in the balance

When I heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday my first reaction was – 2 hours?

Apparently there is some outrage growing today as well. Somewhere within Virginia Tech, someone was in charge. Someone got the call about the murders on campus, felt the flutter in his or her stomach, hairs stood on end, then the weight of responsibility began to descend and bear down hard. A decision had to be made. A course had to be set. Lives were in the balance.

Balance?

What was in the other side of the balance?

I have no idea who that person actually was or what actually went through their mind, but I can wonder. Maybe it was like this:

What if this could be contained as an isolated incident? Easily explained. It’s probably a lover’s quarrel gone bad. No threat to the masses. No one needs to know. It’s just a footnote on page 2B, and a statistic in some study. Don’t worry about your sons and daughters. Classes are still open. Business as usual.

Or maybe:

No one wants to overreact. Remember Chicken Little. You can handle this. Don’t lose your cool. You need to know the right thing to do. Everyone is counting on you. Don’t be a sissy like your dad always called you. What a pathetic waste you’ll be if you cancel classes and this turns out to be some small thing, or even a hoax. Everyone will despise you. You might even get fired. Just ease that finger off the button. Wait and see how this turns out. Be composed.

I was talking with a friend recently about an incident that happened where he worked. Someone accountable to him had behaved unethically, and he witnessed it. But instead of confronting the person right then and there, he let it go for more than a week. He finally decided that it was still wrong, and that it would be cowardice not to confront it, even if late. It didn’t go well. His motives were questioned, he was accused of trying to ruin the person, families got involved. Yuck.

My second son is a real gem. He is such a neat kid who will be a good man. But he catches so much flack around here. He has a habit of making messes and generally acting out (for attention?) so that he gets scolded a lot. He doesn’t find me to say goodnight like the other kids, is stiff as a board when he hugs people, and he always seems afraid of me, and he mumbles. I kept waiting for some teachable moment to come up that would allow me to really prize him and connect with him. It wasn’t happening. Then I decided to be intentional about praising him and valuing him. But even those days were mixed with scolding. I felt like I was losing him. I felt paralyzed, incapable of being his dad.

Maybe kind of like my friend with the ethical incident. Maybe kind of like the Virginia Tech official who decided to wait it out.

For one reason or another, a step in any direction seemed perilous. And all the safe steps had already been dead ends. What if I blow it? It seems like I have a lot to lose here.

One night…I don’t know what came over me…I think I just got fed up with feeling hamstrung…so I sat down and wrote my son an email. I told him about it being hard for me to express my feelings to him, and how awesome I thought he was. I gave him specifics. I told him how much he was prized, and how honored I was to be his dad. No buts. This was a huge risk for me, though. I hit send, and as soon as I did I felt so cheesy, so naked, so ridiculous. I actually felt like a coward. Why did I have to write a letter when I could just talk to him?

I copied my wife on the email. Her response was, “Wow. What a great thing to do.” I still wasn’t convinced. The next day I was out of state on business. I called back late the next night and asked Jill if Benjamin got the email. She said, “Yeah. He slept with it.” What? Yes, he read it over and over, got help printing it out, and then went to sleep with the letter held to his chest. I cried.

Since then Benjamin has been a new creature. He seems more true to himself. His jokes and mischief are authentic and therefore wonderful. He doesn’t seem to be afraid. He seems to be joyful most of the time. He relates well to his brothers and sister. He hugs me at bedtime. He speaks up. It is a noticeable change.

There is no doubt in my mind this is what he needed. And for the longest time I was blowing it. I was paralyzed. I withheld. I think the reason I did that for so long is because it felt like an admission of failure on my part. The real courage for me was admitting that I was struggling with something. And admitting that I was afraid and didn’t know exactly what to do.

It his me how I choose my steps a lot of the time so as to not blow my cover. There’s this balance between what people know about me and what they think about me that seems to be working pretty well. It’s gotten to a place of equilibrium anyway. And when things go sour or when a crisis comes up, I tend to get anxious and fearful, or calculative. In any case: paralyzed. To me the true courage is to admit that I don’t know what to do here, I want to be honest and connect with someone else, and I don’t really care if my cover is blown. Some things are more important. Pushing the honest button tilts the balance towards me being exposed, and also towards the truth. Pushing the button is the only way to advance the story. Whether it seems to be good for me right now or not, there is a bigger story being told, a weightier scale.