My brothers and sister and I made up a lot of games when we were kids. We were the last generation without video games, purists of the gaming community. We used sticks, tape, rocks, bricks, and nature. You know, Minecraft outside. Did I say kids? We still do.

As a youth minister, I get to still make up games and try them out on kids. At one lock-in, Joel and I made up Duct Tape Spit Wad, one of our most clever creations. The group was divided into teams, each with five rolls of duct tape, a box of tissue paper, a bowl of water, and about 20 teens. The goal was to tape a teen to the wall and then dip the tissue paper into water and throw the wet wads at the taped teen. The teen with the most spit wads won. You’re welcome parents.

I make up games with my children often. Half of the time it is a ploy to get them to do chores faster. The other half of it is simply entertaining. Myself. And over the past two years we’ve become board gamers. Like, geek gaming tabletop addicts.

Over the last two years I’ve spent some time studying a personality typing tool called the Enneagram. There are nine types, with deep nuance to each, that each person on the planet most closely identifies with. The brilliance of this tool is that it helps a person discover her mask, coping mechanism, or what Thomas Merton calls, “The false self.” The false self is the person that each of us spends the majority of our energy trying to be. It is the person that I think everyone wants me to be, or the person that I believe will benefit me the most, but not my true self. The true self is who I really am. The me that is not motivated by manipulation, but instead motivated by love. The true self is content to be himself. He is not afraid of his limitations and humbly recognizes his gifts as truly gifts. Alice Fryling says, “One of the values of the Enneagram is that it not only identifies the compulsions of the false self, it also suggests the grace that invites us to return to the true self.”

At birth, each person is given a gift. It is her gift to the world, the gift by which she makes the world a better place, the place that God intended it to be. But the false self gets scared that this gift is not enough. “People need me to be more. This can’t be all that I have to offer.” And the gift is replaced by a compulsion, a false gift to supplement the seemingly insufficient true gift. The Enneagram helps us to see this gift, its tendentious compulsion, and God’s invitation to return to the true self.

So as not to get too technical, I’ll show my cards. Not something that I like to do unless I’m highlighting my brilliance (welcome to the Type 7). I am a Type 7- The Epicurean. The gift that God gave me for the world is joy. To be able to bring contentment, laughter, fun, and life to those around me. Sounds awesome, right! However, often I don’t think that what I am contributing is enough, so my compulsion is gluttony. Not gluttony in the traditional sense, but gluttony in the sense of an unquenchable appetite. Life is not joyful enough, so I must breathe in, take in as much life as I can. And I do this through limitless projects, events, outings, creative outlets, relationships, hobbies, ministries, you name it.

Many of you know me enough to know that I can tend to a gluttonous lifestyle. In case you don’t, I’ll remind you. Last year I started a blog, recorded an album in Nashville, ran my first triathlon, began writing a book, started a new continuing education class, began a dozen books that I didn’t finish, watched every Oscar nominated movie in seven different categories, and traveled out of state about ten times, just to name a few. I have a fear that I won’t be able to get all that there is out of life. Major FOMO- “Fear of Missing Out”. I have a fear that I will miss out on something, but I also have a strong aversion to anything painful. Any suffering. I must be careful that out of all the things that I try to fill my life with, I am not avoiding the invitation from God into my pain. That He is even there, in the shadow of death. And I’m not very interested in that RSVP.

So, God offers me a special grace to get me back on track. It’s my way home, back to my true self. It is the grace of contentment. He gives me the gift that my life is enough. That I don’t have to fill every moment with some adrenaline rush, some energy charge from something new.

Last night the kids and I sat around and played a board game. Something that we’ve done a lot of over the past year. I’ve found that board games give me an opportunity to stare into the faces of my kids and see them for who they are- the gifts that they are to my life. In the pain that I try to avoid, they are reminders that God is close, that He is with us. Game night is the simplicity of life that I need to be reminded that there, between Park Place and Boardwalk, I can offer my family joy and that is enough. And they can give our family their gifts- goodness, love, creativity, wisdom, faithfulness, and peace. I once heard a preacher define joy as, “the feeling you have of being home.” My gift of presence, my gift of stability that I am learning from my parents, my gift of appreciation and acknowledgment, my gift of a place of value and dignity in our home. My gift is joy. And that’s enough.

I remember a few things from seventh grade. It was there that Mrs. Norton, my English teacher, made me fall in love with literature and the power of language. Almost thirty years later, I still hear her words:

• “A lot” is two words, not one.
• People are hanged, pictures are hung.
• Judgment does not have an “e” in the middle.
• It’s theater not thee-ate-er.
• Salmon is pronounced sammon, not sal-mon.
• Whom is the object of the preposition
• And finally, I remember most vividly, she introduced me to Greek Mythology

In The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus spends some time as a captive on an island with cyclopes (Yes, I had to look up the plural for cyclops.) When Odysseus and his men arrive at the island of the giants they are befriended by one named Polyphemus, who eventually turns on them, traps them in his cave, and then begins to eat them one by one at mealtime. During one of the evenings, Odysseus and he are talking and Polyphemus asks him his name. Odysseus replies, “Nobody, Nobody is my name.”  On the following night, Odysseus drives a stake into the eye of Polyphemus and eventually escapes with his remaining men strapped to the bottom of sheep. As the monster screams for help his friends come and ask him who has done this to him. “Nobody is killing me,” he screams. So they return home confused and disinterested. Odysseus is able to escape and eventually make it back to his bride Penelope.

A paradox is something that seems to be contradictory in nature, but is in fact true.

Not to be confused with the comedienne Pete Holmes’s “Incredulous Statements” in which he states a basic word several times, peaks your attention to its misplacement, and then reveals his problem with that word.

For instance, Unicorn.

Unicorn?

Really, uni…corn? The animal has one horn. Was it really that difficult to say unihorn?

I live a paradox at times. A life of contradiction, but is in fact true. My life is beyond blessed. I have three beautiful and healthy children. I get to do what I believe I am designed to do and actually get paid for it. Enough money to put me in the top 1% of wage earners in the world. I have always and still have a family that supports me in every way.

But.

But there is a dissonance on the inside of me. Things aren’t all as they should be. To live in a paradox is an odd place to live. Where things are as good and as bad as they can be, at the same time. Dickens said, “It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.” I live there. I’m watching my children grow from amazing kids into amazing young people. I’m watching my wife just grow older. It’s weird to feel blessed and cursed at the same time. To feel joy and pain. To teeter like an egg on the ridge of happiness and sadness. To watch my kids begin to experiment with their personalities as they shape their dreams and futures and then to feel trapped from mine. To feel in the will of God and forsaken by Him at the same time. If things were all black I could bounce and smile and live and thrive. And if things were all white I could curse and cry and mope and die. But things aren’t black or white, my life is grey. These life contradictions and paradoxes are grey. Life is a paradox and it’s an odd place to live. Not quite the adventure that I anticipated, but an adventure nonetheless in which Nobody is taking care of us.

7th grade was the greatest year of my life. At least up until that point. For an extrovert, my class size just increased exponentially. I went from the same group of friends in every class to having a different group of friends in each class. Each subject was a new adventure in class pranks. There was my geography teacher’s velcroed toupee that never matched his eyebrows in color or movement. We tried to land erasers in it without him noticing. My biology teacher’s aquarium that we built pencil ships to sail in. Lunch and PE, an excursion from pseudo-learning into pseudo-exercising. English- girl taunting, math- paper wad basketball, and walking the halls- chariot races. I think that I learned something. It was the introduction into a social butterfly’s dream. I knew that the next five years would be unbelievable.

The summer before I would begin 8th grade we moved to Florida.

600 miles away from every friend I had ever had.

I started from scratch. Well, not completely from scratch. I had my trusty Eskimo Spitz named Cotton, two brothers that I still outweighed by 30 pounds and could beat up, and a sister who was four. In no particular order. Except for Cotton. That first year was hard. Making new friends with people that hadn’t necessarily reserved space in their worlds for me proved challenging. The first week at lunch I sat with cheerleaders. As amazing as that sounds, it was because I was sitting by myself and they came over because they felt sorry for me. Which is still sweet. I muddled through the year the exact opposite way that I anticipated 8th grade would have gone.

When the school year ended my parents let us go back home and spend the summer with my grandparents. It was an interesting summer. To my surprise, all of my friends had gone on without me. The chasm that I left in their lives with my departure was quickly filled with, well, chasm-filling-stuff. My anticipation of how we would pick up where we all left off was met with a realization that they didn’t even realize that I was gone. It’s an odd place to live- homeless.

At the end of the summer my grandparents drove us back. We were met by fun-deprived parents and my dad said, “That’ll never happen again.” I looked at him confused. “This house was too quiet. Every single day we missed you and I regretted letting all of you go. You can’t go from a house of six to a house of two overnight. Never again. We just missed you.” I didn’t get it. I think I still had whiplash from my introduction to the gypsy life.

Tiffanni and I started dating in the same city where several years before I was introduced to loneliness. We lived on a small college campus and recognized nearly everyone. Even before we started dating, our time together increased. I would walk her to breakfast in the morning, find her between classes, meet her for lunch and dinner, and spend every night until curfew doing any number of things. Appropriate things. We were rarely apart. If that wasn’t enough, we would usually talk on the phone after curfew for awhile each night until I finally begged off to write a paper or two before we hit repeat the next day. In a city 600 miles away from the only place that I ever knew as home, a city that I never expected to meet a single friend, I found my best friend.

We’ve spent the last 20 years mostly inseparable. From that first walk across campus to now chauffeuring her everywhere that she goes, we’re together a lot. We built a family together which is pretty amazing when you take some time to think about it. There are three kids that exist because she and I fell in love. And because of that, I’ve fallen in love with my kids.

I don’t like it when the kids are gone. Not one of them. The house feels wrong. The dynamic is off because something, someone is missing. I really do want to let them grow up and discover themselves and spend the night out with friends that they could have forever, but I hate it. While they’re out making memories, I’m trying to hold on to them. My kids have lived in five different homes with me and Tiff- all in the same city. And I was content in every one. Because they were there. Home was never about a place, a house. It was always about a relationship. We could move a dozen more times and nothing would change. Home is where you’re loved unconditionally, where every moment matters, where you pile into the bed wadded up like puppies and watch another episode of Full House, where you play bad board games with made up rules, where you break bedtime to tell another story, where you wrestle and laugh and hug and cry. Home is where my kids are. My kids are home. And I’m never letting them go off for the summer.

She tries to furrow her brow, eyes squint, lips pursed. “Like this,” I say. I pull my right eyebrow down as I lift my left eyebrow up. I flare my nostrils and compress my lips. She smiles her new smile. An echo of what it once was, but clearly her smile. She tries again, but just squeezes both eyes tightly. Squinched face, wrinkled forehead and I burst out laughing. She smirks. She knows that she’s made me laugh and enjoys her accomplishment.

I’m not a morning person. Never was. Neither are any of my siblings. My mom drove us to school every day of my life that I can remember and didn’t bat an eye when I asked her to drop me off half a mile from the front of my high school entrance the first day of 10th grade. Mornings were a somber stint. Each kid staring into his bowl of cereal with small breaks to read the back of the box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch only to return to the milk slogged cereal bowl. Zombified, we didn’t really wake up until 9 or 10am, long past that expressionless drive to the awkward momzone drop off before lumbering in to first period.

So it was a culture shock those first few years waking up to chipperfest every morning after we got married trying to pretend that I enjoyed discussing the outfit that I would wear for the day the minute I opened my eyes. “Hey there sleepy head,” she would rouse me to cognition before my left eye could even join my right eye, “I’ve been waiting on you to wake up for so long.” And it would begin. A peppering of words and thoughts and ideas and reflections and ponderings before I had time to blink for the first time. My ears and eyes accosted by my sprightly life partner as I struggled to remind myself of my vows.

At some point I remember telling her, “You’re going to have to give me a few minutes before you attack me with the morning.” Which didn’t seem to compute well, except to offer an intermission of explanation to herself in between thoughts.

“Good morning sunshine, guess what crazy dream I had,” she would begin. If my eyes worked yet, I would roll them, if not I always had a reclose. “Oh that’s right, you’re not a morning person, I’m sorry. I’ll give you a minute. But before I do, I have to tell you about this crazy dream I had.” And the ever-elusive minute never quite actualized. I guess my face sometimes looked like I was awake before I really was because regularly I would open my eyes to mid-conversation and scramble to catch up, dazed and disoriented, reaching for context clues and keywords.

Eventually we reached a compromise. Ear plugs.

I hate grammar police in everyday speech. If you want to correct my syntax after I deliver the State of the Union, fine, but when I’m just telling a fun story and everyone is laughing and enjoying themselves and you point out that I ended a question with a preposition, leave me alone. Sometimes I use the wrong word and someone corrects me. And I just want to scream, “Did you understand what I said? Do you know what I meant? Then I communicated. What I wanted to say, you heard.”

Communication is a funny thing. While words matter, correct words, they aren’t deal breakers. There are so many other ways to communicate. The eyes convey a language all their own. The body speaks messages that words sometimes can’t. Pauses, tone, inflection, speed, volume can all dramatically change the smallest of words and phrases. The truth is that you and I could have spoken a fraction of the words that left our lips today and have gotten across what needed to be said without any misunderstandings.

Words are hard to come by these days. Tiff makes dozens of phonecalls everyday and I get dozens of apologies, “I’m so sorry, I just can’t understand what she’s saying. I keep having to ask her to say it again.” She repeats those few worded phonecalls over and over just to make the connection. In public, I stand at her side as a translator like we’re on the mission field. But the truth is, it’s getting harder for me too. I have to use context clues again. If she’s holding her brush, I assume that she needs her hair brushed. If she hands me her cup, I’m fairly certain that she’s asking me to refill it. She regularly reaches for the volume while in the car and I know that she wants me to talk to her.

After over twenty years there’s not a lot that needs to be said with words anymore anyway. A smile, a laugh, a tear, a frown. Empathy is in the eyes. Compassion in the hands. And love in that crazy little eyebrow furrow that she just can’t quite get, but she keeps doing it over and over and over because I keep laughing. A million words, a million feelings, a million joys- not one word.

I can name about three memories before 2nd grade. My brother Adam being born. Getting chased on the playground by some girls in kindergarten. And Santa Clause-gate, when innocence was stolen, dreams were shattered, and I realized that the exorbitant gift-giving Santa was now on a budget. I just don’t know what my kids remember. It all happened so fast. Normal and then nothing close to it. Of course they didn’t know things were different- life just was.

Tiffanni and I had only been dating a few months when she found out that her sister was pregnant. She got in the car and drove 400 miles to celebrate. When my nephew was born, she was there. Skipped school for a week. I get that babies are a big deal, she shopped for months leading up to the life entrance. But it surprised me that someone would shop that much for their own kid, let alone another’s.

With a backseat filled with toys, clothes, diapers, she debated getting her own carseat, and headed north for the baby event of the century.

It was another few months before I would ever see what the fuss was all about. Babies are cute and all, but they all look and act the same. I’m not sure they even have a personality until about age two- unless you count colic. And then they’re just jerks. We showed up and Tiff darted out of the car toward the house and by the time I drug all of the suitcases into the living room, she had my nephew cackling and making new noises that “we’ve never heard him make before.”

Tiffanni was magical with kids. She can still get a kid staring and smiling in Dairy Queen every time. I try to mimic her but I apparently tortured and burned stuffed animals at the stake in another life. Kids can sense innocence. This evolved intuition that discerns the difference between safety and danger manifests in a simple smile or a faint ignore. Tiff could make every kid laugh. Put them all at ease. She was made for children. Patient and kind. Which is why she worked with special needs kids for the first couple of years of our marriage while she attempted to finish school.

Tiffanni was diagnosed with Huntington’s in the fall of 2011. My intention was to live as full of lives for as long as we could, until circumstances inhibited us. I planned several trips, several getaways, and unplugged from as much noise as I could. Within three months her dad and I had to ask her to stop driving. It wasn’t really a request, not after she drove through the neighbors’ garage door with our kids in the backseat. We cried as we realized that this disease was demanding and unforgiving.

The following summer, I was out of town for the day when I got a phonecall from one of Tiff’s friends. “I don’t want to be a tattle-tale, but I just talked to Tiffanni and she told me that she feels better. She feels in control and is tired of sitting around the house. When we hung up she was getting the kids in the car to go to Sonic for happy hour.” I panicked. The last time she was driving could have been disastrous and now this. I quickly called her phone from two hours away and did my best calm voice when she answered.

“Whatcha doing?”

“Nothing, why?” I heard the distinct ring of the carkey in the ignition behind her voice. The kids laughing.

“Why does it sound like you’re in the car?”

“I’m not.”

“Tiffanni, I need you to listen to me. Please don’t drive with our kids. Please don’t drive. I know it’s not fair, but you can’t drive.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Ok, I’ll be home this evening.” I hung up and called her dad who was able to go over and help me settle the situation.

The last time she ever got into a driver’s seat was to take them to Sonic. And she didn’t even get out of the garage.

We’ve talked, the kids and I, a lot about what they remember. Brayden can’t remember a day that his mom was “normal”. He asked me one day, “Why did God make mom crazy?” Addyson and Carsyn can’t ever remember anything either. I’m sure it’s because at some point, the memory begins to jade their recall, stamping all memories with the filter of disease.

So I prompt them. I try to trigger thoughts. We talk about Christmas, which Tiffanni loved- putting the tree up in September. I remind them how she chased them around the house nearly every day. How she tickled them till they couldn’t breathe. How she carried them around on her hip so much that people commented on Tiff’s biceps regularly. How she dressed them up, made them costumes, did their hair, snuck their makeup. We’ve lost a lot.

I picked the kids up from school yesterday, a rare day that everyone came home at the same time. Of course they asked to go to Sonic for happy hour. We ordered slushies and limeaids and laughed and told stories. Addyson kept asking me to turn the music up and then reminded herself, “Oh, you want to talk.” My almost teenager.

In the middle of our break from life Carsyn got excited and said, “I remember mom checking me out of school. She came and got me and said, ‘My arms were just aching for you. I couldn’t bear to be without you anymore.’ And she took me to Sonic and then to play. Just us.”

Addyson screamed, “Me too! She said the same thing, her arms were just aching too much to let me stay in school.”

“You guys remember that?” And they nodded. “You were only four and five years old.”

“She did it a lot,” they told me. And I remembered. She kept one of the kids home from school every off day that she had. She couldn’t just take a break, or I suppose the kids were her break. My little truants.

My last memory of Sonic, filled with pain and fear, but Carsyn’s and Addyson’s filled with all that was good about their mom. Her aching arms, her contagious laugh, her simple love.