Into The Deep Blue

Yesterday afternoon, I considered that my opening line for a talk to some at-risk students at Project LIFT might just be throwing up on the lovely blue carpet. It was a deep blue, like the far-out part of the ocean that people always warn you to avoid unless you’re an expert swimmer or have a boat. I’ve always been one to get nervous before speaking – and it’s probably more akin to anxious excitement than nervous dread – but I was especially amped up yesterday because it was a new experience for me. Sure, I’ve spoken to hundreds of youth over the past 15 years, but it was almost always within a church context, almost always on a passage of Scripture. This was different. This was me speaking to a theme, trying to inspire kids with tough backgrounds and even tougher realities to overcome the hardships before them and aspire for something more.

Sure, we were meeting in a church, but I was doing something new. And I knew I would either nail it or fail miserably.

I decided that nailing it was the preferable option. So I pushed my anxiety aside, kept my Whatchamacallit candy bar in my stomach where it belonged, and I started telling a simple story about a boy, his kinship with a pencil, and the journey of discovery they made together. (If you’re interested, here’s the PDF: Project LIFT – The Boy)

If you’ve ever spoken to teenagers before, you know they can be a tough sell. They’re smart, they’re savvy, and if they think for a second that you’re flim-flamming them, they’ll shut you out and move on. The students I spoke to yesterday were no exception. But as I went along with the story, trying my best to weave in humor and add in improvisational moments based on their responses to me, the most amazing thing happened.

They stayed with me.

Now, here’s where years of youth work comes in handy. To the average person, a teenager who is “staying with me” might seem a lot like a distracted, disinterested person. They rarely keep eye contact, they tend to shift in their seats, and every so often they’ll look up or down or around the room to see if maybe a magic fairy has flown in to grant wishes. It can take some getting used to. In fact, you really have to simultaneously speak to them and look for the cues that they’re with you: a smile, a subtle nod of agreement, leaning forward in their chair at a crucial point, tapping their neighbor on the shoulder and gesturing for them to pay closer attention. All of those signs were present yesterday afternoon, even as my talk soared past the fifteen minute mark.

I wrapped it up after 25 minutes, and the best thing in the world happened.

They wanted to ask me questions. Which means they had listened and heard something that piqued their interest. I even got asked two of my favorite questions: Have you ever thought about being a teacher? and Have you ever thought about doing stand up comedy?

(In case you’re wondering: yes to the first and no to the second.)

Afterwards, the folks who invited me to speak (without ever hearing me, might I add – brave folks) told me that it was the first time they could remember that the kids had ever sat through a presentation without having to be redirected.

“That never happens,” one worker said. “They actually listened to you.”

Yesterday, I took step beyond the familiar boundaries I’ve always known, and the ground beneath my feet was just as firm. I’ve always been told – and believed – that I was a good preacher; yesterday was the first time I’ve been told I was a good speaker. There may not seem to be much difference, but for me, there is. And since you might be asking yourself, “Self, what is the difference?”, I’ll tell you:

A preacher comes with a built in audience. A speaker has to earn one. God has always been gracious to me because He’s always provided me with a platform to speak from and people to speak to. I’ve never taken it for granted, but it’s always been built in for me because of my involvement with a church. Yesterday He showed me that he could open doors beyond a church (never mind that I was physically inside a church) and that I could earn the right to be heard. He showed me that He could do more with me than I’d imagined.

The best part of the day, however, the part that just made me fresh-from-the-oven-chocolate-chip cookie gooey inside, was when I got into the care with Rachel to leave. She silently grabbed my hand and said, “Good job.” I kissed her hand and said thanks. But then she added this, and I knew things were going to be okay:

“I loved hearing you speak like that. You really seemed to be in your element. It was awesome, and the kids really enjoyed it.”

One journey ending, another beginning. Into the deep blue we go.

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?

When Anything Was Possible

This morning, because he was climbing the walls, I put my son in my car and took him for a drive. We ran an errand for work first, then headed down Highway 78, eastbound. We passed through Loganville, Between, Monroe…and as the mile markers swept by, Jon asked me where we were going.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m going to take you to where I went to college.”

“You’re gonna take me to your college?” he repeated.

“Yeah. The University of Georgia.”

“The Yoo-be-nursery of…how do you say it?”

I smiled. “The University of Georgia.”

“Oh. You’re gonna take me there?” he asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Can we get ice cream?”

The great thing about my alma mater is that it’s less than an hour’s drive, yet feels like going to another planet. As we turned onto Milledge Avenue, Jon immediately started asking questions. “Why are there so many houses? Why do people have couches in the yard? Why do they have bulldogs on everything?” It was non-stop.

I turned into the Butts-Mehre Building parking lot, thinking that I’d take him to the sports museum inside and show him the glory, glory of old Georgia. We walked in and in quick order took pictures with the 1980 National Championship trophy, Herschel Walker’s Heisman Trophy, and a very nice lady who knew where the restrooms were (that was Jon’s idea). But all of that lasted less than a minute; suddenly, Jon wanted to know where the scientists were.

“I want to see the scientists, like me.” (Special thanks to my brother- and sister-in-law Terrell and Julie White for sending Jon a Big Bag of Science Experiments for his birthday. My kitchen floors will never be the same.)

So we left the Butts-Mehre, went down by Foley Field (Jon had zero interest in the baseball diamond), turned by Stegeman Coliseum (he wasn’t interested in that either) and zipped over towards the Biology, Chemistry and Food Sciences buildings. He begged me to find a place to park so he could “see the scientists make stuff up”, but I couldn’t find a spot, and wasn’t sure we could get into some of the labs anyway.

“That’s sad,” said Jon. “Don’t people want to see scientists?”

I’ve yet to tell him what Bear Bryant said on that issue: “80,000 people never showed up to watch a chemistry test.”

We turned left on East Campus Avenue and drove behind Sanford Stadium. I turned left again on Baldwin Street and showed him Park Hall. “That’s where daddy spent most of his last two years of college.”

“That looks boring,” he replied.

We turned right onto Milledge once more, and then made a right onto Broad Street. I parked downtown near the Arches and we took a stroll across North Campus. We looked at squirrels, trees, the Chapel Bell, the Law Library Atrium, and the inside of the main library. I walked him back down to Sanford Stadium and made the mistake of telling him that’s where all the dead Ugas are buried. After that, he wanted to talk about nothing else.

It was a nice trip, despite the fact that the campus looks almost nothing like I remember it. Fifteen years after I left, the university has become what former president Charles Knapp had dreamed: a top-flight center of education. I marveled at how young the students are compared to when I was in school; how many of them still think they’re invincible enough to smoke; how many of them seem far more determined than I was when I roamed the same grounds.

As we walked back to the car, I took Jon to Park Hall, where the English and Classics departments are headquartered. I snapped a picture in front of my old haunt, and recalled when a professor stopped me on the front steps and told me that, with a bit of revision, some of my pieces would be press-ready. And then the professor offered to send them to his friend at The New Yorker – and could almost guarantee they’d see print.

I stood there and watched that memory play out one more time: I shook his hand and told him thank you, but no. I wasn’t prepared to face rejection. He asked me to reconsider; told me that of all the students in my “Writing for Publication” class, I was the only one to demonstrate real potential.

I told him no a second time. Then I walked away.

It’s been fifteen years, and I still remember that. In college, so the saying goes, anything is possible. You’re not who you were, not yet who you’ll be. You’re a bundle of potential and passion and purposeless energy. You’re waiting to be aimed somewhere and to see how far you’ll go.

At least, that’s the way some people were. I wasn’t. I’m 37 now, and am just finally reaching my “anything is possible” phase. It took me this long to realize the things about myself that are good and worthy and deserving of people’s attention. Today, I wouldn’t hesitate to take that professor’s hand and say, “Let’s sit down and make those revisions now. Why wait?” I would whole-heartedly accept his offer and be so excited about even the possibility that I might get read, much less published.

But I am that person today because I wasn’t that person then. I am a husband and father and writer today because I couldn’t see myself as any of that then.

Sometimes, we take the path we think we’re supposed to take because we have a hard time imagining ourselves take any other path. We choose what we know because we’re afraid of what we don’t. And sometimes, we discover that we end up where we started; we come back to the path we turned away, prepared to take it and see what happens.

That’s what I felt today, standing on a campus that isn’t the same as it was fifteen years ago. But then again, neither was the man standing there. Today, with my son in tow, I went back in time and realized I hadn’t missed my moment; I’d just been preparing for it.

Carpe diem, right?

Anything is possible. Even today.

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.