Falling Down

I fell through the ceiling in my hallway tonight. I was carrying a stupidly heavy box of books from my packed up office (a box that was so I heavy I actually thought to myself: I should probably just leave these downstairs), and since my attic doesn’t have decking (but does have a high number of obstacles to easy walking) I missed one of the joists and my left foot came crashing through the ceiling below.

It’s a good thing my butt already has a crack in it – as it is, I almost gave myself a second one. Luckily, nothing sensitive got injured, and all I ended up with was a three foot square hole in my ceiling and a baseball sized contusion on the right side of my butt (which was helpfully treated by my sitting on an ice pack for 20 of the most awkward and least attractive minutes of my life).

For someone who just quit his job and has a limited income right now, this was not a welcome experience. Doubly so since I also have the handy man skills of a six month old.

So now I’m sitting here, staring at the massive hole in my ceiling, and all I can think of is Michael Caine. Specifically, this clip:

I love that clip for a thousand different reasons, not the least of which is Michael Caine’s accent. The man just sounds cool. But I also love it for the truth it contains: we fall down so we can learn to rise. Life has its way of asking us to go backward in order to go forward; we’re not fond of that fact, but it’s true all the same.

I had coffee with a friend tonight (well, now that I think about it, I had coffee; he never drank a thing) and we talked about life and the changes that it holds. For me, the changes with my job and career track; for him, the adjustments to fatherhood and how his writing/creative life has been put on hold for the moment. As we often do, we reminisced about life in high school and college, and we each were able to identify a specific point, or a specific thing, that – if we could do it all again – was the one thing we’d do differently. We talked about that for a second, and then my friend said something like this:

“But you know, by not taking that path, we’ve become the men we are today. So in some ways, not making those choices taught us to make them when they counted.”

We fall down, so we can learn to pick ourselves back up.

I know plenty of people who’ve fallen down lately (and for some, it’s more accurate to say they’ve been shoved down cruelly or kicked to the ground). There are people who are simply looking for enough hope to make it through the end of the week, or the day, or their particular shift at work. They wonder if things will ever be in their favor; if they’ll ever reach that point where life feels like it’s moving forward more often than it feels like it’s going back. The dream is still out there, but they’re tired of it being beyond reach.

All I can say is that falling down isn’t the worst thing in the world. Going backward isn’t always bad. It’s staying there that’s the issue.

If we fall down, we must get up.

That’s the path of reward – that’s the life worth living. Even gaping ceiling holes can be patched and made good as new. But sometimes, we have to live through those moments to believe that.

Do What You Do

I had coffee this past Sunday with a friend of mine who happens to help writers/creative people transition into new careers. We met at a local coffee shop and chatted briefly about the changes going on in my life, and I asked her for advice.

She gave it to me. Straight, no chaser.

“You don’t need to change fields,” she said. “You need to do what you’re good at, which is write about and talk about God in a way that young people, and people who maybe aren’t so into God, feel like they have a friend.”

Well dang, then.

What does this mean moving forward? I don’t know. I have suddenly surged upwards with the number of folks subscribed to this blog (I’m almost to 400, 225 of which have come within the last month or so) and my freelance career is coming along nicely. Not enough to make a boatload of cash, but enough to give me hope that more work is out there if I’m willing to hustle for it (and I am). And I know that people have been interested lately in having me out to speak to their church’s youth group or weekend retreat (and I would love to do even more of those).

I don’t want to make any kind of declarations, but I’m satisfied that God is showing things to me, if only I’ll have eyes to see. And it’s all new territory. New sights. New sounds. New smells.

It’s scary stuff. But as someone wise once said, “The trick is to figure out what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about, and get someone to pay you for doing both.”

Do what you do, bruh. Do what you do, and trust Him to do what He does.

Amen?

Wherever He Leads

While walking along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

- Matthew 4:18-22

Last week, I read this passage to the students in my CLC class. It was the beginning of an exercise to help them think of leadership from a Biblical perspective. After reading it to them aloud, I closed my Bible and asked them: “Based on this passage, what made Jesus someone worth following?”

They looked at me for a solid three minutes. Nobody said a word. No one so much as whispered an idea to a neighbor.

Total and complete puzzlement.

Finally, one of the seniors said, “Honestly, I don’t see anything in that passage that tells me why Jesus was worth following. He just told them to follow, and they did.”

Another student piped up. “Maybe they followed him because the life of a fisherman was boring. Maybe they just wanted to do something exciting.”

One of the seniors rolled his eyes. “I bet they thought they’d get money out of it. Maybe the line, ‘fishers of men’ made them think that they would be doing something special.”

They continued on for a few minutes, each new idea prompting other new ideas, until we finally had a pretty good discussion going. After letting them bat the various thoughts around for a few minutes, I finally said, “What if they followed him because he was sincere?”

Once again, I was met with silence.

“What if,” I continued, “it wasn’t about what Jesus said, but more about Jesus himself? If it wasn’t about end results as much as it was about the One speaking?”

Still silence.

“When we choose to follow Jesus, when we fall in behind him and go wherever he leads us, we don’t always know how it’s going to work out. We don’t know that we’re going to have an adventure or excitement; we don’t know that we’re going to profit from our obedience; we don’t know, honestly, what the cost of following him will be. But there’s something about him – something in his voice, in his words – that compels us to give up what we know in exchange for the chance to follow him. Often, it means leaving behind the things that we have always held onto and embracing him instead.”

I paused.

“We follow, not because we are guaranteed to prosper, but because we are guaranteed to be with him. And that’s what makes the difference.”

Sometimes, we forget that following Jesus means following him – wherever he leads. The psalmist made it clear that we should follow the Shepherd even into the valley of death, and fear no evil, because he is with us. And if that means leaving behind people and places that are familiar to follow his lead into territory uncharted, so be it. We shouldn’t be afraid because he is with us.

This lesson came to fruition in my life last week. After a long time of wrestling with it, I resigned from my job as youth pastor last Thursday. One day I’ll write more about it, but for now, God is calling me into something much more frightening: the pursuit of a career that engages culture by making it. I want to write. I want to speak. I want to return to a time from my past where I can make short videos and podcasts. I want to do all of that and more.

I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. For the first time in my life, I’m literally waiting on God to say, “Go here.” And it scares the heck out of me. There are so many unknowns, and there’s such a part of me that wants to reign it in, take control, fix the problem, instead of trusting the One who has called me out to follow him.

It’s a scary place to be. But I’m with him.

And that’s what matters.

Obligatory Post

I’ve been writing against deadline all day, but I feel obliged to post something. Thus, I give you a fair approximation of what my day has been like:

I’ll be back with an actual blog tomorrow.

When Pastors Go Bad

You’ve probably read or heard about the No-tipping Pastor story by now. If not, it’s fairly simple: a pastor goes into a local Applebee’s with a large party. Because they have over eight people, an automatic 18% gratuity is added to each patron’s bill. The spendthrift pastor scratches out the automatic tip, adds “an emphatic zero” on the additional tip line, and scrawls the words, “I give God 10%; why do you get 18?” on the ticket before signing “Pastor” above her name.

The waitress borrowed the phone of co-worker Chelsea Welch, took a picture of the receipt, and posted it to Reddit. It went viral, ending up on Yahoo!’s news crawl.

I read that story yesterday, and was offended by the pastor’s behavior. It’s hard enough getting respect as a member of the clergy these days; having one of our own spit on the brand doesn’t really help.

But the story gets even worse.

Chances are you’ve heard that the offending cheapskate, Pastor Alois Bell, from Truth in the World Deliverance Ministries, compounded her stingy error by calling the Applebee’s and complaining about the receipt being posted. The manager of Applebee’s apologized to Pastor Bell for violating her right to privacy and fired Chelsea Welch.

That’s right: Chelsea, who did nothing other than loan a co-worker her phone, got sacked.

God bless America.

Today, this story is all over the internet. People are taking sides, and Bell now claims that she left a six dollar cash tip on the table. And in the link above, she says the automatic gratuity was charged to her card anyway. To add just a dash more bizarro to the story, when you Google her church, you get a link to this website, and this is all you see:

I especially like the Luke 6:38 quote right next to the picture that got Ms. Welch fired.

The site might be a fake, something put together in this cynical and ironic internet age to jab at the faux paus of the religious. That wouldn’t surprise me. Neither would it stun me for the site to be 100% authentic and utterly tone-deaf. Quite frankly, religious folks do stupid stuff like this all the time.

This story irked me, because after I read it on Yahoo! there were immediate links to it on my Facebook wall. Some were Christians lamenting the story; others were atheists asking if this was what Jesus would do. As a pastor, it just bothered me to no end that I felt on the defensive about my calling and vocation, even though no one suggested a correlation. In fact, most people just jumped on the “Christians are crappy tippers in general” bandwagon, and, after polling my Facebook friends, I had several who responded that during their time as servers, they hated Sunday shifts because the Christians who came in after church were routinely the worst tippers.

I know I have seen my fair share of the church crowd horribly mistreat servers by berating them, demanding excessive attention, and just in general being really, really hard to please. Seeing that kind of behavior often enough is what sparked my wife and I to make it a principle that, when dining out, the server gets 20% from us. Period.

And that’s 20% in money, not in Gospel tracts or special “prayer of blessings”. We actually give them money for their labor, even if it’s not the great. Because you never know why a server is having an off-night; it could be that they’re overworked, or stressed, or worried about things at home. My cousin worked as a waitress at a local Buffalo’s that we visit from time to time, and I can tell you that when you see the waitstaff as people who have lives, the fact that they don’t get the sweet tea to you within thirty-five seconds isn’t that big a deal.

Sure, I have my moments where I feel entitled. I have rolled my eyes, or let out a huffy sigh of displeasure at the fact that my chicken sandwich, meticulously ordered with medium buffalo sauce, no lettuce, no tomato, no mayonaise, french fries that are hot and crispy, with the bleu-cheese dressing on the side and swiss cheese added to the sandwich for a tangy contrast, came with the buffalo sauce on the side and the bleu-cheese dressing on the bun. I have my moments when I’m in the mood to be pampered, and I unfairly expect a waiter or waitress to make me temporarily feel like the Earl of Fife. I think we all do.

And I’ve certainly had instances when the service was so horrific that I dropped the tip to 15%, but that’s usually the nuclear option, reserved for instances such as when the waitperson looks at me after I ask for a refill and tells me to “quit drinking so much. I’ve got stuff to do.”

But to shaft someone on the gratuity, and then not only leave a snarky, unkind note, but sign the note with a flourished “Pastor”?

Never crossed my mind, and here’s why: I’m supposed to set an example in action and speech to the people around me (see  Timothy 4:12, 16). I don’t have to be perfect, but when I do make a mistake I have to own up to it, confess it, and model repentance. That means that I have to walk in the Spirit of Christ, with humility and accountability.

It also means I don’t call Applebee’s and complain that my error in judgment turned into an international embarrassment that I want erased, and now. I don’t get someone fired for my mistake. I take the heat, make it a point to adhere closer to the teachings of my Savior, and quietly spend the rest of my days being a blessing to those that serve me food.

Because if anyone on the planet should understand that the “worker is worth his wages” it’s a pastor (Matthew 10:10).

Believe it or not, the title pastor doesn’t automatically mean the person carrying the title is good. Bad pastors abound. And the cure for them is the same as it is for everyone else: conviction, confession, repentance.

Here’s hoping Pastor Bell keeps that in mind the next time she decides to head out for a bite.