Signing Off

In news that you’ll only read here, Second Drafts – my blog home for the past ten years – is closing its doors, with no plans to be reopened or replaced. I’ll save you the self-serving explanations and simply say that, for a variety of reasons, it’s time to move on.

That said, let me leave you with a final “best of” collection from the past ten years. After writing nearly 1,000 posts, I’m including 30 of my more popular and personal favorite ones – a wide variety I’d love you to read just one more time. (To be sure, there are easily another 30 I would include if I gave myself permission, but enough about me, what do you think about me?)

One of the reasons I include these and perhaps not others has as much to do with the interaction (back when people actually responded to blog posts and not just the social media announcing them), so be sure to read the comments. (Of course, you’re always welcome to troll the archives for more as you like, but I imagine you have a life.)

While I will no longer be blogging here anymore, I’ll continue to contribute a periodic post to The Scholars Blog and City Presbyterian blog every six weeks or so. For better or for worse, I still feel I have thoughts and words to share, but it’s time to develop those in a different way and for a different audience. At least personally, my blogging days are done. It’s been a good run.

Whether you’ve been a long-time or recent reader, thanks for the gift of your interest and attention. I’ve never taken it for granted. Enjoy reading/re-reading the posts, and if you’d be so kind, leave me a comment below to say you did. Thank you.

Most Popular

• Names That Are Verbs (this is the post people still comment on; the suggested additions in the comments are amazing)
• They Made It Work (a reflection for my parents on occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary)
• Retail Therapy (a piece I wrote trying to capture one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve still ever had)
• On Death and Dying in a Digital Age (thoughts on mourning and comfort in the wake of my mother-in-law’s passing)
• The Power of Prayerlessness (a sad but honest attempt at sharing the little I’ve learned about prayer)
• Sakulu (one of the saddest posts I’ve ever written in honor of the first Compassion child we sponsored)
• God’s Will for Your Life (sometimes we make it so complicated, but it really boils down to this)
• Walking the Line Between Loss and Hope (a reflection meant to encourage those who have ever lost a child)
• Deceitful Heart, Desperately Sick (a confessional detailing one of the first ways I learned to hide)
• Playing Dress Up (a meditation on the biggest challenge of being the parent of four daughters)
• Man School (a lament for the departure of manhood – my own and that of others in the culture)
• Rural Reflections (some of my most honest thoughts about our family farm and its future)

Culture

• On Gay Marriage / The Heart of the Matter (these two companion posts go beyond talking points; read the comments)
• The Most Schizophrenic 48 Hours of the American Existence (one of the last posts I wrote commenting on Black Friday)
• Honoring MLK is Really Honoring the Gospel (a piece tying my studies of Acts to the importance of equal racial rights)
• We Aren’t the World (my thoughts on the rise, fall, and decline of American pop music)
• The Postmodern Wave (here’s what happens when you mash up Derrida, Foucault, and Cardinal baseball)
• A Funeral I’d Rather Miss (a lament for the death of freedom at the hands of overreaching government)
• An Invitation to an Honest End of the Year (a critique of the modern season’s greetings)
• What Freedom Protects (a meditation on what real freedom is – and isn’t – and the difference this understanding can make)
• Morally Dumbfounded (a critique of classical humanism’s propagation of  the idea of moral evolution)
• On Barry Bonds and Baseball (an essay in which I apply David James Duncan’s The Brothers K to baseball’s steroids era)
• The Ideology of Rationality (a reasonable critique of rationalism with some help from Gene Edward Veith and Tim Keller)
• Red, White & Boom (a metaphor to explain my feelings for and frustrations surrounding politics)

Life Hacks

• Stop Doing List (some notes from a talk I used to give on beating busy-ness and the attitudes that tend to complicate it)
• A Primer on Conferencing (after 12 years of camp/conference work, here’s a compilation of ways I learned to learn better)
• Top Ten Ways to Frighten the New Neighbors (one of the best top ten lists I put together after one of our many moves)
• Sabbath (this post details what Sabbath used to once look like in the Dunham household; it’s been a long time)
• Fuller Disclosure Equals Fuller Discourse (a brief manifesto of convictions that got me into blogging in the first place)

They Made It Work

It was a proposal that could only have worked given its partners: my father, the most principled of pragmatists (which is the profile of a small farmer still farming), and my mother, the most eternal of optimists (which can only explain her 30 years of teaching English to rural high schoolers). As I understand it, there was no down-on-one-knee, hand-over-heart scene; no particularly inventive presentation of a ring (though I’m assured there was one). Forget the drama of the old question and answer; this wasn’t so much a proposal as a proposition – long-considered and risk-evaluated – to be taken (or left) as quietly as it was made.

“I think we can make this work.”

It was so unromantic as to be nothing BUT romantic – this idea that my father, Roger, offered and my mother, Charlotte, embraced while college students in the early-60s at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. And 50 years later (just a few days early from the actual anniversary of January 2nd to kindly accommodate us out-of-towners), here we are in west central Illinois (Pike County, to be exact) celebrating its continuation. Principally and pragmatically, my two younger sisters and I (along with each of our spouses and combined eight children) would attest to their success; by most measures, it seems Rog and Char made it work.

As a kid growing up in the pregnant bulge of Lincoln Land, I attended more 50th wedding anniversary receptions than I care to remember. The weekly county papers always had at least one announcement of a couple’s fiftieth big day coming up, and growing up outside a town of 1,200 people, we almost always knew them. Still, there were worse things to do on a Sunday afternoon (and there was cake, and the punch was usually good).

Anymore, however – whether in Pike County or elsewhere – the 50th wedding reception has gone the way of the dodo. In these days of no-fault divorce, the marriage vows ending with “’til death do us part” tend to mean “or until something better comes along.” Never mind the 50th anniversary milestone; as a culture, we’re seeing fewer 40ths…30ths…20ths…even 10ths (not to mention plenty of folks who aren’t even taking vows in the first place, or are sadly confused as to with whom they’re taking them).

There are plenty of examples of marriages that have fallen apart and failed for all kinds of reasons, but I’ve always been equal parts grateful and inspired that my parents’ is one that hasn’t. From the beginning, they set out with little more than an idea and a hope of getting, being, and staying married. It wasn’t complicated (except when it was), and 50 years after having said they would, by God’s grace, they did. They made it work.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.

An Invitation to an Honest End of the Year

The website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency had a pretty funny post yesterday entitled “Snopes Investigates the Anderson Family’s Holiday Letter,” in which the fact-checking website analyzed an imaginary family’s uber-happy annual end-of-year Christmas correspondence. The result was a brilliant paragraph-by-paragraph “true” or “false” or “mostly true” or “unconfirmed” study, substantiated or unsubstantiated by evidence the investigator(s) at Snopes had snooped out.

I find myself taking this same tact now that the Christmas cards and letters are showing up at our house. Actually, we don’t get many letters anymore as no one takes the time to write them; instead, we’re getting what seem semi-expensive, do-it-yourself, four-color published cards with a happy picture and some sentiment of the season printed across the top or bottom. There’s usually a signature, but not every time.

But there are always smiles. Always.

We’ve been off and on in recent years when it comes to the year-end Christmas letter. This year, we didn’t send anything, partially because we didn’t get a family picture taken (or, I should say, we didn’t get a family picture that we wanted to spend money to reproduce and mail), but mostly because it just wasn’t a holiday hoop we were able and willing to jump through. Still, not wanting to throw in the towel completely, my wife posted the picture on Facebook and included the following update:

This, friends, is the best I could do this year. It’s the only family photo we have of all six of us together from this WHOLE YEAR. And I’m pretty much out of steam, so I’m not sending these in the mail (and why would we, anyway, because…well, look at us).

2014: Good, Bad, and Ugly. It had plenty of each. I’m honestly thankful it is finally panting toward the finish line of New Year’s Eve. I’ve never really thought January 1 held some magical restart, but there is something to be said about a clean slate and hope.

And it’s hope that I’m clinging to for 2015. I lost it in 2014. And during this time of the year when the line to the mall parking lot blocks traffic on the main road and everyone wants a piece of the calendar, I sit here with soft music on and sleeping boys who are now home from seeing their parents for the day, still dazed and a little confused by all the caregivers in their lives and the constant transition. I hear my girls laughing with each other over a shared card game, and sometimes bickering because of a small offense, and I grasp to try to remember why we come to a halt this time of the year.

It’s a baby, y’all. A baby who came to redeem the world in all of its brokenness and disaster and make it whole again.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.

Joy to the world. Joy to you…to me.

Merry Christmas

I tried to convince Megan to add “damn it” after Merry Christmas, but she resisted, despite the fact that 2014 was a brutal year of loss for the Dunhams – foster kids, Megan’s mom, connection with the past, health, sometimes confidence, oftentimes hope. If you know us at all, you’re probably familiar with some of this already, so if suddenly we sent out a “happy, happy, joy, joy” Christmas letter in December, it might seem a little disingenuous, which should bother you.

I would sure love to read more honest letters at the end of a calendar year. I roll my eyes when I see pictures of people smiling on ski slopes or beaches, and I’m bored with the braggadocious behavior that links the fact that God is good with the good time somebody had this year (for the record, God is good, regardless of your good time). Instead, I’d love to see a family picture in which all are somehow owning their dysfunctions. Or even better, how about some tears to go along with what everybody already knows is going on? Sure, talk some hope, but what good is hope if we refuse to acknowledge the life situation(s) crying out for it?

Maybe you don’t want to come off as down or discouraged to family or friends (after all, that’s what Vaguebook is for, right?). Well, even if Megan and I happen to be family or friends (or both or neither), please know you can send us an honest letter and we’ll be glad – actually excited! – to read it. We might even pray for you as a family, which would be pretty cool because we suck at that, so think of this as your invitation to help our family’s life of prayer rather than as your family’s Christmas confessional.

You can email us your letter (cmdunham [at] gmail.com), or request our mailing address if you want to send us an actual piece of mail. Please include a picture (preferably not the Glamour Shots version) that’s at least as desperate as ours so we can make the refrigerator photo gallery a little more interesting.

With all that said, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

(I was again going to suggest “damn it” at the end, but Megan again wouldn’t let me, so just know that we mean it. We really, really mean it.)