Jesus and I

I know that Jesus is real. I've never been able to shake that. That's always been something of a secular problem for me, and my spirit just loves that upper hand.

So this I know. I am a cynic and I can argue on both sides of the existence of God and Jesus as Lord. I could be an atheist's best friend in an argument.

But none of that matters. I know. I've tried to prove it untrue, but my mental eloquence makes no difference to the truth.

So I know that. So what?

Sometimes I lie awake at night and in my heart Jesus and I are in a deep wood. Out there in "all that dark and all that cold." And He is teaching me things and we just have some conversation and I ask Him questions and He recommends books and songs. And then I lie down to sleep and I remember that I've been a jerk to Him, but He doesn't. He just throws another heavy blanket over my shoulders and stirs the fire. That's just how it comes to mind.

And when I wake up by a smoking pile of sticks, He's gone. I don't mean gone as in I won't see Him again, I just mean He isn't right there. But I know that whenever I've hit the wire and there's nothing I can do He's there. And when life kicks the crap out of me He's there. He's a good man. People have a problem with that because it makes Him sound tame but He's not that. He's a warrior and a fighter and He's tougher than I. But He's still a good man.

The human race is pretty feminine. That's why we're the bride.

I don't know. God always shows up and I forget that sometimes. I tell people God never talks to me. I tell people I've never seen God. That's a fact. But when has He let me down? I don't know why He keeps stepping between me and my enemies, who I invite in my own home.

I think He must love the heck out of me.

Sometimes I sin. But sometimes I don't, and it's those times that I imagine God is beside me screaming and yelling "Don't quit! Don't quit! Don't quit! You can let that go! I believe you can do it! Look at me, look! We can take this! Say it to me! Say you won't let go!" And His eyelids are like white mud and they are circled by bruise colored fatigue because he's been staying up with me night after night after night begging me not to relent, reminding me how much He loves me and How much He is moved by me.

Sometimes I am sad. Often I am, but I'm a thespian with a cause. Still, sometimes it gets to be too much and in my mind I'm making a speech before a crowd and the burden is too much and I start to collapse but he catches me under my arms and whispers in my ears the words to my speech and I spit them out with passion and tears.

I walk outside sometimes and I can understand the proverb "a fool says in his heart 'there is no God,'" because I see glory and glory and glory everywhere. You would have to be stupid to think it all just happened right?

There are inexplicable feelings. Let's not blame them on chemicals.

I know that God loves me with the truest love. I know that the facts that "God loves you" and "Jesus Saves" are cliche. But I know that all cliches are great truths and that there is a reason they have been repeated and repeated and repeated. I know that God love me. I know that I can know Jesus. I know that "the same things win that always won." I know that God's love won't ever become antiquated or outdated.

I know that for whatever reason God is captivated by me. I know that He is stricken with emotion at each action I take. I know He is smitten with my journey towards Him. I know He is excited for my pilgrimage. I know He is devastated by my falls and hurt by my abandonment. My waste. I know every second is an ache when I am prodigal. I know He is angered by my sin. I know He is jealous for my attentions.

There are house fires everywhere you turn. I know people are burning to the ground. It's during these times that I imagine that I know a guy that can put it out. He's bigger and faster and stronger than I and He's the only man for the job. And I know He's on the other side of a forest and across plains in His home and all I have to do is run there and get Him, but sometimes I am too lazy to do that. But if I would just go and get Him, I know He'd take care of it.

Sometimes I lay in a a creek half-faced in cold water and he jerks me up and thuds His big hands across my face a time or two and He says to me, "Stop being stupid, I saved you're life." And that's why I get up and do his bidding. Carry out His mission. A knight loyal to my King. A son loyal to His Father.

Sometimes I hear a song and I tell Him it reminds me of Him.

He is the cause, citizens, that we fight for. He is something worth being passionate about. How sad that I can find time to be cynical about that.

I don't want to hide this fact, but neither do I want to present it in the wrong light.

Jesus and I are in something of a relationship. Because, we do things together. Generally it's me being a bad friend, son, subject, or whatever else you want to say. But when God is done raising His child I will be a warrior. Polished, but oh so rough around the edges. "I'm flawed, but I'm cleaning up so well, I am seeing in me now the things you swear you saw yourself." You've known what I was made of all along. You've always known what you were doing and you've always loved me. He's proud of me.

I'm just going to be frank with you, I love Jesus Christ.

May my life testify to that.

Faces to Statistics

At my campus at Lee University in Cleveland Tennessee, they showed a documentary about sex trafficking and prostitution. The documentary was titled Nefarious: Merchant of Souls and will be available in the way of DVD before long.

The film was really about slavery. A people in bondage. A portion of the synopsis of the film read as follows:

Regardless of nationality, victims are systematically stripped of their identity, battered into gruesome submission and made to perform humiliating sexual acts with up to 40 strangers every night. Held against their will, most are forced to take illegal drugs and are kept under constant surveillance. On average, victims are thrown into such ghastly oppression at age 13. Some are abducted outright, while others are lured out of poverty, romantically seduced, or sold by their families.

Here are some statistics on international slavery:

• A child is trafficked every 30 seconds.
• The average age of entry into commercial sex slavery in the United States is 13 years old.
• Human trafficking occurs in 161 out of 192 countries.
• Human trafficking is a 32 billion dollar per year industry.
• In some countries it is estimated that 70% of men purchase sex
• Over 27 million people are enslaved around the world.

Now try putting faces to these statistics. That's what the film does. Dirty men and helpless women. The average age for being thrust into the sex industry is 13 years. Parents literally sell their daughters into it. When they have a daughter it is said that they "hit the jackpot." They don't only sell their children to buy necessities (this still a terrible injustice) they sell them for luxuries, like television sets. Able fathers do nothing as their helpless daughters send checks home.

Even where prostitution is legal, organized crime is rampant. The reality is everyone in the sex industry is a slave.

As I watched the horrors unfold on the screen. I began thinking about giving money. Decidedly I would. I began to think about all the organizations as I listened to the women involved give testimony to the horrors of the life and even the trauma still faced afterwards. Some women even go back into the industry after being rescued from it.

A man who helps fight against these injustices spoke and he talked of how many people think if you educate the young women it will solve the problem. He said that this is disproved by the prostitution and traficking that goes on in America. He said that many of the young girls would have counseling but nothing would help.

It left me wondering what would.

The end moved me far beyond what I imagined it would. Of course, the answer was clear.

Jesus Christ is the only hope.

Each of the women interviewed (and even a former traifficker) spoke of what Jesus had done form them. Few of them did not weep when they spoke His name. Of course Christ is the only hope. It's like we are taking part of emancipation inflation. We have the tangible means of freedom but we don't have the assets to back it. If America prints money money money, then good, they have money, but if they don't have the assets to back it, then it's worthless. In the same way, we can counsel, educate, give money, rescue and do whatever we want to stop trafficking, but if we don't have Christ to back it then it is worthless.

Action is required. You can always turn a blind eye. That's okay. But abolitionist William Wilberforce spoke of a different sort of person. An incurable fanatic:

“If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.”

—William Wilberforce

Wilberforce practised three methods of taking action. The first: prayer.

This is where the assets back the action. We need Christ to change lives. We can't do it. The team showing the film recommended that every time we, in our vehicles drive past a red light that we remember to pray for those in trafficking or red light districts. It's a brilliant reminder. Prayer is powerful.

The second is raising awareness. Blogs, twitter, facebook, youtube. We have everything we need to make a cause known. Just do it.

The third is to give. Money. Your money. Give it for something better than your coffee a day at starbucks. You can literally commit to giving 3 dollars per week. You can spare it I promise. Yes. Money.

Though it seems a hopeless cause with God there is hope. Take action. Be an incurable fanatic.

Here is the site to get you started.

http://nefariousdocumentary.com/

Music Therapy

Music, among other things, is a bridge between the past, present, and future. That is, nostalgia, contentment, and hope. It inspires, it lends spices and salt to the bland emotions. It escalates wildly from apathy to action. It speaks to the heart of matters. It does, of course, more than I can ever hope to explain in hundreds of books, much less a brief essay.

What I want to walk across in so many words, is the bridge that it makes. The one I just talked about between the parodoxical stations of time. Because it does that, I think, it is a "balm to the soul."

It's a relationship. The music can be our voice in anger, grief, envy, joy, or any number of feelings that we want to let loose into a conduit.

But music heals too.

Sometimes when I'm sad, I want to feed that sadness. It's like when your lips are chapped, you sort of pull them apart and make your way towards the apex of the sting, once there you can smile at ease, because you've felt as much pain as you can possibly feel towards the matter. When I am filled with sorrow, I let the music feel me up and pull apart the lips of my lament, cracking them and releasing the eager blood. Searing the thin skin.

Sometimes it doesn't really matter the message of a song. Haven't you ever been grieved by a song that has a happy tune and lively lyrics? It is guilty by association at times. The best way to ruin a song is to listen to it in a dark time, because forever after when it plays it will be a mournful piece. I could make a playlist from those dirges. And listen to it until the melancholy memory pats me on the back and repeats the locational and situationally nonsensical, "there, there."

But sometimes the music therapy playlist just says "Hey, I'm a million miles away under an equally dark sky penning out this song on old paper and running my cold, callous fingers down the guitar strings. Smelling the ink and the metallic blood in each resonance of the chords. And feeling the same aches and tasting the same bitterness and sitting outside lost 'in all that dark and all that cold.' So let's go find a fire together. Heck, let's go build one." And the fiddler follows as you trek and trip through the trauma.

Toy Story Theory

I guess my problem with science has just been that I am an alleged hopeless romantic. We just don't get along. Our relationship isn't hostile. We are merely two different sorts of people. I like looking at the world in one way and they like looking at it in another. There are ways of reconciling the two, but I as long as I like scientists I don't have a real need to like science. Some of it is fascinating, but I just don't like how much it explains. Water isn't as beautiful if you think of it as two hydrogens and one oxygen. I don't want to know what things are made of. I like to think that things have essence and aren't entirely material. I like to think that humans have souls. If you tell me that a rock is sedimentary I usually want to bust your chops. I am annoyed sometimes that we can see the bottom of the ocean and the inner works of the body and that we can logically go into space. All the wonder has been explained away hasn't it?

It's not all bad. I could talk on the other side if I were a scientist, but since I am on the philosophizing, romantic end (ironic I would call this post a theory) I am going to contest the scientific explanations of all time.

I suppose it is only fair I explain the title. If you have seen Toy Story, you know that the toys are very much animate and all living out these intense dramas in their own miniature world. That is until the humans come around. Then they drop whatever they are doing and become ordinary pieces of plastic only brought to life by the imaginations of children.

Now, let's take an example from science. The human eye will do just fine. Science tells us that eyes are organs that detect light and convert it to electro-chemical impulses in neurons. It is a pupil, a cornea, an iris, and a lens and an optic nerver among other tiny structures. If you take the eye out of the skull you will find a blood shot orb with a little flagellate tail that once sent signals to the brain. If you look what was behind that it is just a big compression of cerebral mush. There isn't anything inside that eye. You can disect it and you won't find other worlds. It's no portal. No Shakespeare, or Da Vinci or whoever said that it was the window the soul. No it's not because you see when we tear open a head we can look and see that there is nothing back their but organs and blood. So there you have it. That would seem to explain it.

But you can't ever be sure.

Because maybe, maybe, there are some things we humans aren't meant to see. Maybe it is only when we leave the room that the toys come to life. Maybe the moon's face turns to craters when we put a telescope to its lunar lips. Maybe the sea lays out a carpet of sand to hide the fact that it is bottomless as the divers get nosy. Maybe our eyes turn to limp lumps of light-lapping lenses when we try to pull back the curtains on the windows to the soul. I think eyes go much much deeper than that. I know when I look in someone's eyes that what we see behind the drapes cannot be what is actually going on inside there. Fire is not a chemical reaction, it is more of a miracle. It is an element. Trees are wise, photosynthesis is not how they dine. They are classier than that. The universe is a work of art. You can't explain these things. It's alive. I bet you really could journey to the center of the earth.

I think that the world has a heart of its own and the real stories are going on behind our back. Those that don't believe don't get an inside scoop. Much closer to the actual action is not the textbooks and dissertations or anything that you can see under a microscope. Much closer are the fairy tales and the madness of poetry. Much closer are the philosophers and the supernaturally inclined. Something is going on in another context, but we don't know it. We are like the children who can only make up the stories with our imagination. We play with the toys but never see them at play without us. They are in hiding. They don't want to be discovered.

Then where would the mystery be?

Bravery

The road takes you a lot of places. There isn't much of a science to it. You just get on it and get to moving. The destination, more often than not, has nothing to do with where it takes you and what it shows you and teaches you. Roads are escape artists and navigators and smugglers and homes and journeys. That's why bards still borrow from its books and young people will attend its lectures.

Deification is what I call the above paragraph. A derivative of personification, it involves giving qualities of God to other things. It is probably a nifty resource for atheists everywhere. But it is also appropriate for allegory. What I mean to say is that it wasn't the road that took me somewhere with certain people, it was God.

As fate would have it, I was riding down the freeway one day to attend an outdoor Christian rock concert with three of my brothers (not by blood) Daniel, Samuel, and Wesley. When we arrived at the extra small town we saw a classic cameraman and pretty young newscaster duo. We all got sorta happy as we slowed down and lowered the windows thinking it had something to do with the concert.

"Put us on the news?"

"You don't want to be in this story."

Curiosity thus piqued we drove on ahead postulating amongst ourselves about what happened. Postulating so much that, in the unfamiliarity of the town, I passed the filling station that my friends wanted to stop at, seeing it as a justifiable place to use a restroom as opposed to the portable lavatories available concert-wise. They yelled at me to turn around so I pulled into a dirt driveway (apparently the only kind of driveway in style around these parts ) in order to back out and continue on in the opposite direction.

Upon pulling in, that sound we so often shrug off as background noise peeled the soundpaper of our scene back to where it could command our full attention. By gosh I tasted, felt, smelled, and saw that siren before I realized I was only hearing it. There were at least three emergency vehicles wasting no time getting where ever they were going.

Completing our vehicular 180 we found the engines to already be out of sight if not sound. We carried on our way only find a freeway fricasseed with frenzy. The epicity seemed operatic. Determined not to get caught in the turbulent metal black reflectionary snake of cars I pulled off at the median.

Action.

We surveyed what we now obvioused to be a wreck. Significant was a little purse of people all squatting in the grass. We agreed that they were huddled around a victim. What degree of victim that person was we did not yet know. Daniel announced that he was going to pray for them and unfastened his safety belt.

I cannot explain to you what happened in my spirit except that I didn't want him too. Maybe because I knew he was doing what was right and I knew that I didn't want to step up and do what was right.

Heroes do what's right.

"I don't think we are supposed to do that. I don't think they'll let you"

"They'll just turn me back then."

"Do something!" went the conscience's coax And still I sat. I watched him walk over slowly. I wondered if he had hesitation and a tinge of fear in his heart. If he did I couldn't have admired him more or been angrier (as a scapegoat for my own cowardice).

I saw other officials approaching so I pulled to the other side and parked flipping the hazards on. I watched Daniel from afar.

My pocket buzzed. I pulled out my phone and who but Daniel was on the caller I.D. I picked answered.

"Yeah"

"Give Samuel the phone"

I did just that. Samuel threw the phone down and started running towards the scene. I deduced that they needed a Spanish speaker. I finally emerged from the vehicle taking hurried steps frustrated for my inactivity up until now.

I guess it was about a tenth of a mile away and when I got there Samuel was bent down holding a large woman's hand. Her eyes were shut tight and perspiration pickled her dark skin. Her foot was immediately noticable with blood and she complained about it most (in Spanish). She and her husband had been ejected from the car. Her husband had a white sheet over his face. Dead. I didn't find out that was her husband until later.

Sam was talking to her and I tried to pick up on what he was saying. I know he asked her how old her kids were. She said they were both twenty. Two men. Twins I suppose. I prayed and at length paramedics arrived with a stretcher. They asked questions through Samuel and we finally rolled her on to a sort of towel and lifted her onto a stretcher. Samuel kissed her brow and walked over to the ambulance with her talking to her all the way.

The four of us carried on back to the SUV. We were all sobered by the grit of the scene. It is hard to see. Samuel was sobered most. Across the highway I noticed the news reporter and cameraman we saw earlier. Samuel approached them and said a few things and we all went back to the car. We were quiet.

I could see Samuel was still upset. I told him he did good. I told him you could tell a difference between people who do good just to get a pat on the back and people who do good because they love people. Then it was quiet again and I prayed aloud.

Later at the concert as three of us sat under a tree, Samuel finally spoke on the matter.

"I lied to that woman"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I told her that everything was going to be okay and that her husband was going to be okay when I knew he was over there dead. I feel really bad about that."

...

"What did you tell those news people?"

"That is something you won't ever know Mitch" he smiled a little as he said this.

I think people like Daniel and Samuel are heroes because they take action and they get out of their comfort zone and they love people. I love people but I don't act on that. I know the two are destined for greatness in their own ways. They both have their own ambitions.

But I still feel guilty. For a little while now I have been shooting my mouth off about being brave and how Christianity requires it. It demands it. I am a critic of the hypo variety. I always say that I want to do ministry and I want to be involved in it. Several times I have said that I wanted to be a pastor. But I should know that pastors don't just stand in a pulpit and make good theological speeches. People in ministry are supposed to be brave. They are supposed to show love to the world. If they aren't doing that, they aren't doing their job.

I am not fully aware of the future plans of my friends. If they plan to be doctors or architects or movie producers or bankers they are still more of ministers than I. If they plan to be ministers then they have the right idea.

I need to be a Christian. I need to be brave.