parts of the country, but he's still working 60 hours a week ministering, comforting, counseling others.

I can't imagine growing up without his quiet influence everyday and while I am still very saddened by the circumstance, I no longer look back upon my life and long for something different to have happened to my family so many years ago. We are doubtlessly shaped by the events in our lives and our responses to them, as well as the response of others close to us. I like who I am. It's been a far from perfect twenty-four years, but I have realized that I would be a markedly different person if certain events hadn't evolved into a seemingly brokenfamilybeast of a thing, and I thank God everyday for helping us to tame this leviathan of modern American family life - let's just pray this creature doesn't become the household pet of the status quo.

Notwithstanding, the number of single fathers with primary custody of their kids is on the rise. As a culture and community of believers, I think we should offer these men just as much praise and recognition as single-mothers - my dad has been both mother and father to me for 13 years now and as I continue to evolve as an independent adult, I still seek his guidance and opinion. Thanks, Dad.

There is a lot to love about the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Quiet moments in the locker room before the game, you can tell whose eyes burn with the intensity of a champion. During the national anthem, close ups reveal exactly who is about to throw up their pre-game pasta, and who is ready for the battle ahead. The way the teams skate onto the ice to the screams of thousands, modern day gladiators fighting for their playoff lives. The roller-coaster of emotions that travels fast as lightning to both ends of the spectrum, even in the span of one game. The way players play hurt, play hard, give every single fibre of their being to their team in hopes of glory.

It's been 2 years since I first wrote on the Stanley Cup Finals. The Anaheim Ducks made short work of the Ottawa Senators, and someone actually commented on my article, "I didn't realize NHL hockey was still around." True story.

And so it has been for the past few years. Since the lockout eliminated the 2004-2005 season, the NHL has been somewhat of an afterthought (or more likely, laughingstock) in the United States of America. My favorite game has endured countless criticisms and been the butt-end of many, many jokes.

But on a recent vacation, I read a few American based sports publications that were praising, yes praising, the NHL. You see, the 2009 Stanley Cup Playoffs have been a sight to behold. Sure, there's been a few ugly moments (namely this one), but overall, it's been an incredible ride.

The 2009 version of the Stanley Cup Playoffs are bringing people back to the game. Much like when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought baseball back (sore subject now), Sidney Crosby, Alexander Ovechkin and a cast of other incredible young talent have people paying attention to Canada's game once again.

It certainly helped to have Crosby's Penguins face-off against Ovechkin's Capitals in the 2nd round. It was being hyped as an epic match-up of Bird v. Magic proportions. How often have we over-hyped a match-up only to be sure it can't live up to expectations? Too many to be sure, but this time the stars aligned (pun intended) and this match-up exceeded expectations. Crosby's unassuming nature and intense passion versus Ovechkin's outright flair and unbridled enthusiasm. The NHL's two brightest stars could not be in starker contrast.

There was no choice but to pay attention. I even caught an episode of PTI during which Wilbon and Kornheiser pretended to know something about hockey. America was talking hockey again, and this time they left the jokes at home.

Both stars were as good as advertised in the series; Crosby scoring 8 goals and 5 assists in 7 games, and Ovechkin, equal to the task, notching 8 goals and 6 assists. In the end, Crosby led the Penguins past Ovechkin's Capitals in a 7-game series that will not be soon forgotten.

From there, the Penguins cruised past the Carolina Hurricanes to get back to the Stanley Cup Finals, once again to face the Detroit Red Wings as they did in 2008. The 2009 edition of the Finals provided more than its fair share of good storylines.

The occasion marked the 1st Finals re-match since 1984, when another young Canadian icon, Wayne Gretzky, hoisted his first of four Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers after losing the year prior to the New York Islanders.

Detroit's Marian Hossa, a Penguin this time last year, facing the team whose millions he spurned to sign with the Red Wings, citing that he wanted only a chance to win the Stanley Cup. Now he had the chance. And standing in his way, the men he did not believe in.

I went on record as saying the Pens would be a different team this time around. Through the early part of the series, it appeared I was wrong. Detroit jumped out to a 2-0 lead, and looked to be headed toward a second straight Championship.

Yet Pittsburgh was determined, and battled back to tie the series at two games apiece, then battled back again to tie it at three games apiece after losing Game 5 to the Wings. Even still, going into Friday's Game 7, there wasn't a prognosticator around that wasn't picking Detroit.

After all, smart money was on the defending champs. They were at home, and no team had won a Stanley Cup Game 7 on the road since the 1971 Montreal Canadiens. No team had come back from being down 2-0 in two different series (vs Washington, vs Detroit) and won the Stanley Cup in NHL history. On top of that, Detroit was 11-1 at home this post-season, and Pittsburgh had won just once in six visits to Joe Louis Arena during the past two Finals. Not only had the Penguins lost all 3 previous games in Detroit, they didn't even manage a strong performance in the Motor City.

But Game 7s are a different beast. A bounce, a break, a mistake from your opponent - any could be the difference between winning and losing. Throw out the stats, because the Game 7 is not played in the past.

Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals is the game you dream of your entire life. Growing up in Canada you play that game in your driveway and on the frozen pond. You go to the rink as a child, learning the game, finding your passion, always in the back of your mind the heroes you see each night on the TV. Always with the hope of lifting the Stanley Cup.

In the end, the underdog was victorious. The Pittsburgh Penguins became the first team to win a championship Game 7 on the road in any sport since the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates.

It always amazes me how the record books save a spot for the most special of players. With hockey's history as deep as it is, it doesn't seem there would be any records left for today's players to set. And yet as Sidney Crosby hoisted the Stanley Cup over his head, he became the youngest captain in NHL history to do so.

I've long tried to argue that Americans really should love hockey. It has every element of sport: beauty, finesse, strength, power, physicality, and raw emotion. The video below attests to all of those facts, and it suffices to show that it has been a very good year indeed.

Every crisis, and this is a crisis by any definition, brings out the best - or the worst - in those who try to isolate causes or future preventative measures. The crassest, and most callow, are those who, at least initially, placed the blame on those who "bought more home than they could afford". Besides the mathematical absurdity (does anyone really think a few thousand defaulted home loans could bring down a world economy?) there is the pragmatic reality that virtually all of us, with pay cuts or job losses find ourselves in "more home than we could afford".

This simplistic - and vindictive - analysis, mostly from talk radio hosts with multi-million dollar salaries, does little to help us make sense - or deal with - an immensely difficult and complicated situation - one that reverberates from the headlines to the house next door.

There's a old saying among those who work with the homeless that we are all, no matter how middle class, merely three paychecks from being homeless. And that was true several years ago. We have all, no matter how prudent we might have been, moved several steps closer to that brink in the past year or so.

One of the many ironies in our current economic mess is the silence of people of faith - these are the people who make a public profession of compassion and restoration. But where are they? Where are the voices of hope? Where are the groups who were so eager to "protect the American family" a few months ago now that families from virtually every neighborhood have been evicted and scattered across couches and tent cities across our country?

The Bible is not silent when it comes to these armchair pontificators. Consider this verse - "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation." Matthew 23:14 (New King James)

Every empty home, every tangled and overgrown lawn, holds a story. In fact, every empty home holds a series of stories; one about those who used to live there and one about those of us who look on from our own emptiness.

We are awash in explanations and blame. There is a cloud of grief and rage that hangs over our neighborhoods.

But as we might step, or even just peer, into an empty, cold and damp house, what says more than the broken toy left in an upstairs closet? Or a bag of cat food left on the fridge?

Sadly, this economization of sex is not just a flippant portrayal of modern conceptions of human relations - putting a price tag on sex is a sobering reality. Recently, an article in a major publication stated that a young lady was selling her virginity for $3.8 million. The twenty-two year old girl is simply going to sell her virginity to the highest bidder. The integrity of this 'gift' is based on her honest word that the highest bidder would actually be her first. Now, the fact that she is selling sex and that there are ample men lining up is not exactly inconceivable news. After all, prostitution is said to be the oldest profession and it is only becoming more professional.

The real kicker comes when the young lady explains her rationale for selling her virginity. She states that it all comes down to a moral and religious issue and it is neither against her morals nor her religion. Essentially, the young damsel in financial distress is saying: "you've got your religion that you live by and I've got mine - so don't tread on me." Like it or not, this is a brilliant public relations move. Playing the modern day trump card of religion, nobody in good post-modern conscience can tell her that selling virginity is wrong.

Religion is the crux of her argument. This recently tepid word has become a veritable get-out-of jail-free card. Anyone can say that their religion permits an action and you are being intolerant by suggesting that they are wrong. This gives Christianity no traction whatsoever to contest immoral behavior, allowing people to write anything off simply as a person's private conception of morality. The word "immoral" has been struck from the books to be replaced by open-mindedness; to many people, saying that an action is contrary to Biblical teaching now has absolutely no efficacy.

No longer can one say, "I am monogamous because of my religion." Anyone can simply counter with, "I am promiscuous because of my religion." Using religion leads to a stalemate where each side simply agrees to disagree. What, then, is a Christian to do with this quandary? The answer is unnerving to some Christians - if society has gutted the term "religion," natural reason still has clout.

In society's breast, reason forever beats. As a culture, we have decided it is reasonable to be tolerant, concerned, and humane. It is reasonable to base knowledge in experience and science. It is reasonable to test all beliefs. In view of this, suppose one could counter this young lady's argument on the basis of reason. In other words, her so-called religion has failed to change her mind, so why not try plain reason?

Could she be persuaded by psychology and its suggestions that she is running towards an identity crisis and ruined psychosocial growth? Could she be persuaded by medicine and its suggestions that she is at risk for AIDS and a whole slew of other sexually transmitted diseases? Or, perhaps the economists could persuade her by explaining the law of diminishing returns and how her 'product' is ever decreasing in value. The fact of the matter is, I really don't know what would persuade her. Still, I do know that if the word "religion" does not work, Christians must find something that does. It seems reasonable to me that if the Creator of reason is good, reason itself must be good.

Except...

Information I gleaned from field trips to the Smithsonian museums didn't really mesh against what I was taught in private school, church, and in my Bob Jones-breed Christian home. Answers from my childhood "experts" seemed flippant, curt, and imminently unsatisfying.

Years later, I met and grew to love my parents-in-law (and before them, my brilliant, well-read, think-outside-the-box husband!). The whole family valued independent thinking and had the utmost respect for science's contributions to our understanding of our existence. They all encouraged me to explore and test different ways of thinking, much to my growth and amazement. Science, and three people who deeply loved me, quietly tugged at my heart.

But, the icing on the cake came when my pastor preached a sermon titled "Isn't Creation Just a Myth?", a clear assault on all that Darwin stood for. You see, my pastor, whom we still greatly respect and study under, called Darwin's theory of evolution "a religious system" that is "full of lies" on that fateful Sunday. Was my husband angry! For weeks afterwards, I listened to his diatribes. Eventually, he went to talk to our pastor one-one one, and eventually came to some kind of resolution in his own heart and mind on this volatile issue. I had only seen that kind of passion in hard-core fundamentalists before!

So when I saw Giberson's Saving Darwin at the bookstore, I was chomping at the bit. I longed to resolve the obvious tension playing out in my intellectual and personal life. Besides, the search for Truth should never intimidate us, especially as Christ-followers!

Saving Darwin covers a lot of ground. Giberson begins with an honest assessment of Charles Darwin's paradigms and the ultimate break in his faith (which had absolutely nothing to do with his brand of science). He then moves comprehensively to an in-depth look at evolution's dark side, its abuses and extremes (think genocide) and slips easily into an anecdotal recount of the Scopes "Monkey Trial". In the blink of an eye, he leads us though a systematic dismantling of The Genesis Flood, a fundamentalist's "science" book, co-authored by one my home-town's Biblical heroes, John C. Whitcomb. Giberson clearly demonstrates that the creation/evolution argument is a culture, rather than an academic war, for evolution bears out its scientific validity in a number of disciplines including biology, geology, genetics, and paleontology. On the other hand, young-earth creationists have virtually no support from mainstream scientists and in fact, find themselves a bit isolated (and conveniently academically myopic), with a small, but fiercely dedicated army of anti-evolutionists.

Few books have challenged my faith, my core beliefs, and my intellect more than this one. Many times, I found myself nodding with a clear understanding of Giberson's science, immediately accompanied by stabs of fundamentalist offense and guilt. In the end, however, I could find nothing in this work that contradicted Jesus' story of redemption for His fallen people. (That being said, I don't know that I could find much in this work that disagrees with any of the world's three major religions.) Giberson repeatedly warns both "sides" of the creation/evolution battle that the existing dichotomy between their theories is "wrong" and that the current polarized positions "are not the only two options". He compels his readers to re-work their understanding of God's creativity and our place in the universe to match what can be empirically studied. And he warns against twisting the Bible's ancient wisdom "to speak to a modern issue it never intended to address."

On a minor note, Giberson never fully engages his reader on an emotional level, other than his brushes with wry humor. This man is clearly a scholar, not a salesman. He does take one brief rabbit trail into his own personal belief system. He writes, "As a purely practical matter, I have compelling reasons to believe in God." He then describes his parents as "deeply committed Christians", his wife and children as "believing in God", most of his friends as "believers", and his job that he loves at "a Christian college". His relationship with our Creator never reaches much beyond his summation that "abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails." That's all? That is the basis for his faith? I wanted more.

In his conclusion, Giberson offers the book's powerful redemption, an admission that won me over: "Perhaps the unfolding of history includes a steady infusion of divine creativity under the scientific radar. Perhaps the meaning we encounter in so many different places and so many different ways is not simply an accident of our biology, but a hint that the universe is more than particles and their interactions." My belief in Jesus' plan for our universe's reconciliation and the wonder and mystery of His methods remain fully in tact, but will be, hereafter, combined with a respect for modern academia and science's advances.

Saving Darwin will make a great gift for my dear father-in-law; he will find it brilliant and engaging. I probably won't, however, buy it for my dear pastor. On second thought... it might be just the challenge he needs.

Brad D. Strawn is dean of the chapel and Vice President for Spiritual Development at Southern Nazarene University in Bethany Oklahoma.

My father was a Baptist minister and my mother was a homemaker and they had a special language for talking about sex. To hear it from them, babies were gifts from God dropped from heaven into the arms of happily married couples who had a special way of loving each other.

I never heard my parents say the word "sex" until I was almost finished with high school. The reality of sex was shrouded in euphemism and hyper religious lingo.

Thanks to my curious and scientifically-oriented mind, I figured out sex for myself when I was thirteen years old. I had been babysitting two children for the summer, and I noted the difference in female and male anatomy when I changed their diapers.

In the tradition of being vague and euphemistic, I'll just say that the boy had a round peg and the girl had a round hole, and it seemed to me that if all men had pegs and all women had holes, these were most likely puzzle pieces that were meant to fit together. And then I thought I must be crazy because how could you ever, ever, ever let a boy's peg anywhere near your hole.

That was ridiculous. Wasn't it?

My curiosity finally overcame my embarrassment, and I decided to research my theory. One evening while my parents were out and my younger siblings were asleep, I took the "R" encyclopedia off the bookcase in the living room and retreated to my room. I sat on the floor, knees tucked to my chest, serving as a makeshift table top for the encyclopedia that lay open before me. Looking back, I realize I should have taken the "S" encyclopedia to look up "Sex," but at the time I didn't even know what it was called. The only word I knew that pertained to the topic was "Reproduction," which I must have picked up in biology class at some point.

So I looked up the "Reproduction" entry in the encyclopedia and began to read. I was at once gratified and horrified to find out that my theory was true. Male and female anatomy were puzzle pieces that fit together in an act that the encyclopedia called "intercourse."

I was right! I thought triumphantly.

And then, Oh my gosh, my parents don't do that. Do they?

And after the gratification and horror came a deep sense of betrayal. Why didn't anyone ever tell me this? I wondered.

By the time my mother got around to giving me the sex talk, I had gleaned all the information I needed from our encyclopedia set.

One night she sat down on my bed and said, "Do you know what sex is?"

I nodded.

"Do you have any questions?" she asked me.

I shook my head. I thought, I've done so much reading, I probably know more than you do, but I didn't say that out loud.

I let her kiss my forehead, turn out the lights, and retreat down the stairs. And that was the end of the sex talk.

About a year later, I celebrated my sixteenth birthday. My parents gave me a purity ring to mark the occasion. We had a little ceremony at the dining room table where I put the ring on my left ring finger and promised my parents I was going to "save myself for marriage." But even then, there was no mention of the word "sex." There was purity, abstinence, waiting, saving yourself, the special relationship between a husband and a wife, all these terms and more. But there was no "sex."

Because my parents seemed hesitant to discuss the details of sex, I decided not to bring it up. Instead of thinking about boys, I immersed myself in science class and research projects. Instead of dating, I got involved in church and choir and drama.

I almost forgot about sex. Until I got to anatomy class in college. Thankfully, by this time Al Gore had invented the Internet, which came in handy for looking up answers to questions I was too embarrassed to ask out loud.

There were some questions to which I found no answers. Like who first referred to sex as "the birds and the bees." All I could imagine when I heard this phrase was a canary trying to mount a bumblebee. Wasn't that the equivalent of a man trying to hump a horse? Wasn't sex between different species considered bestiality?

And why did people always use the verb "have" when referring to sex. Everybody "has" sex, but how is it possible to have something you can't keep? Why didn't anyone refer to "doing sex" or "practicing sex"?

Other questions that arose had more concrete answers.

In a lecture on human sexuality, I learned about different sex acts, including something called a blow job. For a few weeks, I mulled this phrase over in my mind. A blow job? What exactly was that? How did blowing on a man's penis get him aroused?

I couldn't figure it out, and I didn't know who to ask, so I turned to Google, where I found a graphic description of fellatio. Again, I felt betrayed. Not because no one had told me about this before, but because the act had been so misnamed.
There was no blowing involved as far as I could tell.

*

It turns out, my younger sister was as naïve as I was. Except she wasn't as curious as I was, so she never turned to the encyclopedia set or the Internet to figure out the mystery of sex.

She lived in blissful ignorance until, at age 15, my mother hauled her to the ob/gyn's office because she was having irregular periods.

When my sister checked in, the nurse gave her a specimen cup and pointed her to the bathroom adjacent to the waiting room to give a urine sample. "There are instructions on a poster in the bathroom," the nurse explained.

My sister went into the bathroom, locked the door, and read the poster. Then she read it again. And again. She understood that you were supposed to wipe something before you peed into the cup, but she didn't understand what or where that something was. So she opened the bathroom door and yelled to my mom in the waiting room, "Hey, mom! What's a vagina?"

When my mom called me later that evening to tell me what had happened, I scolded her. "You mean she's fifteen and you haven't had the sex talk with her yet?" I asked.

"Oh, no, we've had the sex talk," my mom assured me.

"Well, maybe you should've told her what the parts were called." Then I said, "Put Hannah on the phone."

My little sister sheepishly said hello. I got straight to the point. "Okay, Hannah, here we go," I said. "You have ovaries and a vagina. Boys have testicles and a penis. Sex happens when a boy puts his penis into your vagina."

There was silence on the end of the phone.

"Oh, and sex is how babies are made."

More silence.

"That's all for now."

Without saying anything, she handed the phone back to my mom.

*

By the time I finished college and headed to grad school to earn a master's degree in medical science, I was pretty pleased with myself. I deemed myself worldly wise, well versed in human anatomy and sexuality. I thought I had discovered all the hidden passageways and fallen through all the trap doors there were in the exploration of human sexuality.

And then we began the physical exam labs, where we learned how to perform exams on people who were paid a small sum in exchange for letting medical students practice on them.

For the male genitourinary exam, our class of about 40 students carpooled from Yale School of Medicine to the University of Connecticut medical campus. The coordinator split us into groups of five, and my classmates and I, wearing our short white lab coats, paraded into exam rooms where our professional patients were waiting.

My group entered our assigned exam room to find a sixty-something-year-old man with white receding hair and a short cropped white beard standing in front of the exam table in a button down long-sleeved shirt and cowboy boots - and nothing else. He was naked from his waist to just below his knees, where the boots began.

He greeted us warmly, and invited us all to gather 'round as he held his genitals in his hand and pointed out various anatomical landmarks and told us what these various topographies were called.

He gave us a play-by-play guide to the male exam, beginning with squeezing on the head of the penis to see if you can express any discharge to the hernia exam, which involved jamming a finger through the scrotum into each inguinal area and asking that the patient to turn his head and cough.

"Do you know why you ask a man to turn his head when he coughs?" he asked.

We shook our heads.

"It's simple, really," he said, leaning back against the table comfortably, as if he were a tenured professor explaining English literature. As if he were not standing in an exam room naked from the waist down, with five grad students staring at his genitals. "If he didn't turn his head, he'd cough right in your face."

It was a joke. A male GU exam joke. He grinned, pleased with himself, and the smile lasted for half an hour as each of us awkwardly attempted to perform a GU exam on him. After I'd taken my turn, I peeled off my gloves and breathed a sigh of relief. Now we could leave this room, leave this crazy man and his exhibitionism, get in the car, and drive home.

But just as we were ready to leave, he turned towards the table, lowered his elbows onto it and put all of his weight on his arms, arching his wrinkled buttocks toward us.
"And now for the prostate exam," he said.

*

A few weeks later, our class walked over to Yale's School of Nursing building where nurse practitioner students volunteered to teach medical students the female genitourinary exam.

This was much less intimidating to me, for the obvious reason that I was a female. I knew what the parts looked like and what they were called, and I had had a pelvic exam before. Literally a pelvic exam, just one, a month before I started grad school. But still. It was more than I could say for the prostate exam.

I had run into some of the nurse midwifery students in the medical school library. I knew them to be earthy, strong, liberal women who advocated home births and rhythm method birth control and sexual freedom. Earth was their Mother, and from this Earth they had sprung as fellow goddesses - or so the bumper stickers on their dilapidated Volvo station wagons proclaimed.

My classmates and I took our seats in a classroom where one of the nurse practitioner students showed us simple, graphic charts of female anatomy. She then brought out a tray of instruments - a speculum, forceps, a vaginal ultrasound probe, and a cervical brush - a miniature plastic-bristled broom used to collect cervical cell samples for Pap smears.

She explained the logistics of a pelvic exam, and then we were divided into groups of three and we walked into the next room, where there were a dozen pelvic exam beds and two NP students per bed. One NP student was lying on her back with her feet in stirrups, naked from the waist down. The other NP student was standing next to the table, fully clothed. We learned that they were "pelvic teams," and they alternated between examiner and examinee every time they taught this class. We were also informed that they occasionally took an extra turn if their partner was on her period. (I'm still not sure why we needed to know this.)

Our NP instructor wanted to talk to our group before we began practicing the exam, which made me uncomfortable because all I could think was this other poor NP student was lying on her back, half naked, and I would be much, much more comfortable if she could put her clothes back on. Or if we could at least put a sheet over her wide-open legs.

But the examinee was much more comfortable than I was. She seemed content to lie there indefinitely while the instructor talked to us, and she even occasionally raised her head up from the table and contributed to the conversation.

Our instructor began her talk by forming a "V" with her index and middle fingers. "V is for Vagina," she said in a whisper, as if there really were a goddess lurking somewhere nearby and we were approaching her throne. Or, perhaps, her pelvis.

"V is for Vulva," she said next. I wondered if this was going to turn into some kind of crazy alliteration exercise. V is for Vagina. V is for Vulva. V is for Vasectomy. V is for Very, Very uncomfortable right now.

Then she stopped and looked at her fingers and said, "Do you know what else this stands for?"

All I could think of was Richard Nixon getting on a plane, flipping off all of Asia with this gesture. But I didn't say that out loud.

"This is the symbol for peace," she said. "Let this be a reminder to you that when you come to the vagina, you come in peace."

She turned to the genitalia of the NP patient, and she put her ungloved, V-shaped fingers against the other woman's labia. "Peace to your perineum," she said. She turned back to us. "Say it with me," she whispered. "Peace to the perineum. Peace to the perineum."

As we were chanting, one of the male students in my group got sweaty and pale, and began to lose his balance. I helped him stagger outside into the cool night air, where he sat on the curb with his head between his knees and we talked about baseball until his dizziness subsided.

*

After I graduated and began my full-time career in medicine, my encounters with sex accelerated at a surprising rate of speed.

I performed dozens of prenatal ultrasounds, and delivered three babies.

I performed hundreds of pelvic exams, breast exams and Pap smears.

I told hundreds of men to turn their heads and cough.

I took care of a prostitute who had been raped by a client the week before. He forced himself on her before donning the mandatory condom, and it took her a week to overcome her shame and come to the clinic to report the event. After I finished collecting evidence for the rape kit, I took her urine to the lab and performed the pregnancy test myself. I squeezed three drops of urine onto a cartridge and prayed silently while the urine seeped across the paper. Please be negative. Please be negative. Please be negative, I prayed. Then I watched with horror as a faint pink line formed next to the blue line. She was pregnant. I swore out loud.

I removed objects from men's rectums, including zucchinis, bananas, batteries and one small rubber duck.

I took care of a young woman whose boyfriend "did her" with a frying pan handle and perforated her uterus.

I distributed condoms, IUD's, birth control pills, and fertility charts.

I diagnosed patients with Chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV, syphilis, herpes, and genital warts.

I counseled married couples on how to have more sex, and counseled teenagers on how to have less.

I know more than the average person about human reproduction and sexuality. I can tell you anything you want to know about sex.

Except why I turned thirty without having it.

Sarah Thebarge studied medicine at Yale and journalism at Columbia. She moved to the Portland area where she practices medicine in an insane emergency department. She edits book projects with Randy Alcorn on the side. Her secret ambition is to drink an espresso at every coffee shop in the Pacific Northwest. She is single, and has no pets. (She doesn't even have a plant.)

I was in my early 40's when I found out my husband was dying. I didn't start living like I was dying. Instead, I went into survival mode, where only the Lord can lead one who needs to survive. I have two girls, a great life, great friends, and my Lord and Savior. But, let me tell you, that song has a meaning all its own for me. Living, more like surviving, became enough. I wanted to make sure the stuff that really counted got done, including making it through the day and being there for my girls. The song also reminded me that I only have the time I have and to not put off what I want to accomplish.

Since the fateful day we found out my husband was sick, I have tried not to sweat small stuff - so cliche, but I've learned what is important in my girls' and my life. We have always prayed together, but I make a point to pray aloud, asking God not just to deliver us, but see us through whatever challenge we are facing. I remind us that we can make it if we hold fast to him. I make sure my girls hear me thank God too, for all of the blessings he has given us. When they come to me with troubles on their heart, I stop everything, write down what is bothering them, and then we pray.

They are a new kind of needy. They lost their dad, one half of their foundation. The "Go To Guy" has now become the neighbor, their uncle, their cousin, their dad's son, and their girlfriends' dads. If something were to happen to me, what would they do? Who would make them feel better? Who, in their lives, would be able to tuck them in and replace the only parent they have left on earth?

I don't know if they can even utter the thought. It must go through their minds. In any case, it comes out in the form of concern. It is important for them to know their mom, me, is O.K. They are protective..."Mom, it's really slick here." "Mom, are you O.K.?" When they hear me yell. "Mom, I love you more..." "Mom, I'm sorry I yelled at you." "Mom, can you...?" "It's O.K. Mom, if you can't I understand." "Mom, if you're going to cry, warn me so I'm prepared." "Mom, Dad would be appalled at the shape of his garage." When really, they just wish that the garage was in order, as Dad would have kept it.

There's more stuff I do sweat. I make sure my girls are safe. They need to check in when they go out. I call to make sure there is an adult at home or expecting them at their friends' house. I try to make sure they know where I am. I try to give them the feeling of security by being up and having my coffee in hand before they come downstairs. I try to make good meals often, and sit at the table as a family to eat. We use a lot of our vacation time to visit relatives and we call our family often. I insist they speak respectfully to me and are kind and respectful to others. The thing is, one learns what they live, and I'm their number one point of reference.

All of these things were routine before my husband died. But, when he died, our family felt so broken. All of the routine became extraordinarily difficult to maintain. Everything seemed like gargantuan stuff. I gained 20 pounds between the time I found out he was sick through the six months after he died. Before he died, our bedroom and bathrooms were always clean and orderly. Our bed was made 99% of the time.

Especially the first few months after he died, my bedroom was rarely orderly and our, now my bed was hardly ever made. The kitchen counters didn't get cleaned. There were usually piles of laundry and stuff on the furniture. I didn't wear make-up regularly as I didn't feel like putting it on. I didn't cook often. If it weren't for bean and cheese burritos, maybe some milk and carrots, my girls would have been physically hungry. As it is, today they'd rather stay home and eat left overs than go out. They've sworn off fast food.

I came to dread bedtime. After brushing teeth, I'd often go tuck the girls into bed. We'd say prayers, (which we still do, even at 11 and 14 they like me to say prayers with them). Then, if they weren't sleeping in the same bedroom, I'd be asked to "sleep with me for a while." In the safety of private time and the dark, the tears would come from each of them. "How are we going to get through this?" "When will it stop hurting?" "I'm ready for Dad to come home." Those were the conversation starters they'd use.

I found that if I cried, they were less likely to open up because they didn't want me to feel sad. So, I'd hold them and hold my tears and not talk too much.

I would go downstairs and fall asleep on the couch. I'd be found out in the morning (which was a sign to them, that all was not normal) and so I faced the inevitable. At night, I'd crawl into an empty bed. I started sleeping on my husband's side of the bed because then I didn't feel so alone. I moved my bedroom furniture around so there would only be one night stand by the bed. Some nights I'd hug myself to sleep, and still do. It's better now. It's been 14 months since he died. I look forward to sleep, as I'm better at taking care of business. I also have a dog that needs walking daily so I'm physically tired.

I usually don't find living so overwhelming anymore. I have days where I have trouble functioning and am weepy, but it's not debilitating anymore. Cleaning out his closet doesn't send me into a tailspin where I cry for hours. In the several months after he died, I'd have to call my sister to come and rescue me from the tears. I'd be wiped out for the entire day following my meltdowns. That isn't the case anymore.

I usually have the energy to get showered and put together, write bills, pick up the breakfast dishes and plan dinner. I have my lists of things to do and people to contact. I've got my grocery lists and my car maintenance, financial, and counseling appointments. I stop often, and thank God for the blessings of my home, my family, and the resources to stay home and not need to find a paying job.

People tell me they are amazed at my strength. I tell them I couldn't have gone on without the Lord above. I tell them about the people who pray for us. And the verses from Job chapters 39 - 41 where God challenges Job and asks him a few questions such as "Were you there when I mapped out the coordinates of the universe? Were you there when I told the water where to stop on the shore? Were you where when I hung the stars?" These references assure me that God is at the helm of my life and has a plan.

I recite people Jeremiah 29:11 which says, "For I know the plans I have for you saith the Lord, plans not to harm you, but to give you a future and a hope." I tell people how the girls and I have banked on this promise to see us through and continue to sustain us as we go forward.

I wonder what people are thinking when they say I'm strong. What am I going to do? Close the blinds and hide from the sunshine and my friends? Then I realized if I didn't have the love and support of Jesus, my friends, and family, I might have done just that. I instead, I hear the words of my Uncle Jim, whose own wife of forty years, is in a close battle with cancer. He always ends his letters, "And so we go on."

Of course, then there are mornings like today where "going on" is a challenge. Mornings like today I wake up and wonder, "Was it real?" The life with the man I spent fifteen years...married, making a home, a family, a life together. Was it real? Do I even remember his voice, his touch, his smell, his presence? Would I, if he came up behind me, know it was him?

And then I say to myself, "Oh hell. I'm tired of missing him and trying to remember what it was like to have him here and to not be the only adult in the house? I am sick and tired of the loneliness." I keep it to myself though, I don't want to upset the girls before they leave for school.

Then though, my youngest comes downstairs. She's not quite right. I ask her what's up. She sits down on my lap and says she misses Dad. She's ready for school to be out, but mostly, she misses Daddy. We sit down in a more comfortable chair. I call the school. I'm not going to make my volunteer gig at the crossing zone today. I rock-a-bye with my 11 year-old daughter. She doesn't fit in my lap, but she needs to rock-a-bye like she did when she'd skin her knee as a three year-old. Her heart is hurting more than her knee ever did. I can't fix it. So, we take a minute or ten and sit in the quiet. Soon though, it's time for school and the day must go on and lunch needs to be made and the dog pees on the rug and her sweatshirt is in the dryer and today's the fitness test which she likes better than the Mile Run because she "rocks" at sit-ups and push-ups. We make it to school on time.

Then my girlfriend calls me, as she often does when I'm not guarding the crossing zone. She asks me if all is O.K. I say yes at first but she can tell that everything isn't O.K. I surprise myself with the tears in my voice as I recount the morning. She validates my feelings and my weariness of this whole grief process. She asks me if she can pray with me. She tells me to go ahead and cry. I think to myself how I'm so not going to cry. Immediately when she begins to pray, tears start coursing down my cheeks and I can't make any noise and I'm so thankful she called.

I'm so tired of grief. I want to be done with it and to not feel so sad or lonely. I don't feel sad everyday. It just catches me so off guard. One who hasn't lost may not understand the loneliness to which I refer. I think I can safely say that if a couple is married and shares the birth of children, and love and respect for the other that grows during fifteen years of marriage, there is a level of commitment and comfort that becomes second nature. It was second nature for me.

While my husband was sick and whacked and hallucinating because of the medications and toxins in his brain, he was afraid and insecure and belligerent. He was childlike. Sometimes I was more his parent than his wife. But when it the time came, and we both knew he wouldn't live, we cried together because we loved each other on multiple levels. We were friends, walking buddies, each others' cheerleader, parents, partners, lovers, companions. The list could go on for pages. We trusted each other to tell the truth, even when the truth question "do these pants make me look fat?" was launched. We prayed and worshiped and laughed together. We forgave each other. Again, the list could go on for pages. And, "at the end of the day," as he would often say, I loved him so much, I didn't want him to suffer. I told him if it hurt too much, the girls and I would be O.K. and he should go see Jesus. I told him I loved him, and within a day, he died.

And there I was, except I wasn't alone, I was blessed with our two girls. We have come forward with his spirit in the girls and me. We do not have his physical scent, his voice or touch. We remember his kindness and gentleness, his patience and humor, temper and annoying habits. But it's one thing to remember, it's another to have and to hold. We miss him.

I miss him physically, practically, and mentally. I miss him when the furnace filters need changing or I can't get the lid off the pickle jar or the grill needs to be lit or the vacation needs to be planned or the bills need to be written or the lawn mower needs fixing or, I've spent all day cleaning the house and no one notices.

I feel alone when the girls are fighting or don't listen or need to be two places at once or have bad dreams or are crying out in their sleep or really want what they want and the answer is still no.

I feel cheated when the girls come home excited because they've made Honor Choir or the Mediating Team or National Honor Society or high jumped 4'4" or have tried out for the Volleyball Team or graduated from their counselors. I feel cheated that I can't share the excitement together with him. I can't share my anger or sorrow or joy, knowing that he would understand, like no one else in the world, what it means to each child. I feel cheated when I think how each child is going to miss getting that nod of approval from their dad. I feel cheated when I think of all the events where he should be sitting by me, watching our girls grow up.

So, I woke up this morning, tired of missing him and even wondering if he was real. He was real. I've got pictures and children and lessons learned and a home and a life built with him. I just don't have him.

But, as my uncle says, "And so we go on." By God's grace, we go on.

And then I blog about it. Here's an entry from several months ago.

December 16, 2008 I wonder what things in people's lives never go away. What becomes the background radiation of an individual? I got to thinking about this, because I went to do a home visit yesterday. When I do those, I always end up talking to Ray for a little while. Ray is the front desk man. I said, "How are things, Ray?" He said, "Okay. We had a suicide here over the weekend." He went on to tell me about how he found the body of this person in the shower, naked. He'd used pills and booze to do it, apparently. Finding a dead man in the shower is something I can barely fathom. I said to Ray something to the affect of, "That's terrible. How are you handling that?" And Ray said something to the affect of, "At least I found him right away. Other times I have to open the door when somebody has been dead inside for a couple days." Here's a man to whom, on some level, the finding of the dead is part of the job. I wonder how that plays out for Ray. I wonder, when he turns off the lights and all, how he listens to that or how it informs who he is the rest of the time. It's the same for interacting with our guests... I'm always fascinated to find out the events in the past which are unignorable, the memories of which never go away.

It spooks me a little to reread that. If I believe (I do believe this, you should know) that an essential element of this kind of work is identification with the poor, then what elements of the lives of these men and women will never leave me? It's sort of like I fear transference of the emotion of their experiences. That might be a disrespectful way to put it, because really, how could I ever know what the abuse some of these men and women have gone through is really like? Of course I can't really know. But the background radiation of the lives of some of our guests is very invasive and I get hints and whispers of trauma that's not mine in my case management meetings with them. After awhile, those hints and whispers really do become mine. They feel really heavy and I'm afraid they will never leave. That's the best way I can put into words what scares me about finding any kind of identity with the poor.

But there's also this: I found out that one of the biggest, but most subtle dangers of doing this kind of work is becoming filled with pride. The organization I work for is Christian based. We all know the dangers of that particular sin and we all know the appropriate response: Do the work you do for the glory of God and not for the glory of yourself. I get it. You know what though, I constantly find myself feeling superior to other people. It's not like a real overt sense of superiority, but just a little something I carry around in the back of my mind so when I meet somebody new at church, let's say, and I ask him what he does and he says something like, "I'm in finance," I can dip into that little sack of pride in the back of my mind and think at him, "Finance, huh? Well, who gives a rat's ass? I know a guy with a huge crack problem and it's my job to help him. Finance? Please. Come on, ask me what I do, you sucker." Not a lot of room for the glory of God, I'm forced to admit. I find myself clinging to crack guy's pain, the heaviness of which, in reality, I'm afraid will never leave me. I think it's because when I'm around other people, that pain provides a kind of identity. "This is what I do, and it makes me feel like a hero," is what I would secretly say out loud to nobody.

So it's my own pride that keeps me clinging to the hurt of others. (Man, that sounds terrible.) I find it hard to release that pride because somehow, doing it all for the glory of God just doesn't seem to erase the complicated and nuanced god-awful experiences of some of the men and women my organization serves. How do you shove it all under a marching order like that? So I find myself giving lip-service to that glory of God motivation--evidently I don't think it's enough. If I think about it even more, I realize I ignore doing anything for God's glory because I don't see how that relieves me of the little traumas that aren't mine and that I find clinging to me every day when I get home from work. I think if I could ever get beyond my pride, what I would really want to do with those whiffs of hurt is to share them with somebody who gets it, diffuse them a little bit with some honest conversation, seek some comfort in the arms of somebody who understands more than me. (By the way, for me "seeking comfort in the arms of somebody" = having a beer together in a dark corner of some pub somewhere. It's not really hugging. Lest you think I'm a weenie.)

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11 verse 28, the Lord says, "Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." I've never really thought about this verse as it might apply to me, specifically in the context of working with the poor and of putting on the burdens that they might bear. As a matter of fact, I've always thought it was the poor He was talking to. I suppose the realization for me here is that in fact, He is talking to the poor and I am one of the poor he is talking to. On some level, it's identification with the poor, a kind of solidarity of inadequacy. I am poorly designed to handle the pain and grief that some of the men and women in our housing program experience daily, just as they are poorly designed to handle it. In my pride, I've assumed that I have been set apart to carry those burdens, but, as I am always finding out, that pride of mine leads to an exploitation of those burdens, to a license to secretly lord over other people the work I do. I realize in my more lucid spiritual moments, or perhaps I should say, God shows me in those moments that the kind of rest He is talking about not only is given to the poor for the immense burdens some of them carry, but to me as well, because I'm not supposed to carry those burdens either. It really is a relief to stop pretending I can.

Paul Luikart lives with his wonderful wife in Chicago. He struggles with his own pride all the time. Writing and reading and Christ-centered social justice all matter a lot to him. More thoughts can be found at paulluikart.blogspot.com, if you are so inclined to read them.

As always, Driscoll generously sprinkles his explanations with hundreds of specific Bible references. This author is passionate about Truth and has a gift for bringing Christ's work alive in poignantly relevant stories. His letters, each an independent chapter, address issues such as child abuse, terminal illness and even spiritual complacency through a lens which allows the reader to uniquely see how Jesus answers, with His death and resurrection, their specific concerns.

In this work, Driscoll and Breshears offer an easy-to-understand theology on meaty doctrines such as expiation, justification, and revelation. For example, in a letter to his friend "Thomas", a man driven by sexual addictions, Driscoll draws from I John and II Peter clearly demonstrating his friend's slavery to physical cravings, lust and pride. He then shows Thomas the beautiful power of the cross to redeem us from the curse of the law, the power of Satan, our sinful flesh, and being dead to God. The author brilliantly moves on to show us how Jesus redeemed us to life in Heaven with God, Jesus' return, and a resurrected body.

One of my favorite chapters was Driscoll's letter to his 18-month-old son, a convincing discourse on "unlimited limited atonement". In this letter, Driscoll skillfully weaves his unique perspective on atonement, a combination of Calvinist and Arminian views. Driscoll and Breshears challenge their readers to take a look at free will and God's election, in harmony: "Jesus' death was sufficient to save anyone and, subjectively, efficient only to save those who repent of their sin and trust in him."

Death by Love quite possibly contains the clearest, most understandable, explanations I've ever read on all that Christ's death and resurrection accomplished. These authors are able to explain the cure to our modern-day sins and show us the ultimate example of Love with the unchanging Truth of the cross. Death by Love infused me with fresh hope in Jesus' promise that He has already defeated Satan and death!

John begins with 1984, the real year, not Orwell's. About Ethiopia and Stevie Wonder and pictures of babies with big bellies and flies on their faces. I think that he's talking about how great it was that the world finally cared about Africa, but he's not. He says those photos and songs and TV ads, "destroyed the dignity of Africans." He says the world advertises Africa when there is a disaster, but not when there is a success. (Except Mandela, and "there's a reason for that, too," he says, unsmiling). His words echo in my head. Destroyed the dignity of Africans.

I do this, too. I write about the disasters and the poverty, the beggars and the rapists. As though this is Africa. I, too, appeal to the emotions of others with images of need, without the other images, just as true. Why don't I write about my Kenyan friends and colleagues who are educated, professional and happy? Or about the amazing diplomacy work, development work, and research that Kenyans are doing?

But isn't there also value in describing the suffering? The poverty isn't fabricated. My stories aren't just some isolated instances that I'm using repeatedly or falsely to rip at people's emotions. This is what I see every day.

Like yesterday, I was in a small brick building just down the road where there are 15 babies in 2 crowded rooms, waiting for mothers who are in prison or adoptive mothers who have yet to appear. I know a woman who runs an orphanage in the highlands outside of Nairobi who can't pay her rising, astronomical electricity bills, and so is trying to care for 25 children with no electricity. And I just learned this week of an Internally Displaced People's camp less than 30 miles away that no one seems to know about where 200 people are literally starving at this very moment. I can't imagine that failing to mention this suffering is somehow lending these people dignity. I describe these images because I feel so strongly that this kind of disparity should not exist in a world where so many of us are so wealthy and have access to every possible resource.

So I'm at a loss. I long to write with respect and humility, to honor the people whom I live with here in Kenya. I don't want to contribute to a phenomenon that allows the western world to nurse condescending stereotypes of Africa. And yet, these stories need to be told. If my writing, or someone else's song or photo, can shake someone out of apathy and maybe somewhere down the road even move them to relieve a little bit of the suffering in their world, isn't that worthwhile? Isn't the act of writing my own way of "look[ing] after orphans and widows in their distress"? Lord, have mercy. My African brothers and sisters, have mercy. And my wealthy North American family, please, please, have mercy.

Unfortunately, annual real-life horror stories evoke images that reaffirm such a lowly sentiment. In 2004, a hunter of Hmong descent murdered six other hunters over a dispute regarding a deer-stand (Wisconsin). Last year (also in Wisconsin), James Nichols was convicted of second-degree murder for killing a hunter named Cha Vang. A jury concluded that the primary motive of the murder was racism (Vang was Hmong). Also, this last April, a Minnesota man who was under the influence of alcohol and marijuana accidentally shot and killed his son, whom he had mistaken as a wild turkey.

My perception of hunters was once similar to the aforementioned examples, but has recently changed due to an increased amount of exposure to the sport. After getting married, I discovered my in-laws were hunters who lived within a culture dominated by the outdoors.

I quickly realized the 'low-income' and 'hillbilly' stereotypes I had expected of hunters was misguided. These people owned nice homes and huge, overly-accessorized trucks. Their trucks hauled shiny-chromed trailers that carrying numerous ATV vehicles, fancy riding lawn-mowers, and new jet-skis. They utilized these toys at cabins tucked away in the middle of large-acre spreads.

As I explored one of these privately-owned nature-preserves, I was surprised by how carefully groomed everything was. Vegetation was intentionally planted for specific game to eat. Trails were manicured for easy accessibility. The tree-stands were constructed more like luxury boxes and were equipped with heaters, food, high-powered binoculars, and comfortable chairs. The sight-lines had been cleared away of any stray branch, bush, or tree, making for unobstructed shooting lanes. Outdoor digital-camera boxes documented deer movement, and the data was processed to find the most frequented trails. The high level of preparation seemed more like a planned assassination than the point-and-shoot computer hunting I was accustomed to on Oregon Trail.

The only thing more impressive than the land preparation was discovering a hunter's own anticipation towards the upcoming season. High-powered scopes were sighted for accuracy at specialty ranges. Deer-urine, antlers, and a variety of other gizmos (each promising to attract big game) were purchased without hesitation. Warm, non-scented, water-proof clothing was bought and packed into large plastic garbage bags (to minimize human scent) and GPS systems were put into place to avoid getting lost.

The outdoor stores were built like convention centers, complete with stuffed monuments of bears, lions, elk, and fish that whetted the hunter's appetite to buy, buy, and buy some more. Rifles sold for thousands. According to data released by the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, over 120 billion dollars was spent pursuing the activities of hunting and fishing in the year 2006 alone.

Before you can legally participate in these activities, you must purchase a license. These can range anywhere from ten to one hundred dollars. But once a license is obtained, you must buy special tags (or stamps) according to which game you want to hunt (or fish). The rarer and larger the game, the more expensive the tag.

Some types of licenses and tags are hard to obtain, and hunters can wait their entire lives without ever receiving one. Usually lotteries, where the state selects at random, award these precious slots to individual hunters. Bidding can also be a means of buying a tag. In 2006, ESPN reported that a sheep tag was sold to a winning bidder for $300,000. In addition to the rising costs and spending of the average hunter, specialty hunts (on large private land reserves with huge resorts that guarantee big kills) can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

But for the average hunter, once the land is ready, the gear is acquired, the license is purchased, and the game is killed...an entirely new set of costs come into play. A trophy kill can be sent to a taxidermist, who preserves the specimen, allowing it to be viewed over a mantel or office wall. Taxidermy rates average around $100-$200 dollars for fish and small birds, and $300-$1000 for larger game, such as bears and elk. Food has always been another main motivation for hunting, and if a hunter decides to send a deer to a butcher for processing, they will spend around $100-$200, depending on what form they want the meat in.

Amazingly, of all the sports available to us today, hunting is quickly becoming one of the most expensive. As equipment becomes pricier, land becomes scarcer, and government regulation increases, hunting is becoming a niche sport affordable only to the wealthy. It demands exorbitant amounts of time, energy, preparation and money. But if you've ever experienced the thrilling and peaceful aspects of hunting (as I recently have), or tasted venison, you might just have to give it a shot (no pun intended).