PicoBlog

I wrote about Nikola Jokić and the comments he made after Game 5 of the NBA Finals for Mockingbird. Here’s a taste:

So there’s Nikola Jokić, the best basketball player on the planet. He’s standing on the court of Ball Arena in Denver, Colorado, being interviewed by ESPN’s Lisa Salters just moments after he and his Denver Nuggets defeated the Miami Heat to win the NBA Finals. The confetti is just starting to fall for Denver’s first championship in its 50-year franchise history. The gravity of the moment is just beginning to sink in and Salters looks up at Jokić, asking him how it feels to be an NBA champion.

“It’s good, it’s good,” he says without a smile. His voice is even, if contented. He’s looking at the floor, as if he had just been asked how he liked his morning coffee. Then he looks at Salters. “The job is done, we can go home now.”

And then he looks up. Not at the camera. Just kinda up and away, if only for a moment, and there’s this look of relief mingled with joy in his big, blue Serbian eyes. It’s as if he’s looking toward home. The hint of a smile creeping at the edges of his mouth. Salters laughs and congratulates him, surprised at such a… well, what kind of response is this, exactly?

You can read the whole thing here.

I’m doing my best to bring up my kids in the way they should go, so the whole family stayed up to watch the Nuggets win their first NBA title in the franchise’s history. It was a special moment. Doubly special because it all happened about 45 miles from where we live.

The game ends, we’re high-fiving and jumping around the living room, then we quiet down when the broadcast cuts to Salters’s interview with Jokić. And then he delivers the “we can go home now” line and I think I laughed, but I think I also sat there, stunned and even a little moved by what I had just heard.

In my piece for Mockingbird, I note how subversive this comment is. Especially given that Jokić’s life has basically played out like an inspirational sports movie. He has literally gone from rags to riches, and at the biggest moment of his career—and one of the biggest moments in recent NBA history—all he can think to say is that he’s ready to go home:

This is not something NBA superstars are supposed to say. This is not something one of the most recognizable and celebrated sports celebrities in the world is supposed to say. It’s not what we expect any sports superstar to say.

It’s something a hobbit would say.

Yes, I’ve had hobbits on my mind a lot lately. But how else to explain the mystery that is Nikola Jokić but by comparing him to halflings from the Shire? His temperament, disposition, and way of inhabiting the world is the same as Frodo Baggins or Samwise Gamgee and all the rest. They’re willing to do the jobs they’ve been given, to wander the world performing historic, never-been-done before deeds—which is harder, destroying the One Ring or posting the first 30-20-10 triple double in NBA Finals history? But they are completely disinterested in power and glory and riches. They’d rather be home, tending their garden… or their horses.

Thanks for reading. And go Nuggets.

Another reason why Jokic’s comments resonated with me: I had forgotten that Lindsey and I were in the middle of reading The Hobbit to James when our girls were placed with us.

This process, then, is hard for reasons you see coming but can’t do anything about. The girls’ county case manager and their guardian ad litems (court-appointed attorneys) are required to see the girls in their new home within 24 hours of being placed. We knew they’d be coming the afternoon the girls arrived. We knew it’d be crazy. About 20 minutes after the foster parents dropped off the girls and left, the case manager and one of the attorneys showed up. We had told James that they were coming over, but the arrival of the case manager especially triggered James. Before his adoption was finalized, he often talked about wanting his case manager to stop visiting. So here was a new case manager. All those forgotten, trauma-fueled feelings of insecurity and fear of losing his home and parents and siblings came pouring out. Even after the case manager left, James had a rough night. He was fearful and almost inconsolable when we tried to put the girls to bed first, even after explaining to him that bedtimes would be a little different.

So there we were, a family of five. A home in transition. Imagine moving and giving birth to kids with fully formed personalities at the same time, and you have an idea of where Lindsey and I were emotionally and mentally.

James, by God’s grace, calmed down. We read a couple pages of The Hobbit. (James loves it. We just arrived in Lake-town.) Everyone was in bed a little after 10 p.m. Deep breath.

A couple of days before the girls arrived, I asked Lindsey, “Are you scared?”

“I’m 15 percent terrified,” she said.

I don’t know what percent of terrified I felt as I got ready for bed [that] night, but I know that I had more than one Bilbo-like moment where I wished for the comforts and familiarity of the life I had recently left behind. . . .

Flannery O'Connor observed that "grace changes us and the change is painful." It is a grace that we have been given an instant family. It is a grace that Lindsey and I have daughters. It is a grace that James has sisters. It is a grace to be on this adventure. God has been kind. Prayers are being answered. The most interesting things happen on the other side of our comfort zone.

But receiving an instant family is not all May sunshine and pony rides, as Bilbo found out. He ran out the door scared and unprepared. The girls came to our door scared and unprepared; Lindsey and I were at least 15 percent scared and unprepared. There is pain here. Christian Wiman wrote that "every experience is dyed with [sorrow's] color," and that "even in moments of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow." These seams "make joy the complete experience that it is."

Instant family

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September 19, 2018

I’m happy the Nuggets won. I’m also really happy when the Golden State Warriors win. And more often than not over the last several years, the Warriors have been present during some truly monumental life moments:

Five years. Five different kids. Five Finals appearances by the Warriors. This might seem like an odd way to remember and categorize life's monumental seasons. And while it is true that the Warriors being in the NBA Finals for five straight years is not the only (or weightiest) source of constancy over this timeline, their presence has still been a kind of grace in my life.

God does not leave us comfortless. He does not spit us out into this world without means to make sense of it, to see him, to track our time, to organize our days, to recognize landmarks, to set up monuments made of physical stuff. Seasons matter. Cultural artifacts – like NBA Finals – matter. These are all gifts from him to help us walk the roads we’ve been given, to help ground us in this world of thunderstorms and blizzards and scraped knees and broken hearts. . . .

It’s all a theater, and it's all pointing to him. The good and the bad. The wins and the losses. The certainties and the uncertainties. It’s all there to help us. Only if we have eyes to see and hands to receive it. Even something like basketball qualifies as help. It’s not a distraction; it’s not fluff. As the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.”

The Golden State Warriors and the faithful presence of God

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June 14, 2019

It’s June. June is special. June is a memory. Here’s a poem I wrote a while back about that fullness (and what it smells like).

In June the honey locusts begin to breathe,
and their breath smells like June should smell,
a multitude of scented, contented sighs,
the air infused with the perfume of their pollen.

But once in Moab in mid May, the honey locusts
there were so talkative that at first I thought
the rocks themselves were speaking,
sweating this fragrance of sound.

Then I looked along the banks of the Colorado
and overheard the gathered canopy whisper
motes of wisdom to the desert air,
floating beyond senses and understanding.

What I’m saying is that June is more a memory
than a month, and you can recall it anywhere,
– in the desert of your past
or even in the future as you stand

on the banks of an irrigation ditch
watching the grass wimple in the nut-brown current
like a school of glowing, yellow-green fish
that, even while underwater, can see how the air must taste.

Thanks for reading.

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