"What a Piece of Work Is Man"

I am the king of my castle. This is not to say that I rule over my wife and children. On the contrary, my wife probably has much more power than I do. I am a king in the ceremonial monarch sense of the word, where I don’t accomplish much, and I wander around like I own the place – scratching my belly, belching, and engaging in various levels of slothfulness. I am actually quite a sight to behold, when I am in that state. I am shocked that my wife is actually able to keep her hands off of me, when I am revealed in my glory. My home is my refuge and place of rest. I work a full time job and pastor a church. I need that kind of down time.

A few days ago, I had just come home, and I was going to mow the lawn. I needed to change into some shorts and an old t-shirt from my office clothes. The shorts were in the laundry room, so I went to get them. I made my way across the house past the 100+ pound black lab and into the laundry room. I looked through the baskets there for my shorts.

Here is a little side note of interesting filler information to enhance the depth and quality of the story: We love to do laundry. We wash clothes all the time, even nightly. With 3 kids and dog hair and dirt and all that, it is essential that our washer and dryer run all the time. It’s almost to the point that if the washer or dryer stop, the kids will wake up. That’s a sample of how much we have embraced laundry as a family. Putting the stuff in the machines and watching the clothes be tossed all about, we love. We are very simple folks in that way. Folding clothes and putting them away, not so much. At any given time we have a laundry basket in the laundry room full of clean clothes literally up to my neck that my wife has balanced with the grace and skill of a circus performer. She has a gift of building towers of clothes like no one I’ve ever seen. We just simply hate folding clothes. We love to go to work or church with clean but horribly wrinkled clothing, because we also love to live out of laundry baskets all the time. The clothes often never hit the dresser drawers in our rooms. They come out of the basket, get worn, go back into the hamper, then return to the washer. It is a cyclic merry-go-round from Hell, and I want to get off!

So, coming back to the story, I spent 20 minutes digging through this tower of clothing, like I’m engaged in some kind of surreal, life-sized game of Jenga, where the cost of failure is my life. If the tower were to topple onto me, I would surely suffocate. After the 20 minutes, my wife helpfully said that my shorts were in my dresser (how one pair of shorts got put away and the odds of it being the exact pair for which I was looking are beyond calculation). So, I made my way back across the house and stopped right outside the living room to talk to my wife. I heard a sound, looked over, and my 8 year old daughter, Grace, and 4 of her little friends were standing there in a group, fanned out like a high school swing choir. As comprehension came over me in waves, time seemed to stop. You know that dream that everyone has from time to time, where you’re in public with a bunch of people, you look down, and suddenly you realize you are in only your underwear? That happened in that moment for me….only I was awake and was actually in only my underwear in front of a bunch of 6-8 year old girls. As the implications of this reality overtook me, all I could do was yell, “OH MY GOD!!” and run into my bedroom. I laid there in the fetal position feeling violated and ashamed, trying to rock myself until the memory mercifully faded. My wife walked all of the kids out of the house for their safety and so they didn’t have to hear me whimper.

In the aftermath of this, what did I learn? I learned that, as king of my house, I need to make the rules more clear. Always inform your half-naked father before parading your friends through the house. Also, I learned that it would be good to fold the clothes. I have not yet had to report to Child Protective Services, nor have I had to register as an offender. So, I have that going for me. I hear all of Grace’s friends are doing well with their counseling, and they are getting positive results from the psychotropic medications. As a nation, we are moving forward. Let’s now all face the horizon to look for a brighter tomorrow.