My Foot Lives In My Mouth

Uffa. After reading the comments from my post on Envy, I have noticed that I seem to have given the impression that my brother-in-law, the Coach, and his wife, Sasha Feroce, are nothing but money-grubbing upwardly mobile young urban professionals.

Let me clarify.

This is not the case, at all. My brother-in-law is a basketball coach, because basketball is what he loves and it’s what he’s good at. It’s also the way he’s chosen to make his mark on the world. I change the world one diaper at a time; he changes the world one player at a time. And believe me when I say he changes it. He agonizes over plays, players, and his team. He cares about those kids as people, not as tools to be used to advance his career.

My sister-in-law is a professional photographer who is one of the only people I’ve ever met who have an instinctive, intuitive understanding of visual beauty. She appreciates the beautiful wholly, and she sees it everywhere she goes. In the oddest of places, like the underside of a leaf, she’ll find something worth photographing, something worth staring at for hours. She makes me appreciate the wonder of God’s creation in a way I never have before because she sees it with eyes that are awed by what they see and grateful for it.

It’s true that they have more material goods than we do, but in many ways that’s because they’ve chosen to sacrifice more than we have. We’ve been forced into learning frugality; they’ve practiced it by choice.  Those two things produce very different results.

In any case, I realize now that I implied a dichotomy that I did not intend: the haves, who work for money and not for good, and the martyred have-nots, (ahem), who work for good and not for money. This is faulty, and I’m really sorry for the implication. I apologize to the Coach and Sasha Feroce for portraying them in an unfavorable light when the truth is that I admire them both very much and hope to learn from their good example.

And I hope that everyone who read that post and came away with a false impression of my dear in-laws will also read this one, and allow that impression to be corrected with my deepest apologies.