Clay Harrison, Attorney at Law

01/11/2024

Choose Wisely

I can recall lying on the prickly brown carpet of my university-subsidized efficiency apartment when I was 21 years old. I believe I paid $450 a month for my hobbit hole back in 2005, which seemed expensive at the time.

The thermostat had three options: hot, cold, and off. Like Indiana Jones, one had to choose wisely, or a certain kind of pre-determined doom was waiting. Depending on the winds of chance, if you slid the plastic thermostat stick to the wrong option, the apartment would smell like muskrat for at least an hour.

What I was doing lying on that prickly brown carpet was studying an aggressively heavy book titled simply, “Contracts.” I read about widgets and money disputes about widgets, quantities of widgets, and unforeseen acts of God that destroyed widgets that had already been paid for!

As a young Air Force officer, I secretly wished for an emergency call-up that would pull me out of law school and send me off to some exciting new place. Maybe I could scrape barnacles off the bottom of a ship in the Caribbean, or chase goats away from the airstrip in Kabul. But the call never came. So I trudged along with my heavy brown books, aware that I was very fortunate, but grumbling nonetheless.

I began that season with the idea that my personal success would depend upon achieving X goal in Y time frame, but most importantly, I outperformed Z – other people.

I was quickly disabused of that error. In every field, there are some prepared to sacrifice everything in order to be number one – even at making, selling, or advertising widgets! It makes for a great motivational poster but a flimsy life. The gold medal is made of government plastic and the biggest trophy is trashed in under ten.

I came to the conclusion in that tiny apartment that for me, while the pursuit of excellence is always a given - personal success could never involve a harsh calculation of X’s, Y’s, and Z’s. I knew that if I lived by the sword, I’d die by it as well.

Instead, I was humbled. My little formula had to be scrapped.

In my view, the only lasting test is whether at the end of each day you can answer to the question, “Were you faithful?,” a simple, “Yes.” Whatever burdens, however difficult, regardless of circumstances ... "Yes."

But before you go to bed, be sure to move the thermostat to the correct position. Choose wisely.

01/02/2024

When the Center Cannot Hold

At some level, most of us are aware of a frustrating gap that exists between the person we are in reality and the person we know we’re meant to be. The daylight that exists between these two persons, the size of the chasm between our reality and our capacity, is I think the greatest predictor of living at peace right now, today. If you can’t be at peace with yourself, you can’t be at peace. No person, possession, achievement, title, or accolade will bridge the gap for you. At least not for long.

We’ve all known people who have allowed the chasm to grow too wide and, as T.S. Eliot says, “the center cannot hold.” Things fall apart. Marriages implode. Heroes fall. The feet of our idols are exposed as chalky red clay. It simply takes too much energy to maintain the production and to keep the monkeys dancing. To be clear, I’m not referring to hypocrisy – which is the universal condition of all of us at all times in all places. The outside of my cup is squeaky clean so never mind the inside, thank you very much. No, the disparity I’m referring to here is entirely personal and wholly within each of us.

On New Year’s Day, we set about with grand strategies to attack the divide and set our house in order. There’s an internet video with 7 million views of a man who lost 300 pounds. I can personally claim about four or five of those views. I’ve seen it several times, but seeing his transformation at the end still gets me.

A wise man famously referred to his body as “Brother Ass.” He was calling his physical body a stubborn donkey, to be clear. I see no need to improve on his description. Mental, emotional, and spiritual conditioning is no easier.

Here on this side of eternity, some tasks feel like rolling a boulder up a hill. “Why cut the grass if it’s just going to grow back?” some ask. The best I can answer is this: There will always be daylight between the person you are and the person you know you can be. Maybe the boulder rolls back down on top of you and the weeds are sprouting left and right.

Even so, today’s peace is found in that messy place – somewhere between almost and not quite. The outside of the cup and the inside of the cup are equally unfinished.

In this New Year, may your center hold firm and true, and each day may you renew the unending, impossible, frustrating, wonderful work ahead of you.

12/27/2023

The Big Moments

I remember watching the Daniel Day Lewis movie Last of the Mohicans as a kid. My neighbor’s mom would fast-forward the VHS tape past the part where Magua, the chief Huron Indian, cuts out the heart of a British general on the battlefield. I also recall the high school band visiting Bowie Elementary School to perform songs from the movie.

For my money, it’s the most incredible soundtrack ever put to film.
Years later, when I took military physical fitness tests, I would regularly put on the Last of the Mohicans title track for the running portion. Perhaps imagining Huron and French enemies firing muskets at me was a bit of overreach on my part, but either way, it seemed to help.

There’s a particularly memorable scene in the story when enemies surround the British, and they are within a few days of collapsing if reinforcements fail to arrive. In a last-ditch effort to escape, they send a courier on foot to race through enemy-infested woods and attempt to carry a critical message to a nearby friendly army. As the courier races through the forest, he is attacked with muskets and tomahawks, but British, American, and Mohican snipers provide expert cover fire to ensure his successful passage.

Among the living, I suspect there are few left of us who can claim to have completed a military courier mission with a secret map inside a long tube, but if you can believe it, I am one of them. I like to think it’s as rare today as having swash-buckled a pirate on the high seas, although that would admittedly be cooler to put on a resume.
It was in 2011, and I was stationed on an island in the Southern Philippines. A joint special operations counter-terror group was based in a place called Zamboanga, which is more fun to say than to stay, if you understand me. I was their lawyer, which meant I tried to keep the commanders out of jail and the news, if possible. To show their gratitude, they made a place for me to sleep at night that was a glorified broom closet, minus the broom.

At 3 a.m., the heavy hand of a Navy Master Chief beat on the door to my closet, and I sprang to attention. I peeped the door open to find Master Chief enjoying his task a little too much. “Pack your bags, sir. You’ve got a plane to catch.” I dressed and went to the briefing room, where I was handed a top-secret map inside a plastic tube. “Take this to Colonel X,” they said.

Over the next few hours, I found myself as the sole passenger in a Marine truck convoy, the sole passenger in a single-engine aircraft, then the sole passenger in a blacked-out van, and then led inside an unmarked building where Colonel X was waiting. He took the map and shook my hand, and that was that.

To my knowledge, neither French nor Huron nor Al-Qaeda-affiliated enemies ever fired a shot in my direction. As far as courier missions go, it was pretty mild. But for a young lawyer from East Texas, it made the list of unforgettable experiences.

We spend so much of our lives getting ready for the big, monumental moments, the lifetime memory makers, but the truth is those experiences tend to sneak up on us without a lot of noise or fanfare, and then as quickly as they arrive they’re over – and the James Fenimore Coopers of the literary world will probably never write a book about it.

May we live ever aware of this fact and be encouraged and emboldened rather than saddened and deflated by it. If you get the chance, an Israelite King wrote a whole book about it.

Attorney based out of Sulphur Springs, Texas.

12/15/2023

Old Enough to Start Reading Fairy Tales Again

Sometimes we lie to our children. Maybe it’s more accurate to say we give them as much of the truth as they can handle at their level of maturity.

When a good parent teaches their child to ride a bike, they may prop them up with training wheels at first. These are in a sense “false” because they deny the laws of physics that the child will eventually have to master.

But a good parent has vision – and when they see their wobbling child meandering in circles in the driveway, they can already see the fully trained child freely cycling down the neighborhood without training wheels.

We also tell our children about a fat man with rosy cheeks who drops down the chimney, about fairies who visit them after their visit to the dentist, and about elves and goblins and hobbits and all the rest. At a given age, each child comes to certain sad realizations about all that.

C.S. Lewis told his goddaughter, “One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

The truth is that those fairy stories aren’t lies. They’re merely placeholders. They’re training wheels. They’re as much of the truth as we can handle at that level of maturity. There may not be a big bad wolf huffing and puffing outside the door, but fully mature adults realize that there are spiritual realities darker than the stories we dare to tell our kids and there are glorious wonders in real life we couldn’t fit into a nursery rhyme.

Attorney based out of Sulphur Springs, Texas.

05/29/2020

Conditions & Consequences

Because I’m the world’s greatest dad, I regularly attempt to bribe my three-year-old daughter into eating her breakfast - with the promise of great reward.

“If you eat your eggs, then you’ll get a surprise.”

The promise of reward (or punishment) is conditioned upon her doing something (or more frequently, not doing something).

My love for her is unconditional. There is no “if this, then that,” with her. She could refuse to eat every egg and she would still forever be mine. But none of that saves her from the uncomfortable and necessary process of growing up, with its carrots and sticks, its musts and musn’ts, and its conditions and consequences.

God is the same with his children. Consider this:

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” - Philippians 4:6-7

There you have it. A reward conditioned on the child’s behavior.

Do not do this (worry).
Do this (give it to God).
Then you’ll have peace.

God’s love for us is surely without condition, but his promises are not. Every parent gets this, as I’m sure every shepherd does for his flock of bleating sheep. If you could raise a child without conditional promises, I’m not sure you’d want to.

Kings would frequently have two types of sons: those born to the Queen who were in line to inherit the throne and those who were “illegitimate” and would never stand to lead anything.

Those who would one day be promoted to positions of great influence would be disciplined with carrot and stick their entire lives. Refining a young prince into good king material isn’t easy.

But the “illegitimate” sons were not disciplined. They could do as they please because their character was of no real consequence to the King.

“If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.” - Hebrews 12:8

The King’s love is without qualification or limitation. It isn’t hedged or carefully arranged like an insurance contract. But in this world, there are serpents hiding in the grass, wolves prowling at night, and steep cliffs we might fall from.

May we do this, and not that, and receive our reward. It’ll help us grow big and strong one day.

04/16/2020

It was an honor to work with Chad's Media, Logan Michael Vaughan, and Dr. Caleb Hammargren on this short video project called "Trials & Testing."

Chad & Logan filmed and edited the video and Caleb wrote an original soundtrack for us. Their gifts carry the project, to be sure. Check out his music at

https://soundcloud.com/calgren

Twenty years ago, Caleb and I were high school students in Chad's youth group. He played a crucial role during those formative years for us. I still remember him washing the feet of the entire youth group after a week-long mission trip to Aldama, Mexico.

Logan has been a friend since high school (and also a fellow Mexico mission trip-traveler). He can write, edit, and a hundred other things, but most importantly, he can cook. Tableleaf Supper Club

04/05/2020

Three days after my wife and I returned from the hospital with our newborn son, the plumbing system in our rural one-bathroom home decided to shut down. I called several professionals, but I quickly found myself digging a trench in the pasture behind us. It was a humbling experience, and I think that was the week we decided to build a new house.

Water is designed to move. When it doesn’t, bad things happen. Think of it as the difference between “living” water and “dead” water.

Jesus promised that, “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” John 4:14

But as with most things, we have two choices. We can drink from that well or we can decide to dig our own.

The honest truth is that when life is going decently well, we can survive by drinking from our own wells. It’s like a fire truck that puts out a small fire using only the water in the truck’s reserve – without ever hooking up to a hydrant. In our relationships, at work, in ministry, we can put out fires simply by reaching into our character. We call it self-sacrifice and all that. At the end of the day, our little well is usually pretty dry, but as long as it rains tomorrow we’ll be fine.

In times of crisis and drought, our wells get exposed. There truly is no alternative but to turn to the living well, which at this point has been obstructed and covered with dirt and sediment.

“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Jeremiah 2:13

We must humble ourselves, get out our shovels, and start digging.

04/03/2020

When it’s my turn to put my daughter to sleep, I usually end up regaling her with wild tales about the adventures of a fictional character she apparently made up named “Little Blau” (rhymes with cow). I can’t wait until she’s old enough to read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

Those books planted seeds of faith and adventure in my young heart that are still growing over 30 years later. If anyone has yet to capture an image of Jesus more fitting than Aslan the lion who is “good” but “not safe,” then I’m unaware of it.

What stands out about those books is their excellence. I don’t mean I subjectively think they’re really great. Of course I do. But I mean objectively, stacked up against any other piece of children’s literature before or since, the Narnia series is one of the finest pieces of art ever created. It wasn’t just authored by a guy who happened to be a Christian. The work itself if clearly an offering of sorts – the gifted giving his gift back to God and other believers.

Johann Sebastian Bach, arguably the greatest composer who ever lived, scribbled in his Bible, “At a reverent performance of music, God is always at hand with his gracious presence.”

Astronomer Galileo Galilei, mathematician Blaise Pascal, physicist Isaac Newton, and many others were Christians who accomplished works of tremendous importance.

God is the author of all truth and all beauty. It only follows that God’s children should speak clearly, paint boldly, and sing richly.

In the present crisis, many in the world and even some in the church are sneering at the call to “faith over fear” as anti-science. Don’t be offended when they do. Wash your hands and trust in God. He’s not safe, but he’s perfectly good.

03/30/2020

When We All Return to Dancing

Americans love a good underdog story where the good guys win in the end. It goes back to our nation’s founding and probably before that. But a story is only as good as its ending. Knowing this, many professional storytellers begin at the end and then work backwards to the start.

We love to tell each other stories from our own lives, but only from the comfortable position of knowing how the story ended for us. Frankly, even a story with a rough ending can be inspiring – but it must have an ending. From the present, we can look back to the past and see the arc of conflict, the character development, and the climax.

We laugh about how miserable we were. We poke fun at the things that frightened us. In fact, the darkest moments are what generate the conflict and make the story worth telling.

In the present, we feel like characters in some middle chapter of a story. For a host of reasons, we fear the worst. A cacophony of experts and quasi-experts battle daily to climb to the top of the credibility pile. Even black-and-white subjects like statistics and science are proving to be weapons of information warfare.

In the midst of this, a constant stream of thoughts and imaginations are offered up to us, whispered in our ears, and they do resonate with truth. Armageddon, global collapse, the apocalypse - it all sounds familiar – and it sounds something like truth.

But it isn’t.

We might not know the end of this story, but we know the author and are familiar with his other works. David killed Goliath with a rock and then cut off his head. Moses defied Pharaoh and saw the Egyptian army drown. An out-classed group of American patriots fended off the most powerful empire in the world.

Satan himself can quote the Bible – and he often does – but it’s powerless unless we entertain the thoughts presented to us. The devastating imaginations we build up in our minds are entirely permissive – none are forced upon us. And the strongholds of fear and doubt we allow to be constructed in our minds are subject to eviction and destruction when we decide to make it so.

Make no mistake – our nation’s brightest days are ahead of us and not behind us. And when we all return to dancing – what stories of hope redeemed will we tell?

03/26/2020

Eating the Fish & Spitting Out the Bones

Most people don’t know that in the 1950’s, the U.S. military enlisted the help of vampires to fight a battle in East Asia – sort of. Residents of a rural region in the Philippines believed in a creature they called the “aswang” which hunted people at night and sucked their blood.

Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale, whose civilian background was as a California advertising man, used their superstitious fear as the basis for a highly successful psychological warfare campaign. His men reportedly killed enemy soldiers, then made bite marks on the neck before dumping the body for the public to find. The impression left on the enemy was false, but powerful. And it worked.

Militaries have used psychological warfare for thousands of years. The book of Judges discusses a battle in which Gideon’s men surrounded an army which vastly outnumbered them. Under cover of darkness, the Israelites suddenly blew trumpets and smashed jars, creating the impression that they were vastly more numerous than they actually were. In the chaos that ensued, the enemy panicked, killed each other in confusion, and ran away.

I served in the Philippines with the Air Force about 60 years after Colonel Lansdale. I never ran into any vampires, but I learned that to this day, psychological warfare is alive and well.

Some “information operations” use completely accurate facts. Some bend the truth a bit. Some are totally false. Regardless of your personal ethics, these are all tools which can be devastatingly effective on the enemy.

From the serpent’s great lie in the Garden of Eden to this day, our enemy “was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44

As believers, it’s our duty to “eat the fish and spit out the bones.” We must parse the information presented to us for truths and falsehoods. Some danger in the present moment is quite real, but a false spirit of fear has been tormenting the world (and the Church) with devastating effectiveness.

When the dust settles, I believe we’ll find that this has been accomplished using a combination of accurate facts, a little bending of the truth, and some outright falsehoods.

“Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Matthew 10:16

03/26/2020

When God brings the pause...