I'm coming out of the closet!

I thought that headline might get your attention...

I started this blog a few months ago as a way to inform friends and family about my freak thumb amputation and the progress of my recovery. Along those lines, I'm happy to report that it's healing very nicely and, other than being an inch shorter than it used to be, it doesn't seem like it's going to impede me too much. So I'll give my recovery so far a full one-and-a-half thumbs up.

That said, my intention from the beginning was for this blog to evolve from talking about the accident into more of a blog about my thoughts and observations about faith, writing, and other stuff. But as you can see, I posted my first four posts in January, and haven't posted anything for three months now. The reason for not posting is not that I've been too busy. It's simply that I've been afraid.

A couple weeks ago I attended the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. It was a great conference and I walked away with lots of ideas, inspiration and new friends and new contacts. But the biggest thing I walked away with was a conviction that it's time for me to start blogging more seriously and more courageously, and to overcome my fear and let it all hang out there in terms of who I am and the way I see things. I recognize that I'll probably lose a lot of friends by doing this, but my hope is to gain some new ones.

I've been resistant to blog about my true beliefs for two reasons. Number one is that, for whatever reason, I still worry a lot about what people might think of me. It's a basic character flaw of mine. Number two is something that further complicates number one, which is the fact that most of my friends are evangelicals, and most have political, social and theological views that are probably significantly more conservative than my own. I've had experiences with some of my friends becoming rather upset when on occasion I've shared my evolving beliefs in an honest way. So I've been afraid to tell it like I see it for fear of being judged, and also because I don't want to be the guy for whom everyone is praying that he'll see the light and repent of his liberal, backsliding ways.

Nevertheless, in the interest of full disclosure and facing my fears head on, I'm now ready to divulge the following things about myself:

1. Not only did I vote for Obama, I actually applaud most of the things he's trying to do. Shocking, I know.
   
2. While I'm more interested than ever in following Jesus down the path of faith, I kind of feel like the path we're walking down is leading me away from evangelicalism. I'm not yet sure where we're going; only that it seems to be away from where I've been.
   
3. I no longer see abortion and homosexuality as black and white issues that must be opposed by Christians at all costs.
   
4. At the same time that I'm becoming more and more fascinated by Jesus and what he preached and the way he lived, I'm becoming less and less interested in church and theology.
5. I can no longer accept without questioning some of things I was taught I was supposed to believe over the four decades I've been immersed in evangelicalism, such as the inerrancy of Scripture, the belief that every word in the Bible is from God and not from man, or that every story in the Bible is factual and represents scientific and historical fact.
6. While I still believe that God created man and woman in his own image, I also believe that evolution is real and is something that Christians should stop being threatened by.
   
7. I'm becoming less concerned about believing in Jesus and more concerned with simply believing Jesus. I want to live as though I really believe the things that Jesus says, and if there's other stuff in the Bible that seems to be at odds with what Jesus says, I'm going with Jesus. Forget what Moses said, forget what Paul said, I'm going with what Jesus said.
   
   And, last but not least, the one that some of you may find the most shocking of all:
   
   
8. I'm not gay.

Some of you I'm sure will read this and think, "What's the big deal?" Others may read it and think, "Dear Lord, Tom's gone off the deep end."

In any case, there you have it. This is who I am. I'm not sure that I'm doing the right thing or for that matter the wise thing by going public with all this, and I can't say that I actually feel good about getting it off my chest. I'm sure I've just given many of you real cause for concern. Feel free to pray that I'll see the light; I want as much light in my life as I can possibly get. That said, I hope you'll resist the urge to pray that I'll see everything in the same light that you do.

In upcoming posts I plan to give an update on where I'm at with my two book projects, in addition to blogging about a few topics I've been thinking about a lot lately:

• Is God unethical?
• Is it wrong to decide?
• Does God give a sh!t about the F-word?
• I know I'm being called away from evangelicalism, but toward what?
  

I'm also planning to post some short video clips called Stuff I've Seen. They'll be short clips of video I've shot in my travels around the world. I'll start with a clip of an African midget dancing on a table with a jug band in a rural village in Kenya which I think you'll find both highly entertaining and disturbingly inappropriate. It's one of many surreal experiences I've had on my travels.

The time has come. It's time for me to step into what I'm beginning to sense more and more clearly is a calling to get real and honest about my struggles with faith and start to chronicle, in real time, the journey that I'm on. It's time to face my fears of "what's everyone going to think of me" and remember the two words that God spoke to me a year ago that I mention in the prologue to For Love of God and Beer.

As difficult as it is for me to push the "Publish Post" button on this, there's one thing that is giving me the courage to do so: At last count, only 11 people were even following this blog.

Maybe I can come out of the closet without most people even noticing.

Teetering on the Brink of Depression

It's been almost a week since my last post, and it's been an emotionally tumultuous time.

The good news is that the pain is getting a lot more manageable, and the wound is healing well. Sunday marked two weeks since the accident, and was the first day I was able to make it through a whole day without taking any narcotics for the pain. So that's good. Last night, however, the pain woke me up at one in the morning and was quite intense. I tried to fall back asleep, but couldn't. After half an hour of pain and sleeplessness, I got up and took a Vicodin. That did the trick.

The thumb itself is doing as well as could be expected. The skin is coming together around the end of the stub, and is healing nicely. I'm scheduled to go back to the doctor on Monday, and I'm hoping the skin will have healed enough to take out the stitches. For now, I've got it wrapped in a bandage and a splint. I'm supposed to take the bandage off once a day to shower and clean the wound, which I've been doing.

I've been trying to give it some air and spend a few hours without the bandage each day. The skin around the wound is still very sensitive and produces shots of pain when I press on it, so I still can't really push my thumb against anything and use it for leverage. Which makes it hard to tie my shoes and do other things like that; things where thumbs come in way more handy than I ever realized.

I feel like I'm on a journey walking across a huge frozen lake; a lake so big that it will take weeks, if not months, to get all the way to the other side. It's late winter on this metaphorical journey, and I know that spring is coming. There's hope for warmer days, more sunshine, and new growth and new opportunities. The question is, will I make it all the way across the lake before the ice melts? I have no choice but to proceed. I can't go back to where I came from; it's not there anymore. But I wonder if I'll have the emotional stamina to make it all the way to the other side of this lake before the ice gives way and I crash into the cold waters of depression.

When the bandage is off and I'm left to stare at my stump, I have to confront the fact that this is what I'll be looking at and carrying around with me for the rest of my life. Sure, the wound will eventually heal completely, and the skin will be smooth with no stitches or scabs. But the fact is, I'll never have a whole thumb again. And it's hard to accept that reality, at least emotionally. I feel like I've accepted it intellectually; it is what it is. But I'm not yet there emotionally.

A few nights ago I took a shower just before dinner. I got dressed and came into the kitchen, where Dana, Sara and Casey were setting the table and getting ready to sit down. I wanted to see how things would go trying to eat a meal without the splint on, so I asked the girls if it would be ok with them if I ate dinner with my thumb in its natural (but still very unnatural) state. Sara, our nine-year-old, consented immediately and asked if she could see it. She hadn't yet seen what had been covered by bandages for nearly two weeks. She took a look, and acted like it was no big deal.

"Do I have to look?" Casey asked. "I don't want to see it."

"No, you don't have to look," I answered. "But this is what it's going to be like from now on, so you're going to have to get used to it, just like I'm going to have to get used to it."

She allowed her eyes to glance toward my thumb, and immediately became disgusted. "It's gross! I don't want to have to look at it!"

I promised to try to keep it blocked from her view while we ate dinner. She began to cry, something she doesn't do very much now that she's a somewhat mature eight-year-old. I could tell that she was crying out of compassion for me. It's hard for her to accept that her dad will only have half of a left thumb from now on. It's hard for her dad to accept it as well.

I've had a recurring dream the last few nights. I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a very deep chasm. My job is simply to stand there and stare into it until I'm relieved of duty. The problem is this: There's a strong tailwind blowing at my back that's making it hard to stand, and there's a magnetic force coming from deep inside the chasm that is trying to draw me in. I know that all I have to do is stand there, but at times it just seems too difficult to sustain. I want to stop fighting the force, and to give up and let it just suck me into the chasm, but I realize to do so would be to submit to a darkness from which I might have a really hard time reemerging.

I think the dark force is the self-pity that I flirt with embracing. I know that I have to continue to resist it, even though something false keeps trying to convince me that the self-pity will feel good. It keeps reminding me that I have very good reasons to be afraid and depressed, given the circumstances of our life right now.

But at the same time, I recognize what is keeping me standing on the edge of the precipice: It's love. It's the love that Dana has shown me through this whole ordeal and way preceding it. It's the love of Sara and Casey that fills my heart with hope and joy each day. It's the love of my friends and family that I experience through their smart-ass emails and Facebook comments, and through their intentional acts of kindness shown through things like buying us new tires or bringing over and cutting a cord of firewood. It's the love of all of you that is keeping me standing through this unfortunate event, and it's a blessing from God that I can't help but notice and for which I'm extremely grateful.

Which is kind of the weirdness in all of this, and certainly one of the lessons I believe God wants me to learn through this experience. Sure, I was grateful for what wonderful friends and family I have, even before my accident. But now I have a much greater appreciation for it, not just because it feels nice to have that support, but because I realize what an important factor it is in life itself. It's what keeps me standing. It's what gives me hope. It's what enables me to believe that this too shall pass, and that the life ahead of me still has tremendous potential for deeper beauty, grace and meaning than I've experienced so far.

And if it took cutting my thumb off with a table saw to get me to realize the power and importance of love in my life, then I guess I'm grateful for that too.

Winding Road, or, So This Is How It's Going To Be

I went to the doctor on Monday to have the bandage removed for the first time since my accident. I knew what to expect, more or less, but I wasn't really prepared for the emotional impact of seeing my mangled stub of a thumb as the nurse unwrapped it.

From a medical standpoint, it looked pretty good. There was no infection, and the stitches had held together well. As far as my layman's brain could tell, the surgeon had done a good job of sewing together the various pieces of skin that wrapped around what was now the end of my thumb. Although the scabbing and stitches and tightly stretched pieces of skin looked pretty gruesome, seeing that stuff wasn't what made my eyes flutter and my head feel dizzy. What really got to me was simply seeing for the first time the stub that would be my left thumb for the rest of my life.

So this is how it's going to be from now on.

The nurse had left the room, leaving me alone to contemplate the meaning of life with nine and a half fingers. After a minute or so, I glanced up and looked through the doorway, where I caught the nurse's eye as she exited another examination room. "Are you okay?" she mouthed, a look of concern on her face. I don't know what exactly she had read in my own face that betrayed my despair. I shrugged and nodded my head.

You know how some people see the highlights of their life-history flash before their eyes during a life-threatening moment? The opposite happened to me. I suddenly saw quick images of my future-life flash before my eyes. I saw little kids looking at my stub of a thumb while standing in line at the grocery store, hiding behind their mother's legs out of fear, while at the same time peeking around, unable to resist the curiosity of it. I saw myself at a keyboard typing, only more slowly and awkwardly than I'd been able to before. I saw grandkids sitting in my lap as I did the old "pull off the end of my thumb" trick, much as I'd seen it dozens of times as Sara and Casey sat in my father-in-law's lap. He's entertained countless kids that way, pretending that he really did pull off the end of his finger, shocking them when he revealed to them his real-life stub of a pinky finger, as if he had just pulled part of it off. His stub was not the result of a table saw accident, but rather the result of having it bitten off by a horse when Dana was just a kid.

I left the doctor's office with just a bandage and a splint on my left thumb, which has already given me much more mobility than I had before. While it still hurts to apply any pressure to my thumb, I can now at least use my other four fingers for typing and other things. Because I can't press my thumb against anything without severe pain, I still can't cut food with a knife and fork, hold something in my left hand, or trim the fingernails on my right hand (Dana kindly did that for me this morning). I imagine that as the pain subsides and the nerves heal over the next few weeks, I'll be able to eventually push against my stub and use it for leverage to do most of those things. I'm hoping that other than looking a little weird aesthetically, eventually my thumb will be almost 100% useful, just a little shorter than before.

Last night, as we watched what I'm sure is at least the 150th episode of Little House on the Prairie that we've watched together as a family, Casey was busy scribbling away in a little journal in between glances at the TV. When the show was over, she handed me a "story" (more like a poem) that she'd written while we'd been watching the show. I couldn't help but be profoundly moved by it, in light of the uncertainty of my life right now, career-wise, writing-wise, faith-wise, and every otherwise. (See my last blog entry, Life Without a Thumbnail). I realize that no one appreciates the creativity of a child as much as the kid's own parent, but I thought I'd share Casey's poem with you just this once as it speaks into where my head is at these days regarding what's next for me.

For me, it's a prayer as much as it is the poem of an eight year old. Here it is:

Winding Road
by Casey Larson

Winding road, winding road, which way to go?
Winding here and over there.
South, North, East, West.
But which way shall I go?
Which way down the path?

Life without a thumbnail (spiritually speaking)

in computer terms, a "thumbnail" is a small graphic that gives the user a chance to preview something before moving ahead. it's a nice feature, to be able to see how something will look before wasting paper printing it or wasting time opening the wrong document or wrong folder.

too bad life doesnt come with thumbnails.

i especially would have appreciated a thumbnail last Sunday morning that would have showed me what things would look like after i executed the next task i was about to undertake. had i seen a thumbnail ahead of time, it would have saved me from seeing my actual thumbnail sitting on my garage floor a few minutes later, separated from the rest of my thumb. (read the gory details in my previous post, below).

we all know that that's just the way life is. shit happens. we get no previews, in spite of how useful they would be and how much needless pain and suffering they would alleviate.

as i think about my life today in terms of how i'm trying to live out my faith in God, i'm struck by the faithlessness that's evident in how badly i crave some kind of spiritual thumbnail showing what's next for me. "give me a sign, God. just a little preview, ok?" we deceive ourselves into believing that seeing a preview would give us the courage and confidence we need to move forward in faith, when in reality seeing a preview would actually eliminate the faith that God wants to see us exercise. of course, the converse can also be true. sometimes if we did see a thumbnail of something beforehand, the harsh reality of what our future was going to look like would probably keep us from moving forward into something that God might really want for us and mean to be a blessing for us.

next month will mark two years since i stepped out of Healing Waters International, the non-profit that dana and i founded in 2002 to try and bring clean drinking water to people in underdeveloped countries. creating, nurturing and growing HWI over the six years i was involved with it was the most rewarding, satisfying and challenging thing i'd ever done in my life. starting HWI out of nothing required an incredible leap of faith on the front side, but the sacrifice had been well worth it, and the experience of having been involved in it was immensely fulfilling.

that being the case, i knew it wouldnt be easy to move on from HWI, but i had no idea how hard it was really going to be. leaving HWI was the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life, professionally or otherwise. if i'd seen a thumbnail ahead of time that showed how difficult it was going to be, i probably wouldnt have had the guts to go forward with it, even though i was quite certain that it was a move that God wanted me to make.

fast forward to today. i've spent the last two years working on a couple of writing projects and an even more ambitious home improvement project. on the home improvement side, we love how the improvements we've made to the fixer-upper we bought in Evergreen turned out, but not being able to sell our old house in Denver put an abrupt end to how far we could take the project. Although we've got great renters in our old house, we now have two mortgages and a substantial pile of home improvement debt looming over us. as far as my writing projects, i'm probably a liitle over half done with the manuscript of the memoir i've been working on, For Love of God and Beer: Adventures of a Schizophrenic Evangelical (to read where i'm going with it, check out www.godandbeer.com). i continue to be excited about the project, and have been motivated by the dozens of messages i've received from complete strangers, other disenfranchised evangelicals who have encouraged me to keep writing and are drawn to the honesty and authenticity with which i'm trying to write my story.

the other book project i'm working on is a novel called The Rain in Buena Vista. just before Christmas, i sent a newly-completed-for-the-fifth-time copy of the manuscript to my agent, Giles, in hope of being able to get something going with that. it's been fifteen years since i first started writing it.

the last two months have been ones of intense prayer and soul-searching over what to do with this next phase of my life. fortunately, dana has a very marketable skillset, and she had a banner year income-wise last year. but with me not contributing much income to the household budget due to my involvement in the writing and home improvement projects, we just barely survived the year financially. dana's starting a new position next week doing the same kind of work she has been doing, although she'll now be doing it working for someone else. while there's great long-term potential in her new job, things will remain tight for us in the short term.

i've been doing some freelance writing work over the last two years to try and supplement what dana's making, but it's not enough. i'm now in a situation of needing to make more money, but not knowing how to go about it. i have about a dozen different ideas for start-up ventures, but no clear direction on which, if any, i should pursue. the ideas run the gamut, from wanting to help donors with their giving to wanting to start an online magazine about faith to wanting to encourage wealthy people to lead the way in living sustainably to starting a brand of clothing using workers in poor countries who are paid a fair wage. on top of all those ideas, i also want to keep working on my own writing, but it won't produce an income for a long time, if ever.

As you can see, i'm in some serious need of some direction, at least vocationally. i've been praying like crazy, hoping that God will reveal what he wants me to do. i've been pursuing leads for jobs that i don't really want to do, recognizing that beggars can't be choosers and i should at least find some kind of way to make an income. but so far none of the jobs has panned out, and all i seem to be getting are closed doors. and then THIS happens (cut to close-up of a severed thumb in a bottle of formaldehyde), cutting my immediate options for employment to practically nothing.

God, what in the world is going on here? can't you please show me what you want me to do? isn't there some kind of sign you can show me? some kind of, i don't know, thumbnail or something?

What Happened (period or question mark)

since i was getting a lot of different questions on facebook about what happened to my thumb, i thought i would use this as an opportunity to start the blog ive long been wanting to write but have been afraid to start due to my fear of being deemed a heretic or, much worse, uninteresting and irrelevant. i figured that sawing my own finger off with a table saw is probably more interesting to read about than most other subjects i might use for a first blog post, so consider this to be my first entry on what is likely to be a very random, thematically diverse and potentially very short-lived blog.

first of all, please excuse the lack of proper punctuation and capitalization. As a newly-rendered one-fingered typist, im intentionally choosing efficiency over perfection.

the short answers to the questions about what happened are:

• i cut about an inch of my thumb off while cutting a piece of shelving on my table saw
• its my left thumb and im right handed, so that's good
• yes, i'll still be able to hold a beer bottle
• no, it didnt spew blood like Dan Akroyd pretending to be Julia Child on SNL
  
• yes, the pain was severe and it still is at times
• yes, this will impede my ability to write for a while
  

for those of you interested in the gory details, here you go.

i was at home alone working in the garage where i was cutting some shelves for the inside of a medicine cabinet. dana and the girls were at church. i had opted to stay home, as i usually do these days (i'll write another post about that later, under the heading of religious anti-establishmentarianism). i had just finished cutting a board and was pulling my hand back toward me when i felt a little tap on my thumb. i looked down expecting to see a small nick and couldnt really make sense at first of what i was looking at. it was red and shredded looking but surprisingly wasnt spewing blood; in fact it wasnt really bleeding at all. it took me a few seconds before i realized "oh, i think i just cut the end of my thumb off." it was surreal.

i remember being confused because there was so little blood anywhere (there were just three drops on the boards i'd just cut - thats it). so for a few seconds i was not sure what to make of it all. but once it sunk in what had happened, i got a little freaked out. i grabbed a big wad of paper towel and applied pressure to the cut and then walked around in circles a few times shooting off a barrage of f-bombs. i then looked around to see if i could find the tip of my thumb. i found it on the garage floor behind me. my thumbnail was still intact on the piece that had been cut off.

i thought about calling my neighbor for help, but then quickly realized that this was serious enough that i probably needed to get some proper medical attention asap. i pulled my cellphone out of my pocket and called 911. the dispatcher dispatched an ambulance and then said she was going to stay on the phone with me until the ambulance arrived. she told me to sit down and keep my left hand elevated. she then asked if i had a ziploc to save the stub. i put the stub in the bag. she then told me to put the bag in some cold water, so i told her i'd need to go in the house to do that. she asked if i felt strong enough to walk and i said i did. i then turned off all the lights in the garage, and was alert enough to also turn off the propane heater i'd been using (i thought i might REALLY look stupid if i not only cut my thumb off but also burned my house down in the same event).

man, this takes forever to type with one finger. and it hurts like hell, too. i can only type for about 15 minutes at a time before the pain becomes so intense that i need to lay down with my hand elevated.

back to the story...

i went in the house, put the ziploc in some cold water and waited at the dining room table for the emt's to arrive. they arrived about 15 mins after i called 911, which, considering i live about 15 mins from the nearest fire station, seemed like they made good time.

the emt dressed my wound and i walked out to the ambulance on my own. by this time the pain was intense. he told me that he would give me some pain meds as soon as he did everything else he needed to do first: get my vitals, hook me up to an IV, get me some oxygen, etc. we were probably 20 mins away from my house in evergreen (a community in the mountains outside of denver) when i finally got the pain meds, and it was excruciating waiting that long. the pain meds made my head a little foggy but my thumb still hurt like crazy. i kept asking for more meds. by the time we arived at the hospital he said he'd given me the maximum dosage of the strongest pain meds he was allowed to give me by law.

they took me to the hospital in denver that they said was the best for doing reattachments. dana's dad, dennis, lives real close to that hospital so i called him and he arrived at the hospital about 5 minutes after i did. the hand surgeon arrived about 20-30 mins later, looked at the wound, and informed me that he wouldnt be able to reattach the part i'd cut off. he said that the arteries on the end of the thumb are so tiny that it's pretty much impossible to tie them up and reconnect everything. i wish i had asked more questions about that but i was in too much of a fog by then to be able to think very well.

dana and the girls arrived a few minutes later. dennis took sara and casey to lunch and dana waited with me. they recommended general anesthesia for the surgery, which i happily agreed to. it took about 45 mins to sew it closed. the cut happened between the thumbnail and the knuckle, and the surgeon said they saved the joint and didnt have to take any more of the bone than the saw had already taken. so it seems, assuming that everything heals ok and with no infection, that i'll end up with a small stub just beyond the joint. all things considered, that's probably a lot better than it could have turned out.

we left the hospital at about 4 pm. i'd placed the call to 911 on my cell at 10:18 am.

lets see, what am i missing? oh yeah, the recovery. my hand is wrapped in a soft cast right now which will stay on until next monday. then i'll go back to the surgeon for him to look at it. that should be a weird unveiling. im not sure what to expect after that but i suspect my left hand will be out of commission for several weeks.

the pain. i have an overall pain that feels like my thumb is wrapped in the wire of an electric fence that is used to keep the horses in the corral. it feels like a constant, electrically-charged pain. the percoset and the other oxycodone med they prescribed me don't seem to alleviate this general pain very much. or maybe, this is what it feels like when the meds are working and it would be much worse without them.

that's kind of the status quo as far as the pain. then from time to time i have shots of really intense pain, like the pain you get when you first stub your toe or when you try to walk on a foot that has fallen asleep and you get a shot of pain that feels like thousands of tiny needles stabbing you all at once.

let's see, what else? thanks to this new limitation of only being able to type with one finger and for only short spells, i probably wont be able to do any paid writing work for a while. dana's just starting a new consulting job next week that will take awhile to ramp up, so things will be a little tight for a couple of months but we should be able to squeak by if things dont get any worse.

thats about all i can think of to report.

thanks for all your messages, calls and prayers. its reassuring to hear from so many of you and to be able to take inventory of how many great friends we have. the humorous comments are most appreciated and so far have done a lot to keep me out of depression and self-pity. ive been able to remain pretty stoic about the whole ordeal so far. im not sure if ill be able to stay this positive or if ill eventually lose it. so far so good.

well, there you have it. ill write more about my thumb later, and eventually will begin to post some entries about my faith that, while unrelated to this one thematically, will probably be as nauseating to some of you as this one was.