This past weekend I took part in a panel discussion entitled “Conversations With My Inner Atheist.”  The stated purpose of the discussion was to “normalize the faith struggle,” by sharing the past and current hangups of a few of us who have been around the block with Jesus a few times.  Our stories ranged from personal to academic, as one might suspect…

**Abusive childhoods leading to questions of God’s sincerity…
**A knowledge of global injustice leading to questions of God’s ‘goodness’…

**Confusion regarding God’s violent character and rhetoric in the Old Testament…

**Difficulty drawing ‘in vs out’ lines between heterosexual and homosexual friends…

The idea was not so much to assuage the doubts associated with these questions but provide whatever sense of normalization might come from hearing older, wiser and fully-engaged christian men and women airing their grievances with God and struggles with faith.

Three ideas came to the forefront during our discussion.  The first I’ll make brief comments about now while the other two I’ll tinker with in posts over the next week or so.

First, while the pastoral impulse in me was (and generally is) to fix and heal whatever wounds of history, spirit and mind were aired during the session, there was something close to magical in the simple act of sharing our humanity for a while.  As one of the panel participants put it, “these two words can take you a long way in life and in ministry:

‘Me, too.’ ” .. shared humanity

As I thought of the many scenarios in my history that have led to serious questions about the reality or goodness of God and of Life, I remembered that ‘answers’ never did my soul much good.. Instead it was the presence of others who had shared or were currently sharing my grief or my struggle that saved me.

A further step in this thought process led me to the very Story we hold in question when our certainty wanes. It is, oddly enough, a story in which Jesus himself has reservations about “The Plan.” (http://bible.cc/matthew/26-39.htm)  It is a story in which the pivotal moment is when God, the One who sets the very stage where all our comedies and tragedies take place, says two words that go a very long way in life and in ministry…

“‘Me, too.” … shared humanity.

Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting thoughts about the other two ‘ideas’ that shone during our discussion. Namely..

…that “chutzpa” is a necessary and responsible religious posture. Chutzpa, in the religious sense, means having the guts to face God and say “I disagree.”

And lastly, that certainty is not the aim of faith. That, in fact, making certainty a goal in any area of life can be, and often is a recipe for existential paralysis.

I’ve been away for 6 weeks and just now getting back into the flow of work related things.  It’s generally a battle to settle back at home when I’ve been on the road, but returning to “normal” life after 6 weeks away has proven a bit more to deal with than I expected.  What I’m going through is often called “re-entry,” primarily because of our common desire to be astronauts and the burning sensation often associated with traveling to foreign places.. I’m told there is an ointment…

…Don’t google that.

Anyway, the more I reflect on what my actual difficulty is, the more I think it has to do with reorienting myself to a much faster pace of life than that I’d lived while I was gone.  For the last two weeks of May, Amy and I were in Hawaii with good friends on vacation.  The month of June was then spent at Young Life’s Woodleaf property where I was serving as a leader/mentor to college students who were also there to serve (more thoughts on this, and them, later).  Almost everything about my days over the past month and a half was organized around relationships; around people.  The pace of life here in my little office is set by the To Do List which currently looks like something Melville might have put together.

All of which harkens back to something a young Ethiopian man told a room full of christian ministers here in California this past May.  Reflecting on the un-relational nature of American living and christian ministry in particular, he said

“My people in Ethiopia thought you Americans were the richest people in the world, but then we realized you are poor because you have no time.”

And that afternoon in may the burning sensation was directly related to the sting of being slapped in the face with some African wisdom.

Here’s the thing about re-entry; it’s about the collision of ways to live and in that collision, there is wisdom about each of those ways of life.  In my case, the temptation is to consider the slower-paced, relationally-oriented life I lived for the past 44 days something unnatural.. a shadow of reality.  Whereas living beyond my own energies, half-awake from chasing my to do list and with little time for the things and people I actually care about is what is truly real.  But lying on my deathbed, I’m pretty convinced I won’t want to take one last look at all the crap I checked off my list.  I’m going to want my peeps around me.  I am probably, at that time, going to wonder what the hell kept me from organizing more of my life around those very people, slowing down enough to hear what they were saying and enjoy them.

We challenged our Summer Staff to remember what it was about their month that made it special, enjoyable and good; to commit to taking some of those patterns home and implementing them.  It looks as if this is my challenge; slow down and be with the people I love.

I am surrounded by cats.  I have been for years.  This is an enormous problem in that I cannot stand cats.  It’s not an allergy thing, though I do have some allergic reaction to cat dander.  It’s also not one of those “I’m a guy and cannot like small fuzzy things because it makes me look weak and also feel kinda warm inside” things.  I just get a bad vibe from cats.  Call it male intuition, but I really think they’re up to something as a species; something that is not good; something CATastrophic… He he hahaha.. ha.. ha,.. ahem.

Now, before you think this is all about me randomly selecting an animal at which to direct the anger pent up in me as an Oakland A’s fan, allow me to share a bit of my history…

While I was on Young Life staff, I lived in a basement with another YL staff guy.  It was not really a room.  It was a basement.  We had some stuff in it to sit on and places to put things which made it room-like; but you can create that same effect outdoors.  This was a basement.  The owner of the house who was renting this basement had two cats.  One of them named something cat-ish, like “Felix” or “Tabby” or “Get Behind Me Satan.”  This cat was alright insofar as he/she/it kept to itself upstairs and rarely if ever came near either my roommate or me.  The other cat… well…

…The other cat’s name was “BK,” or “Big Kitty” which is more of a description than a name and therefore a bit like naming one of your children “Daughter #2” or “The Short One…” but that’s beside the point.  The point is that a cat by any other name would still crap on my doorstep.

You see, BK would periodically enter our place and start snooping around; I am assuming he was scoping the joint to see how easily he could hide our bodies when his master plan came to fruition.  We’d shoo the cat out using the “phssst” noise; an act that always leaves a grown man feeling so good about himself.  At one point a guest in our place warned us that if we were not kinder to the cat, the cat would seek some kind of revenge.   She was right.  BK took to the regular practice of pooping in front of our entryway..  When I write that he did it regularly, I mean it was almost everyday.

(here I pause to point out one of the primary differences between cats and dogs.  When dogs have to poop, they simply think “I have to poop right now and would like to know where other dogs have pooped so that I can keep with tradition.”  Cats, on the other hand, when they have to poop, think to themselves “where can I put this that would cause maximum torment and frustration for those who stand in the way of my dastardly plan?”)

We went through several doormats before eliminating the doormat entirely, thinking we might throw BK off.  With the doormat gone, the poop onslaught ceased… or so we thought.  BK had not at all been daunted by our removal of the doormat.  He simply shifted the strategy of his offensive and began pooping in front of our bathroom door… (to be continued)

Marty Caldwell works for Young Life International.  He is the Senior Vice President of Young Life International South Division, which includes Africa, South-America, Mars and Pluto (even though it is no longer recognized as a planet).  This is his story and I’ve asked permission to recreate it.  I’ve not received that permission but expect it any day now. So,.. here’s the story:

A few years ago Marty received a phone call from a young man in Monrovia, Liberia named James.  James had read about Young Life and had a strong impression that God intended to use him to start a chapter of Young Life in war-torn Liberia.  This phone call was placed during the last phases of a 14-year long civil war which had rendered many if not most of the living in their nation homeless and destitute.  On the phone, Marty shared with James about some of the complications of starting Young Life and the often lengthy process it can be.  James was determined and asked Marty to come visit Liberia to meet some of the people interested in getting YL off the ground.

During the course of the conversation, Marty periodically heard what sounded like gunfire on the other end of the line.  “Are you alright?” Mary would ask “that sounds like gunfire on your end.”  “Yes, I am fine” James replied, “I am under the table. Now, tell me more about what we need to do to bring Young Life to Liberia…”  Marty came to know later that James had intentionally traveled into an area of Monrovia where there were regular street battles (featuring rifles and grenades, that is… ) because he knew there was a phone there he could use.  This was an urgent phone call for James.  His sense was that God had spoken and that meant he was to act NOW.  He would not be denied.  His courage and confident faith moved Marty so that, not no long after that call, Caldwell found himself in Liberia talking with the community elders of about next steps in the direction of “Young Life Liberia.”

At one point near the end of Caldwell’s visit, he was gathered by a group of these men in order to pray together.  Among them was a man named Marvelous.  Yes.. his name is Marvelous.

(side note: Can you imagine meeting a guy named Marvelous at a party?

YOU: “Hello, my name is Bob.”
HIM: “Well, hey there Bob, my name is Marvelous.  This is my wife Fantastic, my son Amazing and our daughter Muchsmarterthanyou.”)

Hand in hand with the rest of these men, Marvelous bowed his head to pray.  Now I’ve thought often about what kind of prayer I might have offered up if I had found myself one of a handful of men who believed he had been called to begin the restoration of my nation after watching it turned inside out for a decade and a half.  All the strategic and tactical obstacles.. Fund-raising, training, developing basic infrastructure… Where would I even begin such a prayer, with so much work ahead of me, and all of it daunting.  Maybe I would pray something profound such as “ummm..” or “uuuh” to start with.   I’d throw in a couple “OLordJesus” and “DearFatherGod” in there between the umms and uhhs.  Later on I would mix that up with a “LordFatherJesusOGod” or even a “GodFatherLordGod.”  Then I’d likely move on to powerful movements of prayer like silently blinking or looking around for someone else to pray instead of me.

Needless to say, Marvelous went a different route.  His head bowed, he prayed…

“Jesus, thank you for my shoes.
Jesus, thank you for my pants.
Jesus, thank you for food to eat today.
Jesus, thank you for a warm place to sleep tonight.”

This is the prayer of a man who knows who his Source is.  Seeing that way allows him to hope for and even expect great and miraculous works in a way that those of us who take our shoes for granted struggle to.  Having my eyes set more regularly on what I perceive as lack in my life, I lose sight of my own provision as evidence of God’s goodness and blessing.  In other words, when I consider that 1/6 of the human family lives on about a dollar a day, the fact that I have shoes on my feet at all seems a bit less humdrum.  In fact, knowing that this has always been the case with me and that I have usually had a choice of which shoes to wear on a given day begins to seem less like “what simply is” and more like and extravagant blessing.

Last christmas, my wife and I sent a small financial gift to one of the boys we sponsor.  Compassion International staff in Otovalo, Ecuador took him out to purchase soccer cleats with that gift and mailed us a picture of Roberto (our boy) holding his new shoes.  It was a great pic; Roberto holding up bright green shoes, wearing a pair of hand-made sandals he had worn through months before and smiling as if he had just graduated from Harvard. His obvious joy was more than quaint and cute; It was profound, humanizing and grounding for both Amy and I.

Perhaps there is something more than just the beauty of a simple and thankful heart in those words “.. Jesus thank you for my shoes…”? Perhaps those words reflect the kind of seeing that makes every great work (such as the restoration of a nation) even possible at all.  The words of Marvelous’ prayer, like the smile on Roberto’s face, are the fruit of a vine whose seed was buried and broken by its circumstances.  But this is a vine that, because of the goodness of the soil in which it took root, could not be undone by hardship, be it hunger or war or abandonment.  This is a vine which was born of the seeds of the kingdom of God…

-And the Kingdom of God is like a Liberian man who drove into the midst of terrible violence because he believed that hope for his country could be found on a telephone there.

-The Kingdom of God is like a Young Life Staffer who took that phone call from a man he did not know and responded to a request his organization was not prepared for.

-The Kingdom of God is like 200 Liberian teenagers showing up at the first ever Young Life camp in their country to hear, believe and respond to the message that that God had not forgotten them despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

-The Kingdom of God is like scores of other Liberian kids walking for 2 full days in order to get to this same camp because there had not been room enough for them on the bus.

And the birth of this same Kingdom here in America begins in the very same way as it begins in Liberia or Kenya or Mumbai or Manilla.  Which is to say that somewhere between (and in the meeting of) the numbing abundance of America and the hopelessness of the destitute poor is a place where we all bow our heads, see the shoes on our feet and for very different reasons find a thankfulness in our hearts so complete that it redefines our entire being..

…because..

-The Kingdom of God is like an American man who, upon hearing this story for the first time fell to his knees in front of his closet whispering “Jesus, thank you for my shoes… ” who raised his eyes the roof of the home he lived in, thinking of the friends and family he had, kneeling in the pants he chose from among others to wear that day and wept “Jesus, thank you for everything.”