A Moment in Time

It was evening. I was eight, my younger brothers and sisters had just been put to bed, mom and dad wanted to talk with me alone in the family room of our home.

Time stopped, winter began, and the earth’s rotation was altered, never again were there “blue moons”, innocent summer days lying on the grass imagining shapes, characters and creatures in the billowy clouds above. The neighbor’s dog became mean, my younger “brothers” and “sisters” weren’t really brothers and sisters… my family became opaque, a faded hue, less real. My bedroom became smaller and darker; now there were nightly burglars/murderers and malovent strangers perusing my windows terrorizing me waiting for the opportunity to do me harm. Learning of a father who died I died as my mom had.

My father was drafted and killed in the Korean Conflict. My mom was 21, I was three months, 14 days old. The concussion, the trauma of God allowing her lover, a fine and godly man die left her lifeless… about 6 rows from the front, on the left, in a pew alone, crying most every Sunday. 

She remarried. A retired naval officer became my dad; he adopted me and changed my name from Craig McConnell to Craig Barnard. I was too young to remember any of this and the secret was neatly kept until the evening I was called into the family room and heard “Craig…your dad isn’t your father. Your father was killed in a war when you were born. I married your dad when you were little…and he loves you very much”. And for this little guy all the adventures of boyhood in our Southern California baby boomer neighborhood were indelibly changed.

It’s inevitable; we’re all wounded in some way. And the scar remains and with it some message that becomes the script by which we live.

As a young boy the first draft of my script(the message) was, “I’m different. Everyone else has a father… their real father...what’s wrong with me.”

What was the first draft of your script?

As life unfolds the message goes through numerous edits while staying true to the theme. For me the second significant edit came in adolescence. Living disoriented with the pain and loneliness of not having my “real” father coupled with a variety of in-securities centered on the abiding question, “What’s wrong with me”, and a culturally affirmed rebelliousness it was pretty easy to provoke my dad (the 20 plus year naval veteran who didn't take any crap). And so, in the intersection of the hall and his bedroom, he grabbed me, shook me and for the first of several times told me, “You are nothing but a seagull. All you’re good for is sitting, squawking and shitting”.

I believed him.

No significant re-edits were needed following this.

I have absolutely nothing to offer… I sit, squawk and shit. Period.

That script has held up well…

Jump ahead several decades… which feels like a couple of lifetimes… we (Lori, my daughters and me) live at the beach. On our part of the Southern California coast there is a section of bluffs rising up overlooking the beach and ocean. Regularly I would park near by, walk over near the edge of the bluff and yap with God. I don’t fully understand it, but it was easy to be still, reflective and expectant there… my favorite time was early in the morning and especially when it was socked in with fog. The pounding surf, the salty moist air… the cool sand… ahh a cup of Joe, my journal and/or bible… it most always was a transcendent time.

One morning I am there. In the presence of the Lord… enjoying a meandering conversation. It’s overcast; cool… nobody is around, nice size surf… I can hear the harbor fog horn in the distance, the beach is empty, I’m leaning back into an old rail fence, and I’m sporting what I dearly hope we will wear in heaven: flips, old jeans, sweat shirt… a cool hat…. Heck I’ am in heaven!

Disrupting my communion is black lab puppy that comes bounding up to me. He nuzzles me in twisting gyrations, tail wagging with big dark eyes inviting me…“Hey, wanna play?” He cold-noses me and is full of life… begging, insisting, demanding that I enter in and romp with him. He’s a lab pup…”come on… live a little!” 

I’m annoyed…what’s he doing here? Where’s his master? (There is nobody around). Actually I get a little snarly with this intrusion into my transcendent oneness with the Creator of the Heavens and Sea. I mean, every single access to the beach in LA County has a sign posted that reads, “NO DOGS ALLOWED ON BEACH!!!” I try and scare him by arching my back like a big… really big old alley cat hissing, “Get outta here dog, SCRAM!!!. After a gentle nudge with my foot  ... he gets the message. He’s gone, freeing me to return to intimacy with the God of grace and creation.

Little did I know I nudged the God of grace and creation gently with my foot… because it seemed like a mere moment later I’m looking down on the sandy beach at the lab. He is on the hard sand at waters edge dashing through the surf jumping frolicking, prancing… doing what labs do. I find myself smiling and enjoying him from my bluff above.

Whatever God intended a lab to be and do he was being and doing. Having a ball. He’s in and out of the water, digging a hole, running wild and chasing birds.

God was so present in that moment… and I found myself…. Praying, “I wish I was a lab.”

(One of the great things about Labs is that they cannot read the signs… the signs that say, “No Dogs on The Beach"... You can’t do that… you’re a seagull”. This lab had no script. He was simply being and doing what God created labs to do. Free, alive, simply living as God intended me to.

Yearning, longing, hope and desire from the deepest regions of my soul… aged for decades they surfaced in a groan, a smile and my prayer.

It was God… inviting me again into life, into freedom. In that moment, and ever since, I’ve got a clear picture of the life I want to live. Ignore the script handed me and live the script God has written on my heart. To simply be Craig McConnell… running on the beach… alive, free.

And your new script is…?

- Craig McConnell

Notes:

* There was something about my brothers and sisters being “half” brothers and sisters that sinisterly took root in my soul at that young age and it all too often expressed itself in a unloving distance/coolness… a “Big Brother” meanness in my relationship with them most of my life. Oh how I wish, knowing what I now know, I could relive… re-relate with those in earlier years I missed.

I became a Christian at 21 and reconciled with my dad. As the years have gone by I have so much compassion for him and his best attempts to father me while profoundly wounded himself. He was a good man... and I miss him.

 

Comments

[Jon]

Craig,

I'm touched by this story every time I hear you tell it. Thanks for writing it here.

Jon

By the way...great pictures and use of color.

[Tony Devne]

Transcendence, there's a word I hope to use to describe some future moment.

"Calgon take me away!!!"

[David Felts]

Thank you Craig, thank you for helping me to begin to look more for the "actual" script that God has for me, and not the one that I've lived with....love your heart man, and can't wait for a book...where can I pre-order it?

[Beverly]

Thank you for sharing this. I am "filing" it for perhaps future reference for the inevitable time that my 5 yr old grandson will learn of his biological father's decision to "leave" prior to his birth. My precious 1st born took on the role of the only Daddy he has ever known at the tender age of 2, when his mom & my son married after my son's return from Iraq. (Marines) They don't live near me but I love that little boy and am grateful God has entrusted my son to be his Daddy and I pray he will come to know his Abba at a very early age so to walk with him through that journey. Thank you again for such a tender conversation with us.

[Learning The Hard Way]

Craig,
A very touching story. It makes me want to find out what my script is/has been and more importantly what script God has put on my heart. Thank you.

[Amy]

Thank you - Your blog was very moving to me and a friend of mine I shared it with. After we read your blog we wondered how you went about living this new script God gave you? And then we pondered maybe the answer comes in not doing anything per se but the script God has for you happens when we stop trying. Not sure if my question is clear but would very much like to hear how God brought this new script alive in your life.

[John]

I was at a boot camp in 2004 when you shared about going to South America for a celebration of your forefathers who were the first to take the gospel to that nation. I would love to see that story in print. It really spoke to me about finding one's true identity.

[Jenny]

Craig,

Like Jon, I'm also touched by your story every time I hear it. You expressed it especially well in this post. I'm deeply grateful for how our stories have collided over the past years...how God has used your story to be a vital part of the uncovering of ours.

To answer your question, "What is your script?"...

From day to day, my script often feels mundane...clean house, do laundry, run errands, chauffer my children, cook dinner, and more. But I know better than to believe that my script is anything but ordinary. God sees what I cannot and I'm confident that the story He's actively writing for me is bigger and far more beautiful than I could ever imagine.

[Vern Hyndman]

With gulls flying overhead in the unforced rhythms of grace that gulls live in... feeding off the prop wash, soaring on the wind... a sight that inspires poets... and the resonant thought is "sitting, squawking, shitting"??!!.

We see with filters... as we are transformed by Christ, we start to see the poetry of the Almighty through His lenses, rather than through the shit colored lenses of a universe revolving around ourselves.

When I hear your story, I am reminded to be purposeful to ASK for the lenses of God, that I might not miss the beauty around me. I ask that I not miss the hearts of my children, that I see them through His eyes, and that I be a conduit of love and grace rather than the outlet pipe of the outhouse of my selfishness.

-vern-

[Steve Coan]

Beautiful, Craig.

Your story helps me bring others (including myself) into focus. The idea that--a script was written, I read it, I believed it, and I set out to verify it--brings into sharp relief the shattered and troubled lives all around. Fears and fateful decisions all come right off the script.

It makes me want to despise scripts altogether, to buck the script and do something contrary. But then there's a script for a contrarian, too.

I think there may be something deeper going on here. And usually when I see something so thieving, destructive, and life-killing like a bad script, I think about the enemy Jesus talked about--how he comes only to steal, to kill, and destroy.

There is always more than one way to look at anything that happens. There is always more than one way to tell a story. Maybe there is a battle going on for who the story of my life is to be told by--told by God or told by his enemy.

The closing words in Frank Delaney's brilliant book called Ireland are, "A story has only one master."

God seems to be fighting for rights of authorship--for you, for me, for everyone.

[jill dyer]

Steve,

I like what you wrote. It made me wonder if you had read Dan Allender's book "To Be Told."

[Charlie]

Craig, always a pleasure! I want to be a lab too.