Adoption Update: January 2025

Enough of my friends and acquaintances have asked me lately how the adoption process is going that I decided to write this up. That way, if you don’t know, it’s your own fault and not mine!

The basics first, to forestall any excitement—we are still waiting and have not matched with anyone. But I thought I would take the opportunity to describe a little bit about the modern process of adoption for those of you who don’t know. That way you’ll better know what to look for, and how to pray for the folks in your life in our situation.

ADMMXXIV Retrospective

 And so we bid farewell to the Year of Our Lord 2024. It was an interesting year, a unique year. Dare I say there will never be its like again.

Photo by me. You can't have it unless you ask nicely.

It was not a banner year for the Goode household, but it wasn't the kind that you wince when somebody names, either. 2024 is like that one friend we all have that we don't remember to even think about until he appears across the room at the party and waves. A good fellow, but not very flashy.

So this little retrospective will contain nothing more earth-shattering than normal life. Of course Chesterton would remind us (were he here) that there is nothing less normal than normal life. For is it not in the everyday round of sleep, meals, germs, fellowship, work, and food that immortal souls are forged? So let's work through some areas where God was doing some forging.

Sixteen Pounds of Orange Juice

I can only imagine what the passing motorists thought.

It was one of those moments that really makes you wish thought bubbles from comic strips were real. Here I am, striding up the sidewalk in my Sunday best, bright yellow shirt; a straw fedora; a bright red tie that would do credit to Donald Trump; my cane  stuck in my belt like a sword because I don’t have a free hand, and a giant bottle of Cook’s Brut champagne swinging in each fist.

I’m guessing the dominant thought bubble would have been something along the lines of “???”

I can’t blame them. I have moments where I wonder why I thought this was a good idea myself. Champagne bottles weigh a lot more on the latter end of a mile-and-a-half walk than they do at the beginning. Seventy pounds apiece, at least. Who keeps feeding these things?

Don’t worry, my Baptist friends: I was not strolling home from church with massive amounts of alcohol. Actually, they were full of orange juice.

(Honest.)

It came about innocently enough. We were having a special farewell party for the family of one of the deacons, who were moving to San Diego. There were bagels with various cream cheeses. There were mimosas (almost a necessity if you are having to move to San Diego, in my opinion). There was fruit. [It was supposed to go on the bagels or in the mimosas, but most of the kids just shoveled it in plain. By the handful. I’m sure their mothers were all delighted with the state of their clothes later.] And when it was all over, there was far too much orange juice; somebody’d totally miscalculated the ratio, in a blatant failure of hard-learned eighth-grade math skills.

But, being a highly skilled scrounging bachelor, this was cause for rejoicing. “Would you like to take some of this orange juice home? We have too much.”

Would I? [Millennials, insert crafty-looking emoji with sunglasses here]

But there was a catch. The orange juice had all been made from frozen concentrate and mixed in situ. There were no containers. How would I get it home? Why, in one of those empty champagne bottles littering the table, of course. How clever of me. A twist of plastic wrap around the top, and we’re ready to roll. On second thought, I’ll take two; one can never have too much orange juice.

Wait, second catch. I walked here this morning because it was 68 degrees in early July and sunny and glorious. Could I walk back a mile and a half carrying three liters of orange juice in glass bottles? I hefted one. Totally doable. I’m still relatively young and hearty, even if I don’t ever work out!

Halfway up the long hill back to town my wrists are starting to cramp and I’m realizing that plastic wrap has very little friction, especially when you wrap it around the smooth neck of a glass champagne bottle. And for some reason the old song “Sixteen Tons” won’t quit running through my head, edited to fit the situation:

You load sixteen pounds, and whatd’ya get?

Another day older and deeper in sweat

This OJ’s a-fallin’ but I can’t go:

I’m stuck on a hill where the goin’ is slow...

It probably does weigh sixteen pounds, I think. I wonder how all the speed-walkers with the weights manage to do this. No plastic wrap for starters. I pass an old man going the other way and expect a question, or at least a raised eyebrow. Nope, nothing. He’s obviously lived in this Pacific Northwest college town for far too long for this to qualify as weird. I set the bottles down to wait at the traffic light and flex my fingers. The break feels amazing. Isn’t that just like the Christian life, I muse. We Western Christians expect life to be like a normal Sunday walk: long periods of sunshine and light breezes interspersed with a few brief hard bits, trials to keep us from being too comfortable. But the sermon series is on Acts this summer, and Paul’s life seems far more like today’s walk—long periods of pain and struggle and uphill climb broken by brief moments of blessed relief, when God is near.

But the rest breaks are not the end of the journey. They can’t be, you’ve got sixteen pounds of free orange juice to haul before it spoils in the afternoon heat. The breaks aren’t when you roll over and camp out, they’re when you thank God, your muscles unclamp, and you pop your neck and get ready for the next quarter-mile stretch. It was a good reminder for when I’m going through the dry spells of life, when little seems to be going right and family, friends—even God—seem far away. I can just hear Him chuckling gently in my ear, “Keep going, kid. Anybody can carry this burden another hundred yards, you’re getting close! (At the end there’s free orange juice.)” 

My apartment looked really good as I crossed the last parking lot. One of the bottles had slopped a little bit thirty yards back, and if you thought plastic wrap on glass was slippery, try wet plastic wrap! Not to mention I’d had a few mimosas too many back at the church...

Out of agony-born curiosity, I did actually weigh the bottles on the bathroom scale before I slipped them in the fridge. The needle read approximately fourteen pounds.

It lieth. Definitely sixteen, at least. Besides, fourteen doesn’t work in the song as well.

A Plane Old Day

Wwwwwwwrrrrrrrrroooooooowwwwwww!

Can anything equal the sound of an Allison V-12 engine roaring by?

Well, maybe the sound of a Rolls-Royce Merlin or a Pratt and Whitney.  But all three at once? Unsurpassable.

(On second thought, a deep-toned steam train whistle is probably better. But I digress.)

Little bitty Lewiston, Idaho isn’t known for much these days. Ask residents of the town where I live, and their first thoughts of the city to the south will mention two things: the Lewiston Grade (beautiful winding climb in the summer, nightmare of Route 95 in the winter) and the stink of the Clearwater Paper plant that pervades downtown.

But it does have an airport. And this weekend, the tiny Nez Perce County aerodrome has a bunch of propellers all over it. The annual "Radials 'n' Rivers" event brings a score or more of prop planes to town, and I went down Saturday to see some vintage craft. There were the usual trainers, a bunch of biplanes, an old chrome-colored passenger plane. But the cream of the crop? The World War II machines: most of the major land-based American craft of that conflict were represented, and all of them airworthy!

I started the event by pulling Red into the grassy overflow parking and sauntering past the long line for the shuttles. The runways were literally on the other side of the fence. What could they possibly need shuttles for? Besides, I needed the exercise. I got it, too; it turns out the planes were all parked on the apron on the far side of the runways,  so that a two-mile loop around the end was needed—and the beautiful, partly-cloudy, 80-plus degree day meant that would be a bit of a sweaty trip. Thankfully, a church acquaintance driving by offered a ride in the back of his truck. I love small towns!

On arrival at the apron, my first choice was to join a stretching, sinuous line to climb inside the great workhorse of WWII—the B-17 Flying Fortress. Carrying a crew of ten, thirteen .50-caliber machine guns and up to 8,000 pounds of bombs, this was the plane that flew deep into Nazi territory during daylight hours to destroy factories and other strategic targets. If you’ve ever watched any amount of documentary footage from WWII, I am certain you’ve seen at least one B-17. The inside was cramped, particularly the foot-wide walkway through the bomb bay—the portly gentleman ahead of me nearly became a permanent addition to the plane. But he squirmed through and I got this lovely shot out one of the waist guns.

Next was the B-24—the Liberator. A slightly smaller bomber than her more famous cousin, the B-17, she had a greater range and was adapted to far more uses, from antisubmarine warfare to cargo transport over the Himalayas. Her bomb bay catwalk was even narrower—a mere nine inches wide. Actor Jimmy Stewart flew 20-plus missions as a B-24 pilot in Europe.

A Mitchell B-25 was also out on the apron, but they had it fired up and running rides for the spectators, at the rate of $450 dollars for a half-hour trip. Would have been tempting if I was independently wealthy.

But the highlight of the day was at 1430, when the all the fighters present were put in the air for a grand fly-by. Two P-40 Warhawks (one of our early fighters), two P-51 Mustangs (late war long-range fighters), and the only surviving airworthy P-47 Thunderbolt, the Dottie Mae.

The Dottie Mae has a fascinating story. On May 8^th, 1945—V-E Day—she was being flown in the Alps to drop leaflets on an Allied prisoner of war camp, letting them know that ground troops were on the way to liberate it. The pilot misjudged his altitude above a clear mountain lake and crashed into it, making the Dottie Mae the last aircraft lost in the European theater. (The pilot jumped out after it hit and was saved by two Austrian girls--in a canoe.) For seventy years, it lay at the bottom of the lake in over two hundred feet of water. In 2005, an expedition financed by an American WWII vet found it and raised it, and after a ten-year restoration (most of the missing parts had to be made by hand) it now flies once again—its original pilot was even on hand to witness the inaugural flight. This air festival was only the third time it had been flown publicly. Its Pratt and Whitney engine (the same one used in the Navy’s Hellcats and Corsairs) had a noticeably lower, smoother tone than the other fighters flying today. Nicknamed “Jugs” due to their milk-bottle shape, the P-47 carried eight machine guns and could load a few bombs as well, making it a favorite ground-interdiction fighter. They took out trains, trucks, or other treetop-level targets.
The planes flew by individually at first, then in groups, and finally did a few passes with all five in formation. And the sound of those engines roaring by in unison is something I hope I won’t forget.

Then it was time for the long walk back around, the drive home (during which I picked up an exquisite Papa John’s pizza for only eight bucks—thanks, junk mail coupons!), and a relaxed evening of watching old documentary footage of those planes in their service period.

Plainly, a good old Saturday, indeed.

Antepenultimate

I’m guessing most of you, if you’re old enough, remember a day that you realized that your life was different than you planned.

And I don’t just mean at the end of the week, when you realize you haven’t made it to the grocery store again. I mean the big stuff. You’ve dreamed your whole life up to now of doing something: seeing the pyramids, being an astronaut, buying that certain car, marrying that girl, making that amount of salary. And then one day, you realize that you probably—or certainly—never will. That’s just not the way your life can go now. You missed the turn. Whether through active choices or passive ones, you wound up at this little spot on the map of your life that reads YOU ARE HERE.

I had one of those days recently. I took a look at one of my dreams and noticed that if I’d really wanted that, I should have made a different choice or two (or ten) half a decade ago. It’s a little late now.

This may be what they call a mid-life crisis. If it is, I hit it early (just like my birth.) Or I’m only going to live into my fifties. (Either is quite possible, if you think about it.)

And these missed turns on the road of your life don’t generally come along on sunny days as you travel a bucolic byway beneath a few wooly clouds and flash a grin at the flabbergasted bunnies by the culvert. You’d notice then. They come in the sleet storms, thieving fingers of wind striving to steal your hat from your head and breath from your lungs, two raindrops tickling coldly down the back of your neck. You haven’t seen the sun for days, it seems, and even God is silent when you stop to ask for directions.

To change the metaphor, it’s like living in a novel.  There comes a point in every good story when things get hard and dangerous, wild and wooly. The hero goes down for the count (and it’s usually his own fault). And if you’re not one of those heretics who skip to the end of the book first, you almost don’t want to keep reading; because there is no way under heaven it’s going to turn out like you hope it will. The sea pours into the dike. The plane’s engines start to cough. Edmund heads off with the White Witch. Frodo lies still under the cliffs of Cirith Ungol. Bigwig is in the wire. David stares at Uriah with fear and frustration and murder in his heart. Adam grasps a fruit in desperation.

God hangs on a cross.

One of my favorite words as a ten-year-old was antepenultimate. (æn.ti.pəˈnʌl.ti.mət) It’s Latin based, an adjective, and basically means “the thing before the thing before the last thing.” For example, Thursday is the antepenultimate day of the week. The twenty-ninth is the antepenultimate day of July. And after the antepenultimate, comes the penultimate. In a good novel, you have at least one antepenultimate build-up, a penultimate crisis, and the final, crashing resolution. In a really good one, you have several.

In one sense, all of human life is the Antepenultimate. From the first squalling breath to the last shuddering gasp, every son of Adam and daughter of Eve lives in the crisis. We ride the shock waves, travel the journeys, and generally wind up nowhere near where we wanted to go ten years ago. If we had known our current destinations a decade ago, we’d be terrified, disappointed, or both; no matter how good (or terrible) it would seem. We’d probably be so worried about how to achieve (or miss) this spot on the map that we’d freeze. It’s not really good to know that you’re in the crisis part of the novel as a character...it tends to chill the blood.

And wherever you wind up, eventually comes the greatest crisis. Death, the Penultimate Event. If you cross that bridge, your GPS has no way to recalculate your route. One way only.

But then you reach your Ultimate (in both senses) destination. And once you’ve made it there, the route you’ve taken—missed side roads, exits, gas stations, and all—will make perfect sense. It will, literally, be the only road you could have taken to get Home. You climb out of the car, stretch, and grin in sheer, tension-melting relief.

Made it.

Remember that the next time you missed a turn.

New Years, Old Years, and Jet Skis

My pastor challenged me yesterday. He mentioned that the divide between the old year and the new was a good time to take stock of what you’ve achieved (or failed to achieve) during your last trip around the sun—and what you expect to get out of the next one.

Man, I hate it when he does that.

See, by preference, I’m a drifter. I prefer my achievements to float up in front of me like logs on the flume ride at Six Flags—dead center and obvious, get on if you want, no pressure, it’s nice and slow. If I don’t manage to catch that particular one, there’s always another one arriving with a small splash about thirty seconds later. There's only one channel to ride. No failures. No missed opportunities. No regrets.

But I got challenged to a retrospective. And if you look back at last year—really look—my life looked less like a log ride and more like piloting a jet ski through some tricky sandbars during a glowingly thick fog... on the ocean.

Heeeere we go! Full steam ahead, sixty minutes an hour, seven days a week, and oh, yeah, the brakes don’t work so great anymore. Yes, I have a partial map, but with the wind, and the spray, and the fact that I can only see about six feet in front of me... I think I missed a few turns. Scraped some paint off the bottom. One of the gauges is cracked. I might have wound up in entirely wrong part of the ocean—it’s hard to tell. There’s too many drops clinging to my crooked glasses to see much of anything.

All water looks alike at half an inch.

Okay, the metaphor ran away from me... just like last year. In retrospect: I really didn’t mean to wind up in this chair at this moment, I had other plans. I was going to have a different roommate, be dating a really nice girl, have way more money in the bank, and probably no longer be working a full-time graveyard shift during school. Oh, and I was going to be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay holier. The complaining and the envy and the slothfulness—gone. I was going to be God’s perfect child by now.

(I’m picturing the Father smirking behind his hand, like you do when your two-year old announces that she is going to cook breakfast “all by herself!” Sure, kid. Knock yourself out. Just don’t put your spoon in the microwave with the Fruit Loops.)

Did I have a banner year? Not really. I’m still single. I’m still mildly in debt and clawing my way above the poverty line. I never made the dean’s list in school (of course, I never really planned to). I sinned against a bunch of people, complained to a bunch more, and was only as holy as I had to be most of the time. Depressing, isn’t it? (Maybe I actually crashed the jet ski...)

But perspective is everything. It wasn’t a bad year, either. I’m still in one piece, relatively healthy, and making enough money to eat with, which is more than a lot of folks can say. I got to watch my old roommate trade me out for a fantastic wife. I’m learning great and wonderful things with a bunch of joyful and reliable Christian people, day in and day out. I have a pastor who gives me challenges (that hopefully lead to far more than blog posts!). I have reliable friends. I have a great, enormous family. And I have a whole year ahead to give it another shot. So what if I’m dripping wet? I’m in the water, where I’m supposed to be.

Where will I be a year from now? God only knows. Possibly still in this chilly chair, single, with a different pesky roommate and more gnarly, tangled sins than anybody but Christ could count. But maybe not. After all, if you’d told me four years ago that I’d be sitting here, I’d have laughed you out of the room.

So here’s to Anno Domini MMXVIII. In prospect (can I do that?): This year I hope to pay senior year down, begin to pay off my loans, be the best friend I can be to my pals, write a lot more, read a lot more, come up with a senior thesis, and not get any more cavities. And, shoot, maybe find a date. And while we’re at it, I hope those close to me can look back and say, “Wow, James, you’ve really grown more godly this year.” Feel free to hold me to that.

Toss me the keys to the jet ski. It’s time to climb back on.

Heroes

Behold, the fit is on me. Bystanders beware, for I must write.

My intention is over the next few weeks to do a series of posts on my heroes. These may come from fiction, history, or acquaintances, and will be ranked in no particular order. My guess is that you, dear reader, may learn a little bit about me. Perhaps I may as well. We become like what we worship, and in this case, I believe we become like what we respect (or spend time with) as well.

My hope is that I choose to become like those who are worth following. A fellow whose hero is Josef Stalin is going to turn out different from one who idolizes FDR or Lincoln, who again is going to be different from one who loves John Adams. What you chase determines often where you wind up. And with the pervasive influence of media in our culture, a fictional role model can be just as important as a historical.

This seems worthy of a post in itself. But for now… on to our first hero.

Optimus Prime

Stats

Classification: Hero of Fiction (TV)

Appearance: 18-wheeler truck cab/giant red and blue robot

Origin: First in Transformers, 1984.
Skills: Leadership, wisdom, tactics, history, hand-to-hand combat, and a mean driver to boot.

Defining Moment: “Orion Pax, Part 3” “Alpha/Omega” (Transformers: Prime S2)

He’s first because he inspired this series of posts, and also because he is probably the biggest. He is, after all, an 18-wheeler truck a large part of the time. Hailing from 1984, born of the desire of some American and Japanese businessmen to sell toys, he has since become THE face of a hugely popular franchise. Multiple cartoon series, big budget hours-long explosions… I mean, Michael Bay films, and yes, toys. The version of Optimus that inspires me, though, comes from one of my two favorite cartoons of all time—Transformers Prime. And if you’re one of those people that think cartoons are for little kids, think again. This series is amazing—and often more adult than you’re expecting.

Optimus is the ultimate selfless leader—wise, patient, brave, and trusting to a fault. And millennia of combat have made him one of the few warriors that can stand a chance one-on-one with the big bad himself, Megatron. He won’t fight unless all the other options are exhausted, but if he does, run—the Big Guy packs quite a punch. He puts himself, and his team, on the line for humanity when they cannot do so themselves, and is content with anonymity—a robot in disguise. Sound familiar?

Great Moment: Optimus Prime is probably best encapsulated in the episode “Alpha/Omega,” where he and his nemesis battle wielding weapons that could destroy cities with ease. Megatron, ever the egocentric motormouth, pointedly observes that “At last we take our rightful places, Optimus—as gods!” He calmly replies, “I am but a humble soldier, Megatron, and you are the victim of your own twisted delusions!”

And of course, much credit goes to one of the great masters of voice acting, Peter Cullen, who can make anything sound cool, from the famed command “Autobots, roll out!” to great epic usages of epimone like this:

“I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message: Though we did not choose to be of Earth, it would seem that we are here to stay. If you approach this planet with hostile intent, know this: we will defend ourselves. We will defend humanity. We will defend—our home.”

Okay, and this picture just 'cause I'm proud of it and it's cool...