Stretch Armstrong

October 14, 2014

I am writing this in a coffee shop.  Hanging outside on the wall of the multi-use building where this coffee shop is contained is a sign the reads “conflict resolution center.”  As I drove up this morning I noticed the sign and instantly thought of the lyrics of a brand new U2 song – The Troubles – where Bono sings:

“You think it’s easier 


To put your finger on the trouble


When the trouble is you


And you think it’s easier


To know your own tricks


Well it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do…

You think it’s easier 


To give up on the trouble


If the trouble is destroying you


You think it’s easier


But before you threw me a rope 


It was the one thing I could hold on to.” 

Maybe it was the fact I had just stopped at the store to pick up a physical copy of Songs of Innocence (on its release day), but it think it is more likely the living through/in a week of some of the poorest mental health of my life.  The flash of thought that contained the connection to Bono’s internal conflict was blended with the waves of internal conflict that have been battering me much like the storms that I witnessed as a boy thrashing against the breakwater at the end of the pier in Holland, MI. 

While the image of the breakwater works for how it feels inside my head these days, it was a much smaller amount of water that touched the storm in the first place. As I headed to bed a little over a week ago I stepped on something wet with my last step before jumping into bed.  Bedroom floors are not supposed to be wet I thought.  After a few minutes of investigation Stacey and I discovered that a pipe in the wall between our bedroom and the bathroom was leaking and had been for sometime.  The floor in our room, and the bathroom was wet.  Who knew what else was wet?  So I went into the belly of the beast.  It was not a good time.  The water damage from this episode is not easily distinguished from previous water damage.  The trip also yielded a couple of other issues needing to be addressed.  As I write this I still have no clear idea what to do…

What I do know is that all the feelings I thought were 8 years dead (check out the post “Flashback”) came flooding back like a dike bursting.  As I crawled beneath my families home in a space filled with cobwebs, musty smells, water, and the soft muddy ground on which our ramshackle “foundation” rests I just kept hearing a voice telling me that this is not a suitable place for my family to live.  Another voice repeatedly interrogated me with the question “is the best you can do?”  After a short period of time I climbed out of the hole and the thought of leaving the trailer park – just selling this home and moving – crossed my mind and with a second wave of insecure wondering.  This time centered on what I really believe.  We moved to the park because we felt called here and I have taught for years about the idea of living among those we are called to serve.  Thoughts of leaving made me feel like a quitter, a phony, and an imposter.

So it happened again today my life was called into question, and I crawled into the hole again.  Eight years ago we felt like God was calling us to the trailer park.  We sold our house and moved.  We took our three girls (then 8, 6, and 4 years old).  We bet it all on that call.  Now looking back from nearly a decade later I wonder if it has been worth it.  I spent the entire first summer in our new home waking up and thinking in a mild depression “S#@!, I live in a trailer.”  Over the years I have grown to love my neighborhood, but don’t feel like I have made much progress in tearing down the wall of feelings that accompany physically living in sub-standard housing causes me.  Some of it is me needing to let go of my middle-class expectations and over-educated expectations about what I deserve in life.  That grandiose sense of entitlement makes me sick, but not enough to change apparently.  Making matters worse is a discomfort I feel when interacting with people called to minister among those who our world sees as the lowest, least and last that don’t live among the very people to whom they profess to be called.  That type of un-incarnational existence troubles me.  So the second I feel like selling the trailer and moving away a wave of feelings slams into me telling me that I am giving up on the people God is calling me to - not specifically people in the trailer park - but those who are the most vulnerable in society. 

When we first moved in my wife had time to do the community development she really felt called to, but as the family grew she needed to go back to work.  Now the days of kids filling our house for dinner, advocating for those in the park at the elementary school, and generally being involved in our neighborhood have given way to a pace of life that finds us living at the trailer park and not in the trailer park.  On a good day I think we are OK with this because we needed to do something different to care for our family, but on bad days – like the days you have to crawl under the trailer – it just feels like we sold out to maintain our middle class needs and wants.

Then there is the conflict, accelerating over the years, that we are caught between two worlds.  Never is this more apparent than at 6:50am.  At that time of the day my two oldest girls sprint out the door to jump on the bus that will drive them up the hillside to South Anchorage High School seven miles away.  South is the most wealthy and least diverse high school in Anchorage.  The majority of the ethnic and economic diversity comes from the trailer park where we live.  The diversity is literally bussed in (or drawn in).  The buses my girls ride to and from school are referred to at both the Jr. High and High School as the “ghetto” bus.  However, my girls are not typical of our neighborhood in a variety of ways and easily pass for kids who do not arrive on the “ghetto bus.”  My girls are caught between two cultures all day long, and our family is in many, many ways as well.  As my wife talked to a friend yesterday she told her, “It’s like your being stretched in two different directions, and your not that flexible.”  As I have reflected on that statement I have begun to see our family much like that old toy Stretch Armstrong that you could pull in a bunch of different directions and he would snap back into shape.  I just wonder if in our case we are pulled all over and are beginning to not be able to bounce back.

So as I gazed upon the “Conflict Resolution Center” sign I saw this morning I said a little prayer that the conflict inside of me might find some resolution.

Joel K

“and you know the thing is sleeping a scratch below your skin


and God knows if you wake it up you gotta calm it down again


and I wonder what it felt like when the waters flooded in


and it got too hard to swim”

             Lucifer – By Bill Mallonee