help me hell, part two

Still thinking about "Help Me Hell." I think the kids, when they made that up, intuited something about God that I've taken years to come to myself. That is, that as long as you can say "help me" and feel some response, there's God. Right? Maybe.

All I know is I'm not very good at saying "help me." I attribute this, of course, to my upbringing, to parents who seemed like they had it all figured out and thought I would, too. They're New Englanders by affinity if not birth, and they have that sort of upright, we can do it ourselves attitude. After all, they retired to a house on a dirt road that was only recently added to the electrical grid. Before that they had a generator and passive solar and no cell phone coverage and they did just fine. They've both always seemed to me to be super-competent, the kind of people other people ask for help but who never ask for it themselves. You know, the "God helps those who help themselves" types.

And yet. Recently I visited my dad's old prep school with him. Somehow we got talking about the school motto, which was in three parts. He could only remember two, and when we came to a wall adorned with the motto I read the third part to him:"Self Reliance." Again, those old New England, Emersonian virtues, right?

"That's why I don't remember it," he said. "I've been blocking it. I don't think that's a good motto for a Christian school."

And suddenly I knew what I hadn't known before, that he, too, knows about "help me hell." It's the place we go to when we think we can do it all ourselves, when we get all self-reliant--and then fail. Which we inevitably do, because we live in a world, we live interconnected with others, and self-reliance is a kind of idolatry, really. We need our connections, and it's when we pretend we don't that we get into trouble.

I don't really think Nick knows all that yet. But he's still at the age where he knows he needs a lot of help. I mean, he can barely wipe his own butt. So maybe he still knows something that most of us forget as we grow up. I hope we can help each other to remember.