When I was a boy, I spent one week every summer at the YMCA summer camp. It was an awesome time to play games, do arts and crafts, and occasionally run into very naked, very old men in the locker rooms before swim lessons. I’m sure today there’s a tad more vigilance.

Anyway, the Y gave out superlatives at the end of the week. The crown jewel was “Honor Camper,” rewarded to the best camper of the week. More than anything, I hoped for that superlative. I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I won the thing twice and was immensely proud of myself.

Truly, I won because I was a good boy. There were no prizes for rebels. If a bully picked on me, I let him (or her) do so. No way was I gonna fight and risk my chance of Honor Camper. (Life ruiner.)

As I’ve grown, the desire to be a good boy, or good guy, has followed. I think most of us strive for some moral ideal.

I’m just not sure it’s working. 

I mean really, why do we call people “good guys”? What does that mean? I consider all of my friends “good guys.” I even put myself in that category.

But why am I a good guy? It can only be because there are bad guys. What concept have we of good if we have no concept of bad? When people say “Carson is a good guy,” I think they mean I am likable, friendly and seem to care about others. But I can fit almost everyone I know in that category. There’s a crapload of good guys.

It seems the real reason we’re good guys is we are rarely overtly bad. I don’t punch kittens or steal bananas or get wrapped up in man slaughtering. I’m not a jailbird or a  conniver or an asshole. I obey the law and go on my way.

I like to think by not being overtly bad, or physically afflicting my neighbor, I’m in the higher eshelon of guys. But I must be fair in my comparisons. If I take a look at who’s beneath, I should certainly look at who’s ahead.

And darn if there aren’t many.

Pastors, rabbis, imans, Dhali Llamas, social workers, philanthropists, special needs teachers and Salvation Army bell ringers are trumping me on providing welfare to the common man.

So now, I’m like, maybe in the upper middle tier of good dudes. But honestly, why do I even care where I stand on the moral ladder?

Because I am constantly observing other men for validation. 

In a strange way, their goodness is a threat to me and there badness is a comfort. If I see a jerk cuss out a grocery bagger, I’m thinking “some day he’ll get his.” But if I see a man feed a homeless guy I just passed, I worry “on what day will I get mine?” This constant vascillation of affirmation and concern is so ingrained in my thinking I hardly notice it.

But when I do stop and think of it, and realize I attribute “good guy” to other good and not so good men, I’m really left quite unaware of where I stand. What to do?

I could fall back on karma. After all, I’m acutely aware of where the other guys are screwing up. And it’s satisfying to believe they’ll get what they deserve. Convenient really, until I think about when I’m gonna get what I deserve. There were times I sucked today. Am I really impervious to bad karma?

Who’s dishing the karma out to us good guys and sorta good guys anyway? Some detached cosmic force perfectly rewarding our goodness and unforgivingly punishing our badness? What a vacuous, impersonal atrocity that would have to be.

Maybe more goodness or less badness than others isn’t the standard. What if the standard is perfection? What if I should be striving to be the perfect being? What’s left for me if I fall short? The only seemingly perfect being in history I can think of is Jesus, and even he rebuked a man for calling him good! “Only God is good,” Jesus said.

Perfection seems as distant to me as another galaxy. I fear that I’m a lot closer to the opposite. Damn. Well shall I compare myself to a real baddy? How about Hitler? I’m not as evil as that dude was.

But what if I’m a helluva lot closer to Hitler than Jesus? As far as I know, I’m light years away from complete goodness and a modicum from utter depravity.

In my strivings to be a good guy, I’m left to feel hopeless in my pursuit. My ranking system seems to be unreliable at best and damning at worst. I have zero clue where I fall in the order of good guys. What if I come in 109,000th place of all time? Pretty good considering the many billions who have ever lived. But will it leave my judge impressed?

Good guyness is fool’s gold. Most of us who pursue it are unpleasantly rewarded with pride or self-pity. The gold, I think, is grace.

An acknowledgement that I can never measure up to the perfection I was created for, and the outrageous peace of knowing I don’t have to.

An acknowledgement of a radical truth that I can be a crappy guy and am still loved.

An acknowledgement that I can stop toiling to climb the moral ladder—because it doesn’t freaking matter—and come to my Creator as an empty vessel of a man that He can pour His goodness into.

I want to be a graced guy.

Imagine for a moment that one day things go horribly wrong and you find yourself in a small room with a large panther.

There is a door in the room (thankfully) but the panther is ensconced in front of it (crap). In all likelihood, your rationality kicks in and you assess the situation. A predatory jungle cat is in a room with you, you are not a jungle cat tamer, and he (or she—it really doesn’t matter) is quite capable of killing you. So you have assessed the situation as a realist.

Now if you’re a pessimist, you’re in a really bad spot. You’re not assessing whether or not the panther will kill you, but how exactly you’ll be mauled and devoured, and if your cut-rate life insurance includes “accidental death by panther.”

But if you’re an optimist, you’ve already started to think about how you can get through that door. And for some inexplicable, perhaps asinine reason, you actually believe that you will get through that door.

I guess what I’m asking myself these days is this: Do I see life as a panther waiting to eat me, or an obstacle in the way of my door to freedom?

Growing up, I’d say I was an immature optimist. My optimism served as a way to protect me from accepting bad things would happen. Basically, I never even entertained the possibility of being trapped in a room with a panther. My life hadn’t seen many panthers, and I was pretty safe in my home and anywhere I went. Surely, I would just have the kind of life that existed without panthers. I was naive.

When we grow up and become fully responsible, positive thinking alone doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. Being positive can often be quite silly.

“Oh, Billy’s choking. It’s OK Billy. That thing will dislodge itself, I’m sure.”

“Wow Jean, never seen wheels just fall off the car like that. But at least you still have that unicycle.”

“Today my best friend kicked me in the face. Twice. Hooray for not three times!”

Those were ridiculous examples of course, but in reality being positive often seems downright inauthentic. As the bad experiences of life pile up, I think we get more and more pessimistic. We just expect bad things to happen, like a face kick or Billy choking. And eventually, when we find ourselves in the midst of the proverbial panther, we can’t possibly envision how we’ll avoid our leg being chewed off within five minutes. Where is there room for optimism?

I’ve come to find that optimism is not particularly the expectation of things going well, but the belief of things going well. If you’re a man interested in an attractive woman who appears to be totally out of your league, it can’t harm you to optimistically believe you can score a date with her. Because then, you might get a haircut, take a shower, spray on some Axe, rehearse your proposal, and who knows, she may just respond favorably. You could’ve been pessimistic and remained stinky and lonely, but your optimistic thoughts set you up for success. Now, she might find Axe repulsive and your face repugnant, and feed you some prevarication like she’s about to leave the country forever, but you would’ve absolutely never had a shot if you didn’t institute a modicum of hygiene in the first place.

But what about something serious, like our proverbial panther? Perhaps you’re without a job or you’ve received a troubling diagnosis. What if you simply can’t see a way to move past the panther and through the door? There’s a good chance optimism by itself won’t do. I wonder if the thing that’s better than optimism is hope.

The problem with hope is that it’s irrational. Hope doesn’t help me understand how to get out of a mess. Hope involves trust, trust in an outcome I can’t see but believe to be true. What’s scary is that if I just go on believing that I, myself, can find a way out of my dour predicament, I’ll be quite troubled when I rationalize that I have no ability to do so. Then what’s really scary is that I realize I need something else to help me. When no person in the world can rescue me from the panther room, where do I place my hope? In karma, in the universe, in a god?

Personally, I have to live my life believing that something, someone, will open up the door and save me from panther mauling. The idea of true optimism rooted in hope is terrifying—until we try it. Sure, it’s still hard, but when that first door is opened for us, just as we hoped it would, the way we live really begins to change.

Or at least it should. I’m still a work in progress.

Are you a pessimist? Optimist? Irrational hoper in something seemingly nebulous? I’d like to know.

Have you ever wondered why you love fantasy football so much?

I sure have. I was a fantasyholic. And when I discovered why, it was one of the main reasons I stopped playing two years ago and became a recovering fantasyholic.

First though, let me be clear that one of my reasons to stop playing was not that is wasn’t fun. In fact, perhaps it was too fun. There was a time when few things exhilarated me more than watching my flex RB run for 150 and 2 TDs on a Monday night to eke out a fantasy victory. In my head I would throw a little party celebrating this dreadlocked, steel-muscled machine of a man who was great at carrying a leather ball and running away from angry men. I ate that stuff up like Refrigerator Perry at a calabash buffet. But why was I so enamored?

The easy answer is pride.

I pick better players than you. On draft night while you were scouring your cheat sheet for top-10 kickers I was taking a flyer on a rookie wide receiver and pasting your tail with him in Week 8.

I also start the right guys. Every week. I sat my number one receiver because he was gonna be on Revis Island, and I started a waiver wire white boy named Pete Pickles who went for 179 and a score. I own you like a Jerry Jones oil field.

So pride provided some fugacious happiness until I lost and had to make excuses for what went wrong. They stacked the box against MJD. Foster had a groin flare. My whole starting lineup was on a bye week and I had to start a guy on my bench who happened to be missing a leg. There was almost always an excuse for not winning; my pride was at stake.

Yet pride was not what drove my complete attention to this little game. Sure, it was a factor in why I would obsess over my lineup right until the 1 o’clock kickoff. But there was a deeper, more insidious problem I had with playing fantasy sports. This problem actually made me think about fantasy sports 24/7.  If pride was the hors d’oeuvre that readied me for my fantasy meal, this problem was the midnight buffet binge on the Carnival cruise.

Some of us may jokingly refer to this obsession as a man crush. Rightfully so. But a more serious label, that defined my experience, was idolatry.

Well what does that look like? For me, it looked like staring at my roster and admiring each athlete for his special talents for minutes on end. It looked like watching a game and not taking my eyes off a player, no matter where he was or what he was doing on the field. It looked like watching one of my guys get hurt and having my heart sink with fear and worry of losing his talents (points, really). It looked like sitting in bed and contemplating my players’ greatness, and falling asleep to visions of Megatron dancing in my head. Frankly, it looked like sitting in church on Sunday and fretting over my guy being a game-time decision. I was worshipping the Father, Son, and Adrian Peterson.

So who cares? A few man crushes are pretty harmless, right? Not for me. And maybe not for you, either. You see, I found it very natural and exciting to become so infatuated with a hero. I am so driven to praise something. Yet, how empty I felt when my guy went down, when my team lost, when the season ended. Once again, my idolatry ended in disappointment. It wasn’t wrong to praise something. That’s innate with all of us. It’s praising the wrong thing that is wrong. It was praising everything I wasn’t meant to praise while ignoring the one Thing that I was.

I’m not tying to get you to stop playing fantasy football (as if you’d listen to me anyway). In its purest state, it is a harmless, fun little game. My problem was I couldn’t keep it that way. In a world replete with things to praise, I chose something (or some men) who were unworthy of the cloying admiration I heaped on them with my heart. No amount of fantasy points was worth that.

When I was called out to do the Ice Bucket Challenge, naturally some chilling thoughts surfaced:

I have to do this or I’ll look like a party pooper.

If I do do this I’ll begrudgingly have to nominate others and feel like a jerk.

This is gonna hurt the wallet.

I’m not sure I have a readily sanitary bucket.

You see, when some good friends benevolently challenged me and my wife, I got that uneasy feeling like I was sitting across the table from a used car salesman with a bad tie and dirty mustache. Not that I’ve ever faced that but I imagine it’s horrifying. And it wasn’t anything my lovely friends did. It was the whole thing in general.

Honestly, it felt like getting the digital age version of the chain letter. Remember those? Respond to this need to feed hungry beagles, donate a dollar, send it out to five more people and we’ll send you a certificate and a doggy biscuit. But if you don’t respond, no biscuits and seven years of bad luck. So it felt a little chain lettery to me, but the problem was I couldn’t ball it up and move on. Everyone was watching. Every virtual friend I ever had was waiting to see in the next 24 hours if I’d be man enough to accept or if I’d turn it down for some lame-o reason and be the guy who halted everyone’s fun train.

This is ridiculous of course; but who is thinking rationally when summoned to devise a bucket-of-ice-water-over-head-with-brief-speech-while-managing-toddlers-and-not-ruining-iPhone scenario? Not me, obviously. Really though, why not do it?

For one, I’m against compulsory giving. The challenge presents a “give or else” directive. Not mean-spirited, definitely for a great cause, but still compulsory. I know you don’t have to participate. But in this social media world, where Facebook sees everything, isn’t it hard not to feel obligated to accept? The pressure, whether real or perceived, is still pressure.

But I would acquiesce, of course. It’s harmless right, even if the challenge itself (not the cause) challenges my principles a bit. So I realize I’ll have to reach out and compel others, summoning my inner snake oil salesman. So I ask friends first if I can challenge them. A few agree, but one good friend hits me with the respectfully declined invitation due to the fact that the ALS organization, in some form, supports embryonic stem-cell research. I chihuahua. I do care about that sort of thing, though I admit I’m not perfectly studied up on all of it. And I’m not a right wing bag of nuts, if that’s what you’re wondering. I mean really, would I not give to a great organization with a meaningful cause for the simple reason that their research may be contributing to the prevailing sentiment that it’s okay to destroy what I and many others consider to be life, for the purpose of medical intelligence? Well, no, I might not. But it’s an ethical question that deserved pondering.

When I got home, I was 22 hours into being challenged and all of the haze and uncomfortableness made me think I wouldn’t do it. But my son had already heard rumors he was going to get to dump something on Daddy’s head, and there was really no turning back from that. So how could I do this thing with a good conscience and in some small way help the ALS community, which was whole reason for this spectacle anyway?

First, I wouldn’t join the spectacle on social media. Just didn’t sit right for me personally. Perhaps I didn’t want old high school Facebook friends I haven’t encountered in 15 years to see that my hair has receded slightly. But really, I could dump the hashtag along with the bucket of ice water.

Secondly, I would encourage nominees to consider giving somewhere, but not specifically to ALS. Nothing wrong with the thousands who have given there; I’m glad there is so much funding going towards finding a cure.

Lastly, I would encourage prayer for those who suffer from ALS. Certainly, it’s a different kind of gift, but a disease that casts hopeless prognoses could use some hopeful petitioning.

After all was said and done, my son wasted no time dumping the ice water on me and my wife. So the chain was passed on, my underwear was cold and wet, and an ethical decision had been made. Perhaps I thought way too hard about it. I could’ve just knocked it out unwittingly and carried on with my life.

But that’s not how we were made. Our conscience and our ethics are two waters in which we should always delve deep. I suppose, sometimes, the waters are more chilling than we would like.

Throughout my life, I’ve vacillated quite significantly on what is, in fact, a miracle.

One reason may be that there are a lot of people in this world (most without actual miraculous experiences) who have a different definition of what a miracle is. And I don’t know if even at this point in my faith journey I can say what one is. But I can say what it is not.

 The character Jules (played by Samuel L. Jackson) in Pulp Fiction has something to say about miracles. This comes after he has just bullet-riddled several low-key gangsters, only to find himself looking down the barrel of gun. But at close range, all of the bullets miss him (miraculously). The death-defying experience shakes Jules up pretty good, certainly a diversion from his usual cool self.

Jules determines he has witnessed a miracle. After failing to convince his partner Vincent that a miracle happened, he says this: “Whether or not what we witnessed was an According to Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt the touch of God. God got involved.”

I used to love this quote. I’d post it on my AOL away message, so proud that a dirty gangster flick actually had something positive to say about God. But does it?

I won’t pick apart Jules’ quote here and try to prove why it’s all theologically bogus. I don’t know that it is. Perhaps some of it has some truth. But lately, the “God got involved” part hasn’t been sitting right with me.

First, I’ll acknowledge God getting involved in our lives is pretty amazing. It’s incredible to think an infinitely massive Creator cares a lick about little ole me. But I believe He does. Now, is it a miraculous thing for him to get involved in our lives? Maybe. Certainly I believe the spiritual realm exists outside of science. The spiritual realm cannot be measured, nor can it be subject to the laws of the very world it created. We understand miracles as existing outside of the scientific realm, particularly because miracles are initiated in the spiritual realm.

Notwithstanding, I’m not certain Jules is paying God a compliment in this context. When Jules says God got involved, he seems pretty shocked by this and has seemingly not experienced this before. Perhaps it was difficult for him to encounter the divine in a world where people regularly blew other people’s faces off. That would be understandable. But to say God got involved like it was abnormal is a very Deist way of looking at things, as if God is usually sitting on the sidelines and decides to come play in the game on rare occasions.

Instead, what if God is always involved? What if he is always present, always acting, always working for the good of those who love Him? My experience is that he is certainly not idle. Scripture tells us that for thousands of years He prepared the world for His Son, and thousands of years after His Son’s coming He is still moving, still saving, still involved.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Jules. Maybe he really was impressed by God. But if we are waiting around to see something miraculous to prove to us that God is involved, we may be missing the point. I think God is always involved, and for that I’m in awe.