I get nervous reading a book in which the villain is 100% villainous and the hero glitteringly heroic. The author can get away with it in a specific scene, or in an article describing one single event, but if it goes on longer than that, I start to think somebody is lying. My own son, Porter, is highly fastidious about smells, tastes, textures, and sounds, rigorous about his music training, and in his free time loves sitting in the cool of the back deck, listening to a good audiobook, and strumming his lyre. (Porter doesn’t actually have a lyre, he has two, and his fife arrived today.) It’s all a very lovely, classical sort of portrait, right up until you open his bedroom door and say, “Oh, so this is where the U.S. tests their missiles.”

Both images are completely accurate, the persnickety and the disaster comfortably coexisting in the same seventeen-year-old boy. Porter’s young, so fault lines are sure to shift and change as he matures, but he will probably never outgrow contradiction. Hopefully none of us will because contradiction provides the prickling brain signals we need to propel us forward and to progress. That’s why I don’t much care for Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim, and the whole romantic notion that being handicapped automatically makes him holy, as though he had been born with nothing to conquer.

My nephew, Sam, is eleven, and would love nothing more than to play in the NBA. Any sport involving a ball draws him like a moth to a flame. He passionately debates football stats, shoots hoops, and at age four joined a junior basketball team, because that was the earliest they’d let him in. Sam also has cerebral palsy, a dead spot in his brain caused by a traumatic birth. I remember the night he was born, watching my sister, Natalie, taken off in the ambulance, scared to death for both mother and baby. We were so wonderfully blessed to keep them both, but that did not turn Sam into Tiny Tim.

In all honesty, there very well may have been a mule in our family tree. That same hardheaded stubborn streak that assuredly caused many a social discomfort, also drove our ancestors to cross the American plains, fighting hunger, fording rivers, and conquering mountains, contributing their footsteps and wagon tracks to what would one day form the basis for Interstate 80. When they arrived in Utah, our predecessors were sent on to settle in southeastern Idaho, into such severe and inhospitable country, they prayed to God to temper the elements so they could survive. Apparently, God took an accounting of their faith and the set of their jaws, and listened. Rexburg, Idaho has since bloomed in the desert, and having the opportunity to be born there meant my sisters and I stood on the shoulders of giants. Sam bred true, but sometimes giants knock things over. Read More