“Are you OK?”
That’s my wife’s polite way of saying, “Why are you being such a distant, distracted jerk right now?”
She said that to me about a week ago and she was right. I was distant. I was distracted. I was a jerk. Above all, I was surprised.
If you change clothes in a handicapped bathroom stall at work, never start with your pants.
For some reason, people in other stalls freak out if you strip your pants completely off in a bathroom. I find it’s best to start with your shirt or sweater. Focus on your torso until the bathroom is empty and then change out of your jeans.
These are the valuable lessons that people like Max Lucado refuse to share, but not me. I’ll tell you everything, because right now, everything is weird.
Please don’t be offended, but the Acuff family leaves vacations like bankrobbers fleeing the scene of a crime.
When we go on long trips or short weekend visits, we like to get up ridiculously early on the last day and beat the traffic home. I blame my upbringing. My family hit rest stops like a NASCAR pit crew. We timed our average miles per hour speed when we road tripped to Sunset Beach, North Carolina from Hudson, Massachusetts and sometimes I don’t think my dad even brought the car to a complete stop. My brothers and I would just tuck our shoulder and roll out into grassy medians like Hungarian circus performers, sprinting to the bathroom while my dad circled the parking lot.
I’m a little terrified of my friend Nathan.
He’s not physically scary. I mean he’s kind of a brawny, weight lifting type of guy, much like myself if you’ve seen the video from Cross Point. And he has a breakdancing ministry in inner city Atlanta so clearly it’s not a pop n’ lock issue. It’s just that he tends to ask tough questions. He tends to say things that make me uncomfortable. And that’s exactly what he did at Willy’s a few weeks ago.
We went there for a burrito because unlike Chipotle they don’t charge you for chips. (At this point in the history of burrito consumption, I feel like charging extra money for chips is like a restaurant asking you to pay for the use of a fork. Boggles the mind really.) During lunch I was telling him that I felt like I had hit a spiritual wall. I was stuck. There wasn’t any one thing I could point my finger at, some neon issue I had jumped back into with both feet, but for some reason I just seemed off kilter.
After hearing me ramble for what probably felt like 19 years, Nathan asked me simply,
“Where is all this stuff going? Your quiet time, your study, your reading, your Bible work? Where is the outward expression of your faith? Who are you serving right now?”
Ahh come on. I don’t want tough questions. I want easy friendships where I show up and you show up and we tell each other how awesome we are. “You’re a fantastic Christian!” “No, you’re a fantastic Christian!” I don’t like questions like that.
But as I thought about what he asked, I was confronted with the reality that I really only want to follow the first and greatest commandment. Are you familiar with that one? In Matthew 22:37-38 a guy named Jesus says, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.”
I am down with that verse. When I read it, I think to myself, “Yes, that is what I am talking about! I will focus inward and learn to love the Lord with all my heart and my soul and my mind. This is fantastic. I can twist this into some sort of God-flavored self improvement course. This will be like a Biblically based version of that productivity book I’m reading right now, ‘Getting Things Done.’ I’ll find a quiet spot, cocoon myself in self effort and just go to town growing my faith in a little greenhouse of me.”
That’s what I want to do. But Jesus doesn’t stop thought there. I want him to. I want him to drop a hard period at the end of that sentence and move on to walking on water or multiplying fish with his bare hands. “End scene Jesus, end scene!” I want to shout. But He doesn’t get down that way. He follows verse 38 with this gem about the second commandment:
“And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Nards! Really? There’s a neighbor involved? Can’t I just go on a deep spiritual retreat to a cave in the desert where I grow a beard, and live alone as I work on my faith, perhaps keeping a wolf as my only companion? I’ll name him “Timber” after the one Snake Eyes had in GI Joe. Can’t I turn the Bible into a self help book and God into a self empowerment guru? Can’t this faith thing just be about me?
But it’s not. There’s a second half to that thought. There’s a neighbor and a call to love and an outward expression of faith and Nathan challenged me on it.
The truth is, I sometimes want my faith to be like a bonsai tree, the miniaturized versions of trees made famous in the Karate Kid movie. I want to manicure it and study it and prune it and move piece by piece around with tweezers, never once taking my eyes off the small little tree and refusing to admit there is a forest outside my window. Never once admitting that there are deep woods all around me. Never once realizing that I walk through groves of trees every day that need to be loved and served.
Is there an inward direction to faith? Is there a place for being deliberate about your heart and your mind and your soul? Without a doubt. I don’t think Jesus made a mistake when He called loving the Lord the most important commandment. I think the internal life is a critical part of our faith experience. But Jesus didn’t stop there. He didn’t end the thought with that foundation. He didn’t end the thought with a single tree. He jumped into the forest. He finished by calling us toward our neighbor. He ended by calling us toward outward love.
And whether I’m afraid or lazy or selfish or a million other things, I can’t escape from the fact that He wants me to have more than bonsai faith.
Kanye West deserves less grace and forgiveness than I got.
I don’t know the exact amount, unfortunately the Bible’s not terribly clear on measurements. I mean sure, I know Goliath was six cubits and a span, everyone knows that, but when it comes to doling out grace, there’s not a clear form of measurement.
Is grace a liquid? In the songs people sing about God’s love it’s always in the form of water, “fall down like rain,” “wash over me,” etc.
So let’s say that Kanye West deserves one less gallon of grace and forgiveness than I got.
Or maybe a jug. It’s hard to say what the precise amount is but that’s what I was thinking when I heard he ruined Taylor Swift’s moment at the Video Music Awards. After he walked on stage, and interrupted the nervous teenager to tell her about another performer who deserved the award more than she did, a few thoughts popped up. I didn’t think about the whole situation a lot, on the Jon scale of thought I gave the incident more time than Salt and Vinegar Pringles but less than the new season of “So You Think You Can Dance.” But here’s what ran through my head:
“Kanye West always does that. He’s got a history of doing that kind of thing.”
“Kanye West probably did that on purpose, it was staged. He planned it.”
“Kanye West just wounded a teenager, a kid, that is horrible.”
“Anyone who supports him is dumb.”
“He’ll probably apologize but it won’t be real.”
And I felt pretty good hating on Kanye. I got a hit of that, “I’m not as bad as somebody else” drug. I felt better than him and told my wife the whole story with smugness.
But then I thought about it. That was a worst moment, staged or not, that was a mistake and I am so happy my worst mistakes were not televised.
Then I thought about Kanye the person, the son whose mom died. The broken man with a savior who is longing to see a glimpse of him on the road back to the farm. Then I thought about who I wanted to be in the prodigal son story, the older brother who condemns or the servant who helps plan the party? I know which one is easier. I know which one I usually run to. But this time I couldn’t.
Suddenly I didn’t like the first things I thought:
“Kanye West always does that. He’s got a history of doing that kind of thing.”
So do I. I’ve never committed a single sin, a single time. I am a repeat offender. I have a longer history with sin than Kanye does with running on stage at events. Have you ever repeated a sin more than once?
“Kanye West probably did that on purpose, it was staged. He planned it.”
My worst moments were planned. I didn’t fall down the stairs and suddenly find myself landing in a heap of unexpected garbage at the bottom. I made plans. I was deliberate. I set things up that at the time seemed to be what I needed. I did the things that crippled my life on purpose.
“Kanye West just wounded a teenager, a kid, that is horrible.”
He did and it’s inexcusable, but I wounded my own kids, not a 19-year old stranger. I hurt my own kids by working 70 hour work weeks and chasing money instead of them and mortgaging everything that mattered about being a dad. I did that.
“Anyone who supports him is dumb.”
Do you have to support to show love? Do you have to condone to offer grace and forgiveness? Clearly Proverbs spells out a million reasons you shouldn’t support fools and foolish behavior and what Kanye did was foolish. And it’d be equally dumb to judge people for judging Kanye. Are there only two options though? We love him which means we’re pro “running on stage and hurting people” or we hate him? Can’t we disagree with the behavior and offer love to the person? (I think I just invented the phrase, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” I should put that on t-shirts.)
“He’ll probably apologize but it won’t be real.”
According to whose standards? Mine? Is that what Christ says is the second most important commandment in Matthew 22:39 “Love your neighbor as yourself, only if their apology is legitimate and you feel that their repentance is real?” Or is it written, “Rebuke your neighbor as yourself?” Or is love the thing we’re supposed to do? And let’s be honest, what are the chances that I get to heaven and God says, “You offered too many hurting people grace. You over graced the world Jon. That is whack.”
The more I thought about it, the harder it was to hate Kanye.
So I tweeted and wrote on facebook:
“If we all had our worst mistakes televised we’d give Kanye West grace instead of hate.”
Some people got mad and defriended me (worst verb ever) and some people were cool with that idea. I understand both reactions. I’m not justifying a dumb mistake from Kanye or desupporting Taylor Swift (second worst verb ever). I can only tell you what my experience was because it’s 100% of the experiences I had yesterday. When I heard the story about Kanye, I judged him. I hated on him. I did not correct him or try to offer wise counsel, I hated.
Maybe you didn’t.
Maybe you laughed at how silly and insignificant the whole thing was because it’s just a bunch of celebrities, who cares. Maybe you threw on Kanye’s “Jesus Walks” and got down like the awkward girl from the rich part of town that inexplicably moves to the inner city high school and has to learn how to dance to survive some sort of all girl gang but ends up falling in love with a tough on the outside by soft and tender on the inside street youth while learning the valuable lesson that if you believe in yourself, anything is possible.
Maybe that was your reaction.
Mine was hate.
And I hate that.
And I love that God loves me like He loves Kanye.
Because we are both in desperate need of it.
In a few weeks the new Stuff Christians Like website is going to launch and I’m a little terrified. And not just in that way that I’m afraid of rollercoasters but pretend I’m not and come up with a lot of reasons that we probably shouldn’t ride Space Mountain today, look at those lines. Why don’t we go on Thunder Mountain at night so you can’t tell that I’m closing my eyes so I don’t see what’s coming around the bend even though my six year old daughter is sitting next to me with her eyes open. Not in that way, I mean genuinely terrified.
And the source of my nervousness?
I’m afraid to really try.
That’s a dumb sentence, and perhaps this is an illogical thing to fear given all the very real nightmares people face in their lives, but fear doesn’t really follow logic and that’s honestly the one in my head right now. I’ve got this weird belief that if I don’t really try, then I can’t really fail. I can always buy into the lie, “If I had tried, I probably could have done that.” But if I try, if I give it my all and my all isn’t enough, I’ll be crushed. It’s like never writing a book but always telling yourself you could have if you wanted to, you just didn’t have time or something came up or a million other excuses.
Paying someone to design a site, taking sponsors, admitting that I’m structuring significant chunks of my day to work on this as a ministry makes the whole thing feel “real” to me. I lose the fake security blanket of saying, “It’s just some ugly site on blogspot, it’s no big deal.”
Have you ever felt that way? Has there ever been some hope or dream that bubbles quietly inside but you’re afraid to admit it’s there? It’s a new career or a relationship you want to begin or some off the wall ministry that’s always been in your heart? Have you ever been afraid about putting your all into something?
What did you do? How did you deal with it? What happens when we’re afraid?
Those are the questions I’ve been asking God the last few weeks and it feels like the answer might be pretty simple:
Be as brave as a six year old.
Until a few weeks ago that idea didn’t make sense. I’ve never associated bravery with childhood, until the night before my daughter L.E. started kindergarten. We were sitting on her bed and I was trying to sell her hard on the idea. (“It will be awesome. So many friends and recess and gym!”) And in the midst of that conversation she bit her lip and admitted, “I’m a little nervous.” That’s all she said and then she turned her head and refused to look at me. She was doing her best to hold it together. She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t want to fall apart the night before the big day.
It is a big day. She was going to change from a small three hours a day preschool at a church that she had attended for years to an 8AM-3PM day full of new people, new places and new experiences. She was going to get out of a car, walk inside a monstrous building, navigate her way through hundreds of kids that were bigger and older than her to a new classroom. And she was going to do it with limited life experience.
Think about how the age of the kid amplifies the size of the experience. When you and I change jobs, we have precedent to fall back on. We can say, “Wow, new job starts today. Fortunately I’ve had a few other jobs before. I have a decade of work under my belt, this won’t be so bad.” But for kids, there’s no history to fall back on. The first day of school is a gigantic adventure of colossal proportions.
Yet, she was brave.
In that moment, I felt like God challenged my understanding of who He made me to be. I’ve read verses about being more childlike all my life but never thought about what they’re really saying. In Matthew 18:3 for instance, Jesus says:”I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” What does it mean to become like little children? I think it might mean that we’re supposed to be as brave as a six year old.
I think it might mean we’re supposed to be as trusting as a six year old. They put their faith in God and their parents with an abandon that isn’t limited to logic or reason. They just trust.
I think it might mean that we’re supposed to be as creative as a six year old. Every kid comes onto the planet believing they’re an artist and often adulthood slowly chips away at that belief. Maybe I need to put aside my pursuit of perfection and just color.
I think it might mean that we’re supposed to be as curious as a six year old. A butterfly isn’t a bug, it’s a reason to yell and scream and point and maybe even jump really, really high. Kids step out into each day as a blank canvas, waiting and watching to see what new colors God brings into their life. Kids are curious.
I could go on with this list all day and there are certainly things I wouldn’t add to it. There is wisdom and maturity that comes with age. But it’s interesting to me that when Jesus wanted to make an example of how we’re supposed to live, he never said, “Grab that 112 year old man over there. If you want to enter the kingdom of heaven you gotta be like this dude right here.” He used kids as his example. We’re called to become like little children.
So today, I’m going to be as brave as a 6 year old.
How about you?
God is refusing to answer my questions right now.
There are a few fairly large challenges on the table at the present moment. I would love to get some resolution on them. I’ve made that clear to God. I’ve presented my case, stated what I would love to happen and yet, nothing.
So I find myself doing what I often do in situations like this, trying to jump start God like a car that stalled out.
Instead of pushing God down a hill to get momentum and then cranking the ignition with the hope that the motor will catch, I’m going through my “Christian to-do list.”
OK God, no answer on that issue huh? How about if I read the Bible a little more? Let’s try that. Nope that didn’t fix the silence. Maybe I need to say better prayers? Or get some wise counsel or read a Christian book or go through old journals and look at other situations in which you have provided? Will that do it, you ready to talk yet? You ready to resolve the things that I think need resolving? No? What’s it going to take to get a clear answer on this issue?
I don’t literally ball my hand into a fist and yell at the storm clouds, but I might as well. God is not removing the confusion around my future and that’s frustrating. “If He really loved me, He would,” I start to think. Maybe there’s some area of my life that I’m messing up in right now and if I can just over turn the right rock and kill the snake under it, then He’ll end His silence and show me what to do. Maybe if I can just figure out where the break in the line of communication is, I can patch it and God will be able to lift me out of the situation I’m in.
Have you ever felt like that? There was an issue or a situation you wanted God to speak to and it just felt like at the time you needed Him most He went into stealth mode? You kept coming back to Him with the same question.
Is this the job I’m supposed to take?
Is this the guy I’m supposed to marry?
Will we ever not be so strapped financially?
You asked and you asked and you asked, and no matter how often you went to Him with that issue, it seemed like He refused to remove it?
I’ve felt that way, in fact that’s how I feel right now, but I’m beginning to think I might be wrong.
What if, it’s not an issue of me not hearing God correctly or me sinning in some way that is disappointing God?
What if it’s not that God is just deciding to leave me vulnerable to a season of confusion?
What if God loves me too much to answer my prayer?
I think that might be the real question I need to wrestle with. I think that’s where I need to start and a friend in high school gave me a hint that pointed me in that direction years ago.
He was a “single topic friend.” Have you ever had one of those? It’s a friend where you only have one point of connection, one thing in common, one topic you can talk about. You know he likes college football so every time you see him, that’s what you talk about. You wish your relationship was bigger. You wish you could talk about your families or your future or a host of other things, but for some reason this relationship is stuck temporarily on one thing.
And if that relationship is important to you, if that girl, who only wants to talk to you about music, is important to you, you’ll continue to be faithful to that topic. If you really love that relationship you’d never say, “I don’t want to talk about college football or music anymore.”
That would close the door. That would end the conversation. That would atrophy the friendship. So instead, while you hope and pray that there will be an opportunity to expand your relationship, you delight in talking about college football with your single topic friend.
Sometimes I think I’m like that with God. I get one thing stuck in my head. I laser focus all my prayers and thoughts and energy on one particular issue. And then I take it to Him. It becomes the biggest part of our conversation, the driving force that I keep coming to Him about and then I act confused at why He won’t fix it already.
Maybe God loves me too much for that. Maybe God’s thinking, “Jon, I want there to be a million doors open between you and me. I want your marriage and your job and your children and your dreams and every inch of your life to be a door you open to me, but right now, in this season of life, the only door you’re opening is the one called ‘the future.’ And you keep asking me to close that door with some answer from above that includes a clear set of steps on what you should do. But why would I magically take that away? That’s the vehicle for 100% of our conversations right now, why would I eliminate that? The result would be less conversation with you and I love conversations with you. I want you near me and fixing that situation the way you want it fixed would actually push you away. You would take the answer and leave.”
I don’t know what you’re praying about right now. I hope that you’re more mature in your faith than I am and have already grown your relationship with God much bigger than a single topic friendship. But if you haven’t, if there’s one heavy thing that’s weighing on you, please know that it might be that God loves you too much to remove it.
I think every Christian has a “Doesn’t Count List” (DCL), a collection of small things we do that might not be completely in God’s will for our life, but they’re so tiny they don’t really matter. If you say you don’t have a DCL, apparently lying is one of the items on yours because that’s just what you did.
Here are some things I recently realized were on my Doesn’t Count List:
Speeding
God is completely cool with this. I know we’re supposed to honor the authority we’re placed under, but God is like the state troopers on this one when it comes to driving faster than the legal limit, “Under 5 you’re fine, Over 5 you’re mine.”
Using the internet at work for personal reasons
Come on, I’m reading www.biblegateway.com and listening to podcasts of sermons. Surely God’s OK with me using time that my company pays me for that? I mean people take smoke breaks all day and I don’t smoke so I’m owed a few minutes of Internet break time here and there. I know that no matter what we do, we’re supposed to do it for the glory of God, which means working hard at work, but let’s be honest, that verse was written before Youtube, and that site has everything.
Doing things you wouldn’t recommend that other Christians do
I caught myself in this one last weekend. A friend sent me a link to a lil’ Wayne remix of Jason Mraz’ song “I’m yours” and it was awesome. I listened to it four or five times to make sure it was clean and then was about to tweet it from my twitter account when I thought, “Is that Christian of me to share that link? I mean it’s lil Wayne. I better not, I don’t want to recommend that other Christians listen to that.” But me? I’m apparently impervious to all sorts of less than holy forms of media. Me? I can handle that. (The second problem in that scenario is that by editing what I tweet but still listening to that song, I create a “twitter Jon” and a “real Jon.” I’m not sure if other Christian bloggers struggle with the temptation to “holy up” how they present themselves online but that is some whackness I need to get under control.)
Hook ups
If you thought I was going to talk about making out, you should be ashamed of yourself. I’m talking about the hook ups friends and family members can get us at stores. For instance, a few weeks ago when I decided to buy a mac laptop, they had a deal where if you were a college kid you could get a free iPod touch with the purchase and a free printer. I seriously considered finding a neighborhood kid to go in with me so that I could get the deal. And although I didn’t take advantage of that discount which honestly did not really apply to me, I’ve done that a number of times in the past.
Those are all pretty silly I guess. You could easily read my Doesn’t Count List and think, “Everybody does that. We can’t be perfect, what’s the big deal?” And you’d be right, we can’t be perfect, but what I’ve found in my own life is that the DCL is never satisfied with staying small and insignificant. It’s a hungry little list. It always wants more of your life. It always wants you to add new things to it. To grow and stretch until it’s a mile long.
When I was in college, I got into an unhealthy dating relationship. We were mutually bad for each other and our combined brokenness only managed to amplify the hurt we were able to cause. When my girlfriend got into techno music, so did I. When my girlfriend started going to raves, so did I. When my girlfriend started doing ecstasy, so did I. How?
I put it on my Doesn’t Count List.
After having years of practice adding “small things” to it and justifying why some things don’t count in God’s eyes, it was surprisingly easy to rationalize ecstasy. As I’ve written about before, in my head I told myself, “Cocaine is a real drug because you have to snort it. Heroin is a real drug because you have to shoot it. Pot is a real drug because you have to smoke it. Ecstasy is just a pill, like aspirin. I’ve swallowed pills before, that’s not a dangerous drug. That’s just a pill.”
As stupid as that sounds, when you’re living in stupid land, stupid decisions and stupid logic make a surprising amount of sense. So I started doing ecstasy. But that wasn’t enough for the DCL. So eventually I smoked some pot. And finally, in one of the scariest nights of my life, I did some acid. I kept adding to my “Doesn’t Count List” until it choked out all the good and made my life not count.
As gross as that all was, the bigger issue might be what keeping a DCL reveals I believe about God. Apparently, in my heart, God is still up in heaven keeping a massive list of things that count and things that don’t count. He’s Santa Claus and I’m a kid trying to hide the pieces of a broken vase under my bed in the hope that they don’t count. Christ’s death must not have been enough, because in my mind, there are still two lists going.
Let’s lose the lists. It all counts. If we could have been saved by a list, God wouldn’t have sent His son, He would have just given us more paper and pens so we could keep better lists. It has to count or Christ’s life doesn’t count. The grace, the mercy, the deep, beating heartbeat of hope from Christ beats loudly because it does count. The gap between me and God was wide and dark. But it was crossed.
Not by me.
Not by my goodness.
Not by lists.
But by Christ.
Because it counts.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I don’t think I’m the only one holding a list in my hand sometimes. How about you? Have you ever had a Doesn’t Count List? What’s on it?
I got kicked off the New Jersey turnpike once for being too fat.
Let me rephrase that:
My father in law and I got kicked off the New Jersey turnpike for having a moving van that was slightly over the legal weight limit of what the road could structurally support.
What’s slightly overweight mean?
In this case, 4,000 pounds.
There was two tons worth of stuff too much in our 24 foot Penske moving truck. I thought briefly about whether we could jettison some of our heavier items like they do in the movies. I imagine myself opening the back of the truck while barreling down the highway at 70MPH and yelling at my father-in law:
“We’re too heavy; we’re not going to clear the New Jersey border. We’ve got to lose some weight. The china has to go. There are 12 place settings. We ate lunch at Costco last weekend; we’re not fancy enough to have that much china. And fiesta ware? That stuff is made of lead. You could kill a man with a fiesta ware plate. So heavy. Throw that out the back too.”
But because I love my wife and promised her I’d never throw her china out of the back of a rented vehicle on a federal interstate, I wasn’t able to lighten our load. So instead, we were forced to get off the turnpike. The weird thing is that the NJ turnpike goes through backyards and small little neighborhoods. As soon as we got off we were completely lost. Since this was before GPS devices, way back in 2004, I had to take the support vehicle back to a rest stop and buy a map while my father-in law waited awkwardly in some neighborhood cul-de-sac with our panting yellow beast of a moving truck.
All in all, that day turned out to be a geography lesson I would have preferred to miss but for some reason that’s a subject I can’t seem to escape right now.
Getting lost, not knowing where you’re supposed to be, fumbling with maps both physical and metaphorical, these are all things I find myself constantly doing right now.
The idea of “place” has been something I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. I’ve got this overwhelming feeling that God wants me somewhere else. Whether that’s a product of immaturity or selfishness, there’s a part of me that loves to focus on there instead of here. I want to pray for chances to witness to far off people in far off places. It’s always sexier to think your mission in life is going to involve some sort of adventure with a rope ladder over a ranging river full of piranha as you carry a vaccine and the hope of the gospel to a lost tribe of people that will eventually give you a wicked cool village nickname (mine would be Rik-Rok) and perhaps your own machete. It’s a lot less fun to think that maybe you’re already in a mission field and the annoying guy who you pass TPS reports to, the guy who sits near you in a sea of cubicles, the sniffler, yeah that guy, he needs to know about the love of God.
I get caught up in that attitude and when I do, I eventually start peppering God with geography questions. Have you ever done that? Have you ever said to God:
Where do you want me?
This doesn’t feel like where I’m supposed to be God, can you please give me a sign?
Can you tell me where you want me to go?
Is this job, is this relationship, is this church, is this city where you want me to be?
Do you want me to move cities? States? Countries? Continents?
I fire off thousands of questions that center around the longitude and latitude of my life at God. And do you know how God answers me when I ask Him those kinds of questions? Do you know how I promise He will answer you if you ask Him those kinds of questions? Do you know the first answer God always gives when we say, “God where do you want me to go?”
“In my presence.”
We won’t get a city name first or a country or a street address. God isn’t Google Maps. Punch in as many prayers as you want, but more than anything else, God is going to say the same thing to you as He says to me,
“In my presence, that is where I want you to go. Better is one day in my courts than a thousand elsewhere. I’ve got other destinations planned for you, far off places and close to home addresses that you can’t even imagine, but every destination, every adventure begins with the same starting location, in my presence.”
Stop trying to force a map on God. He might give you laser specific directions for your life and your journey and your next steps. But first, long before He does that, even after He does that, He’s going to remind you of the one place He wants you to go most of all,
“In my presence.”
My wife and I spent Thanksgiving in Pensacola, Florida a few years ago. Since our kids go to bed awesomely early, 6:30 eastern, we were stuck in the hotel by ourselves at 5:30 central time every night. There are few things as depressing as sitting on a bed for five straight hours in a Sleep Inn hotel room. In addition to suck your soul out fluorescent lights, the room had kind of this potpourri of bad smells. It was part smoke, part cat, part old Hardee’s hamburger and a smidge of feet.
It was admittedly a good time to catch up on conversation with my wife, but after a few straight days of staring at each other, we were both a little stir crazy. One night I walked down to the BP gas station that was beside the hotel.
Behind the counter at the gas station was a sad woman in her mid thirties. She looked tired, like maybe life was hard for her a decade too soon. Like maybe she didn’t get to be a kid long enough and all that adulthood was starting to catch up on her.
On the outside of her hand was a small greenish gray tattoo of an X. I was curious about what it meant, so I asked her the significance. Here is her response:
“Oh that? That doesn’t mean anything. My mom gave me that one night when she was drunk.”
That was a kind of weird answer, so I asked her how old she was when it happened. She scrunched up her face for a second in concentration and then said, “I think I was 13.”
When I was 13, I was really concerned about my clothes. I was worried that my mom would buy me a Knights of the Round Table shirt instead of Polo. Or that I would have Reeboks instead of Nikes. These were the kinds of things I focused on, because at that age, kids would tease you for the smallest thing.
But what about showing up to school one Monday with a jagged, bloody green x tattooed on your hand? What was that experience like? How would kids react to that? Didn’t it hurt when her mom gave her that? She was drunk, writing on her daughter with a shaky hand and a hot needle.
I thought about that the rest of the trip and was considering writing about the marks that our parents give us. They’re not all as obvious as that and many are actually positive, but I realized that was a narrow way to look at it, because it’s not just parents that give us marks. It’s coworkers and spouses and friends and strangers. And when we don’t know they’re there, sometimes they actually stick.
Someone once asked me to review a memo at work that included some disparaging remarks about my writing ability. There on page 4 was a giant circle with a big red line through it that said “Fluff” and a sentence that promised a coworker was going to eliminate my fluff writing. The person that handed me the memo didn’t realize it was about me. They wanted me to focus on a completely different section of the document but my eye caught some criticism about the company’s writer, and since I was the only writer there, I couldn’t help but read what was written.
As I walked back to my desk, I was crushed. I felt like my complete lack of value had not only been noticed but captured in a memo. In the quietness of my head though, I felt like God popped in and said, “Hey, that memo doesn’t get to define who you are. I do. And I say you are my son.” I was blown away and instead of spiraling into despair and shame over that memo, I went back to my desk and wrote what was probably the best thing I’ve ever written for that company.
I wish that single event was enough to forever shake off the bad marks I’ve got on me, but it isn’t. I still doubt. I still believe the lies of the marks. I still, like lots of other Christians, forget who I am. I still give other people’s words too much power. I don’t have it all figured out. Instead, more than anything, life feels like it’s been a long series of believing that I am not who other people define me to be, I am a son of God. I am God’s work of art. And the more I have been open to believing that, the more He’s shown me it’s true.
The thing I realized, is that an experience can’t change that. My relation to God is not a mark. It is not a big tattoo or a little sticker, it is who I am. I can not completely cover that up or blot it out with failure. The prodigal son tries, he completely messes up his life. But more importantly, he shows how sometimes, the worst marks are the ones we give ourselves. “I’m a bad husband. I’m a terrible employee. I’m ugly.”
These are the words we sometimes hear from ourselves and they are the kind of words the prodigal son tries to say to his father. (I have written about this story so many times it’s getting a bit ridiculous but I love the lessons it has for us.) When the prodigal son rehearses his homecoming speech, he decides to conclude it with, “make me like one of your hired men.” That was the last thing he was going to say. But when he speaks to his father, that is the one thing he is not allowed to speak. The rest of his speech comes off without a hitch. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
These words are delivered without incident, but he doesn’t ever get to say “make me like one of your hired men.” Why is that?
Why are those eight words left out? You can certainly read that as just accidental, that regardless of the words, the father was going to cut him off before he finished speaking. And maybe that’s right. But when I read that, I read a father stopping a son from saying something the father would never do. The father would never make him like one of his hired men. He would never give the son a new mark of slavery. He would never call him employee, instead of son. So he doesn’t even let those words out. He stops him because no new mark would be given that day. The old truth, the one at the core of the son, still holds true.
Despite the pigpen and the prostitutes, the dirt and the deception, the father doesn’t see a hired man.
He sees a son.
He sees his child.
And that changes everything.