Scott Stilson

**Donna: ** Sullivan’s mom would volunteer [in the library] for a Tuesday, but would need to bring Sullivan’s sister. Is that okay?
Mardi: Yep! If she’s anything like Sullivan, she could probably help out too!
Donna: We are a go!

Carla: Are you a thinker or a feeler?
Scott: Well, the facile response would be: duh, I’m a thinker. But I tend to think I’m actually a feeler who is articulate. Just not about feelings.

Scott: So, Sullivan what laws of physics do you know?
Sullivan: Newton’s laws of physics!
Éa: Nudists know all physics?

He’s such a dick! No offense, Scott.

— Carla, c. 2005, while watching The Last of the Mohicans, presumably referring to Magua

Sullivan: Was there a time when doctors recommended smoking?
Carla: Maybe somebody recommended it at some point, I don’t know.
Scott: Certainly not since the ’50s.
Sullivan: The ’50s haven’t even come yet, people!
Scott: We’re talking about the 1950s, Sullivan.

Your bellybutton looks a bit like Moshulu’s butt.

— Sullivan, comparing Scott’s navel to our calico’s anus

Scott [after Carla suffers a seemingly neverending sneeze attack]: What is your body trying to get rid of?
Carla [sniffling]: My face.

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you that it was a day I remembered that chills had suggested back in January that I start building a habit of singing new songs to God.

As I revisited Psalm 33, where I had found the chills about singing new songs and becoming skilled at making music to You, I found some other new things:

• “No king is saved by the great size and power of his army; a mighty man is not delivered by much strength. A horse is devoid of value for victory; neither does he deliver any by his great power,” i.e., I’m not going to find salvation by having the whole Internet at my disposal, and it’s not the heaviest intellects that get God. So give it up.
• “Let Your mercy and loving-kindness, O Lord, be upon us, in proportion to our waiting and hoping for You”—uh oh, I haven’t been setting my hope on You, now, God, now have I? I felt a little ashamed.

You know what Miss Leigh calls a picture? “Pitcher.” Picture. Pitcher. She’s a very complicated woman.

— Éa, on a quirk of her teacher’s pronunciation

As I read these healing stories from gate A22 a few minutes ahead of boarding for Las Vegas, it occurs to me that there is a singular inner focus I can carry in life that will make for healing prayers and acts of mercy and friendliness and whatever good and God I can do: keep the foot washing in mind.

These are the first four lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” (1803). I encountered them at the Desert Botanical Gardens on solo mini-spur stroll while visiting with Jessica and Brooklyn. I take it as an exhortation to view God not only in the supernatural, but also in the natural.

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you that it was the day Sullivan and Éa enjoyed their first feature-length film: the delightful-in-concept-and-execution Monsters, Inc. We watched it at the Peters’ house after church because Josh and his new girlfriend Esther were watching it. They kids sat on our laps most of the time. Carla provided some commentary and educational questions for the kids along the way to help them process.

I’m sitting 33,000 miles in the air thinking as I read Andrew Murray’s The Master’s Indwelling about sitting across a mountainous slice of warm, fresh gingerbread and brandy sauce with my beautiful Carla at The Tavern. And I am grateful. But I am also struck with this thought: if I want to live with a deeper sense of God, a better set of relationships, and a more fulfilling life lived in humility and love, I would do well to die to my agendas, drop my distracting thoughts, make eye contact, and give my undivided attention to whomever is addressing me.

I very much look forward to reestablishing more such face time with Carla, my love, my foil, my friend, above all. Perhaps the same applies to my relationship—whatever that means—with God.

I hope this week to scratch out time to plan a getaway with Catla that includes something similar to the gingerbread. It will be our first such getaway since Sullivan was born. (I had planned one in Cape May last autumn, but Éa had...

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you that it was the day when Matt Rooke and Carla began work on widening the doorway between our living room and kitchen by doing some demolition and moving the electrical. I mention it because it was the beginning of something Carla had been looking forward to doing for a few years now, having been unable to resist opening the famous “hole in the wall” (to be fair, she did ask permission from me) in a lull of home improvement spending between when we sprang for our first 4K of solar panels and when we had Envinity install new windows. She was getting itchy back then, and it was my dad who suggested that if she wanted to widen the doorway, the first step would be to open an exploratory hole to discern where the electrical wires went.

It was our first foster care home study, which was to happen on February 2, that prompted us get beyond the hole-in-the-wall stage moving on this project now. You...

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you that it was a day that featured an evening in which I struggled to understand how I am to know firsthand that God is loving and faithful as David writes if I can’t sense Him. And then I remembered: He works in me to will and to act according to His good pleasure. He is at work and He is good and He will even bring us from glory to glory, as I used to repeat in years past. Even if I can’t see Him, He is at work in me and in the world.

It was also a day when I spent most of my workday—and therefore a good chunk of vacation time—applying my very slow, barely conscious financial brain to hashing out nuances in the way we handle our finances. All so that I could figure out what to do when my parents give money toward the kids’ long-term or college savings and so that I could give Carla a better idea of what balances we can expect in our various savings accounts at the end of the year. It was an...

Dad! In heaven, I bet that don’t have any rifles.

— Sullivan, without prompting, while being towed along through Spring Creek Park on a snow saucer

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you today was a day I realized that I’m not entirely pleased with the way I was governing my life. What I mean to say is that over the preceding few years the combination of Carla’s resistance to routinizing our relationship and my proclivity toward systems and routine has resulted in predictably relationship-free evenings: Carla curls up on the couch with her computer to watch a show, browse Facebook, and record the days, and I pursue my own agenda, usually on my computer as well.

(I speak in hyperbole that Carla would object to.)

What I was missing was a mindfulness of You that allowed me to transcend both my reliance on systems and enter sympathy, relatability, good listening, peace, and love. I resolved that day to, by God’s grace, no longer proceed through life with blinders on for getting things done, but to think of others, to enter into their skin, to respond lovingly, to allow room in my attention for impulses that are unrelated to accomplishment.

Attributing the healing miracles I’m reading about in Eric Metaxas’ Miracles to rare, poorly understood, completely undivine, powerful psychosomatics because one has to avoid confirmation bias is like remaining agnostic about the origin of a love letter left for me in Carla’s handwriting with her signature on it. If it’s in her handwriting and name, it’s rational to conclude that she wrote it. Similarly, if these miracles happened in the name of Jesus, it’s rational to conclude that Jesus did them. Is it possible that some purely natural, impersonal set of biological and psychological forces combined to make these healings happen? Yes, just like it’s possible that I forged the hypothetical love letter subconsciously out of a desire to be loved by Carla. Do I have any explanatory mechanism that is more powerful than to attribute the healings to God and the love letter to Carla? No, not even close. Does it seem overly skeptical to withhold conclusions about the origin of a miracle when it happens in Jesus’ name and has no great natural explanation because science might someday understand what is happening? In many cases, such as in the cases of these stories, yes.

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you three, which I’d be allowed to do because they’re all related and happened within the same twenty-minute period at bedtime:

1. I read several stories from Love Letters From God, a recent gift from my mother, to Sullivan and Éa freely by their request and without trepidation, demonstrating and substantiating that I was not as apprehensive about talking about God with them as I had been in the recent past because of my doubt,
2. I was unashamed to cast the Old-Testament stories from this book as possibly fiction, demonstrating that I’ve become unafraid of a non-literal interpretation of much of Scripture, and
3. I shared, upon request, some of the miracles I had heard about from friends in recent months (the story of Krista speaking Mandarin plus her brief account of seeing an eyeless man grow eyes) and one or two stories from Eric Metaxas’ Miracles, which I’d been reading after my mother gave the...

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you that to my recollection, last night was the first night I puked since I was sixteen years old. Thank you, James!

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you that Matt and Lara were good friends of ours, and they proved it yet again by coming over this evening and Matt helping Carla figure out what to do about the hole she had made in the kitchen wall two years prior in hopes of someday widening the doorway putting a pocket door or barn door in. We needed to get moving on something because having a hole in the wall with exposed electrical wires was a no-no for folks wanting to get into foster parenting. Lara did the dishes and prepared one of the two pizzas we scarfed for dinner (along with some beer from Otto’s—a rare sighting in the Stilson house). The Rookes also proved good neighbors in general: Matt helped me shovel out neighbor Janet’s driveway when her snowblower wouldn’t start.

I’m currently dissatisfied with my evenings. Maybe I just need to rush through the bedtime routine so that I have more discretionary time? Maybe it’s as simple as journaling a pick of the day only when I feel like I have something to journal.

It makes sense that if I’ve spent all day working on stuff and getting things done that I had preconceived to get done that I then spend some time in relaxation and recuperation. Part of the problem is that I don’t fully engage with what I’m doing when the kids are around. I have a slight feeling of guilt when I pursue something other than them.

If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you it was a day we had our 71-year-old neighbor Janet Donald join us for chicken pot pie dinner. It wasn’t the first time we’d had her over for dinner; it was probably about the twelfth. But this time, as we enjoyed her company, I thought once or twice about how she, being seventy-one years old, will likely die while Sullivan and Éa, how she’d probably beat Carol, Sully, and my dad to death’s door and thus be the closest person yet to our kids to die when that time comes.

What benefit, these thoughts? Not much. Except to say I hope to fill our days in part with loving Janet well in her twilight years.

Naturalist scientists don’t seem to understand that we people of faith aren’t looking for predictable, reproducible patterns in nature like they are. We don’t exclude all but that which is empirically observable from our account of reality. We are people of the anomalies.

Remembering this will help me keep the weed of anti-supernaturalism out of the garden of my mind.

Jesus went out from there and came into His hometown; and His disciples followed Him. When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue; and the many listeners were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things, and what is this wisdom given to Him, and such miracles as these performed by His hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?” And they took offense at Him. Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.” And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief.

— Mark 6:1-6, emphasis mine

I read the above excerpt this evening in a renewed effort to understand who You are, God, as revealed in Jesus. I typed, “God might wonder at our unbelief,” and I realized You might be wondering at my unbelief. I am, in a...