I Love That Kid!

            I don’t know Josh Ripley, but I love that kid! Let me tell you why.

            Sixteen-year-old Josh is a junior at Andover (Minn.) High School. He was running a 5K race on Sept. 16 in a field of 261 competitors. With the race less than half done, the 6-foot-5-inch runner heard a scream and saw a runner he didn’t know crumpled against a fence – holding a profusely bleeding ankle.

            The injured athlete was 5-foot-5-inch Mark Paulauskas, a freshman at Lakeville South High. Here is Mark’s account: “He just picked me up without saying anything and started carrying me and trying to calm me down. He said, ‘It’s going to be OK. I’m going to get you to your coaches.’ … I think it’s amazing.”

            Sure enough, with his own coach trying to figure out why Josh hadn’t passed the halfway mark, he spotted him. “I was wondering what was going on, why was he so far back,” said Scott Clark. “Then I see Josh. He’s got the kid in his arms.”

            Josh Ripley carried Mark about a quarter mile! He handed him off to his coaches and family and then – dead last in the field of runners now – sped off to resume his race. He passed 50 kids to finish 211th out of 261 runners. No excuses. No disappointment. No explanation. He just finished what he had started – only to be asked by one teammate why he had fallen so far behind.

            “He just humbly says, ‘Oh, I picked up a kid,’ ” said sophomore Simeon Toronto. “And I’m like, ‘Dude, you just picked up a kid and carried him?’ That’s incredible!” Then added Toronto: “It was just so typical Josh.”

            I love that kid! And while most of the news reports I tracked down cited this as a supreme example of sportsmanship and compassion among athletes, I think they missed the real force at work in Josh’s action. The details make it pretty clear that it was the unfolding of a very practical faith that Josh embraces.

            He does volunteer work at Living Word Christian Center and – by both Mark and Josh’s account – prayed over Mark as he ran with him in his arms. He prayed for Mark’s pain to stop and for him to be all right. He even asked Mark’s permission before he started the prayer! And Josh seemed honestly bemused by all the attention being paid to him later. He insists he did “nothing special” – but said he was just thankful God let him be there for someone who needed help.

            Mark’s ankle needed 20 stitches to close the gash some runner’s spikes accidentally created. Blessedly, there were no damaged ligaments or tendons. He should recover fully, after he gets out of a walking boot and off his crutches.

            Josh has reminded me again that there are wonderful people out there who are always doing kind and good things with no expectation of being noticed or rewarded. Great kids who aren’t threatening teachers or doing drugs. People whose faith is not a banner or excuse but a daily lived reality.

            I just love that kid! Don’t you? And I want to be more like him.

Commitments & Complications

            Making and keeping promises is one of the things that distinguishes humans from animals. It is also what separates good people from bad ones.

            Yes, I can imagine some promises that should be broken. What if I am a junior-high kid who promises his buddy to help get even with somebody who hurt his friend’s feelings by trashing his bike or computer? Then I realize that I’ve promised to do something wrong. Break the promise! You had no right to make it. Adults sometimes get in those situations as well. Think first. Then speak.

            Yes, I can imagine some good promises made in good faith that may be broken. Suppose a woman accepts a proposal to marry – only to discover over the few months prior to the wedding date that the relationship is a big mistake. Better to be honest and suffer embarrassment or break his heart now than create the long-term heartache and eventual failure of a formalized commitment.

            But the general rule about keeping promises cannot be formed by exploring the exceptional cases. And the principle that holds a society together is that we must keep the promises we make to one another. Employment contracts, land sales, bank notes, installment loans – these formalized contracts about “things” require documentation and signatures. We enforce them in courts.

            Then there are the adult promises we make to one another. They should be regarded as even more important to our integrity as human beings than the contracts we sign about mere things such as cars or money. Are they?

            A Christian leader made negative headlines last week with his televised comment about keeping promises. A caller asked what advice to give a friend who had begun a romantic involvement with another woman after his wife began suffering the dreadful effects of Alzheimer’s disease. “I know it sounds cruel,” he said, “but if he’s going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but make sure she has custodial care and somebody looking after her.”

            The speaker’s on-air partner asked about the traditional – and biblical – vow to love and remain together “in sickness and in health” until death parts them.

            “If you respect that vow, you say ‘til death do us part,’ ” he continued. Then he added: “[Alzheimer’s] is a kind of death.”

            Lots of things are “a kind of death” – ranging from bankruptcy to paralysis from an auto accident to disfiguring cancers to Alzheimer’s disease. That’s why we make promises. That’s why we take uncertainties out of the lives of the people we love. That’s how we preserve integrity in complex and painful times.

            This is what the Bible says about making promises: “It is better to say nothing than to make a promise and not keep it” (Ecclesiastes 5:5 NLT). Amen.

If Only for a Moment

              Like most of you, I remember where I was on that terrible Tuesday morning an eternal decade ago. I heard that something terrible had happened in New York City via car radio. I was driving to campus to teach logic when what turned out to be the most illogical and outrageous event in recent history took place.

            That first report had more ambiguity than clarity. Maybe it was only a tragic, freakish accident. Maybe it was just a “crazy” in a cockpit. At that point, we were thinking of all sorts of possibilities – and hoping for the best of the worst of them.

            We got through class. I moved as quickly as I could to pick up student papers, get back to my car, and head for a television set. With the radio on as I drove, the less-sinister options had all but left the conversation. My country was under attack – by some person or cult or country or what?

            In the 10 years since, the source of the attack has been identified. Military responses have been planned, executed, and protested. London, Mumbai, and cities other than our own have come under attack. In addition to the nearly 3,000 who died in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, twice that number have died in the U.S. military. Two of them were young men I knew.

            In the 10 years since, we have had time to blame and excoriate. Politicians have mastered the techniques of party polarization and personal ineffectiveness. (Is there a statesman anywhere to be found?) The terrorists have succeeded in frustrating us when we travel, helping to throw our economy into chaos, and infecting all of us with a sense of apprehension about what could happen next.

            But I do remember at least one good thing that happened in the aftermath of that awful day. America sensed – if only briefly – that we are one nation. Black and white, Latino and Asian, Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Democrat, we found ourselves standing together in unity. We showed intentional acts of kindness to one another. We smiled at each other as if to reassure one another. We met together to pray across the lines of our different faiths.

            Our pain, confusion, and fear gave us a sense of being “one nation.” We even said the pledge again that affirms we are “one nation under God.” But that ever-so-brief period soon gave way to the old divisions and has seen new ones added. Negative motivations do not generate positive outcomes that will endure.

            That awful day is deposited in a painful place in our memory banks forever. Living in denial would not reverse history. So it is better to allow the memory of a dark day that produced heroic first-responders, unselfish Ground Zero volunteers, and patriotic service by so many to call us back to a strong sense of unity grounded in our positive commitment to the common good, the Golden Rule, and love that imitates that of One who gave himself for all.

            If only for a moment, we had a glimpse of a better way forward. 

Knowledge vs. Wisdom

            These are strange times. The store of human knowledge is increasing rapidly and exponentially; the evidence of human wisdom seems sparse and infrequent.

            I value and affirm the place of science, for example, but know that pushing its boundaries has not always produced good outcomes. Germany boasted the most advanced scientific community of the early twentieth century; yet its then-celebrated but now-debunked “science” of eugenics was a major justification offered for the Holocaust. The knowledge intelligent people have does not seem to make it more likely they will believe what is true or do what is right.

            A full century later, we may not have come all that far. Politicians still seem to vote the interests of their richest and largest-donor supporters. Courts can still be guilty of rendering verdicts tinged with favoritism toward the wealthy and well-connected. A 2005 study of psychiatric drug trials hit upon the unsettling fact that academic researchers whose work was funded by a drug company were almost five times as likely to report the treatment was effective.

            All of us are limited, thus always fallible. Furthermore, we are often tinged by bias and too frequently swayed to seek selfish advantage.

            So you must pardon me for being skeptical of the Ivy League professor who reports that casual sexual experimentation is a healthy rite of passage for adolescents. You must forgive my naïveté when a government economist explains that debt accumulation is normal. You must overlook my sheer stupidity in not rolling over to the latest published diatribe against faith in a personal God.

            What I have found in professional and personal interactions with such persons is that they are often parroting what they were told by some “authority.” At other times, they are using their academic skills to justify or defend something they have already embraced for personal reasons. Then, in the halls of academe, there is always the temptation merely to tear down what was once in place.

            Don’t take the word of any human as final and beyond challenge. Whether Christopher Hitchens or Billy Graham, Stephen Hawking or Pope Benedict, what anyone says is subject to challenge. Hear others respectfully, but hear them with a sense of obligation to examine contrary views – and to think for yourself.

            If thinking seriously about the most important issues of human experience is thought too great a burden, one has already fallen for a popularized fallacy – and has a way to go to get back on her feet to think rather than to follow blindly.

            That we live in a time of so many facts so easily accessed may or may not be helpful. It depends on our being wise enough to use them with mature judgment.

            “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes of wisdom” (James 3:13 NIV).