As a good many of you know, part of the graduation requirements at Western include writing a final paper. I am so late in getting this done that they probably won't accept it anymore, but never-the-less I am holding out hope. The trouble is, this is turning out ot be one of the more difficult papers I have written and I am not sure why. I've decided to start posting parts of it as I write so that I can get some feedback. Here is the first two pages or so.
How I Got to be This Way
"An Unexamined Life is not worth living."
- Socrates
How did I get here? How did my life become like this? I have not always been this way. Of course, at any given point in my life I could ask those questions and make that same statement, for I am somewhat different everyday. But at least, up until recently, I have always been like me. But now, now things are different; I can feel my story changing.
I suppose that before I say how my story is changing, I ought to mention how the story has gone so far. I’m going to skip the first few chapters, because it’s mainly me being a loner and a momma’s boy and I come off bad in it. Instead, I’ll begin when I first began to realize there was a story in the first place, and not only that, but that I was a character in it. This first happened in those tumultuous, terrible, and torturous years of high school. I had just spent several years in middle school, trying to become invincible, and failing that, invisible, all in an effort to avoid the cruelty that so often befell my classmates who had been thrown to the mercy of their merciless peers. By the end of the eighth grade I had been largely successful, but my victory was short-lived; high school has a way of making any good thing feel short-lived. With about a billion zits on my face, an awkward hair style, and all the courage of a beaten puppy I approached the ninth grade with a new awareness of my need for a savior. There was nothing noble or righteous about my first feeble attempts to find God. At my best I was curious, and most of the time I was simply desperate.
I searched for God at my church, a group of Lutherans trying their best to be happy in spite of their Lutheranness. I learned from them that ignoring evil, as this group was apt to do, doesn’t make it go away, nor does ritual without meaning bring any goodness or grace. I searched for God amongst the Mormons, joining them in their studies and in their activities and in their homes. I learned from them that calling everything else evil does not bring to you more good and I became convinced that my “Heavenly Father’s Plan” for me must include more than avoiding R-rated movies and staying away from caffeine. I searched for God in myself, where so many people have claimed to find him, and I found that he wasn’t there; nothing was there. I searched for God, but I didn’t find him and I never have, and I suspect I never will. That first time, and every time since, God found me. That was cliché, I know, but clichés can be true. Had I designed the encounter it would have been different-grander, filled with beauty, that sort of thing. But my encounter with the divine was so ordinary and unexpected that I didn’t even know it was happening.
"Love People. Love the potential that lies in them even more."
- Jim Putman, author, mega church pastor, used to be my youth minister
God came in the form of a wrestling coach with a neck the same size as my waist. The rest of him, his body, his voice, his demeanor, fit quite well proportionally with his waist-sized neck; he was kind of like a car accident-so frightening that you feel compelled to look away but for some reason you slow down to ogle anyway. It never crossed my mind that this man could end up as a mentor to me in that season of my life; at the time I wasn’t even sure that I could speak to him. But what I didn’t realize is that God was in him.
I have subsequently learned that the wise thing to do is to look for God in every person I interact with and every occasion I find myself in. That sounded a little cliché too, but I am certain that one is true. In fact, it is almost a pillar in my philosophy of counseling and ministry. I believe that everyone, every single person, has inside themselves the image of their creator, striving and struggling to break through and reveal itself. Time and again God humbles me by allowing me a glimpse of Himself where I least expect it-in the tears of an oppositional, defiant child, in the clingy behavior of his dependent mother, even in the delusions of a profoundly mentally ill man who just talked to Jesus the night before. Or, in this case, in a big-necked, national champion, all-American wrestling coach, who also happened to be a youth pastor and years later would articulate a statement that, in its context, was one of the most powerful I have ever heard: “I don’t care about wrestling, I care about you.”
Jim introduced me to a God that was quite different from the one I had been told about as a child in Sunday school. Whereas that God was afraid of evil and thus could only talk about good, happy thoughts, the God Jim told me about hated evil as much as he loved me. He didn’t set up simple, arbitrary rules to combat evil, he died to defeat it, and in dying-and raising-he defied death itself. This was the God who would one day crush evil beneath his feet. And he wanted me to help.
I spent the next several years watching the people around me suffer, and in my own ways I suffered along side them. I watched many of my peers make stupid, stupid decisions, sometimes because they were ignorant or ill-informed, often times because they desperately wanted to fit in. I watched still others endure the consequences of someone else’s stupid decision. Like my classmates I spent a lot of time in high school wondering when I was ever going to use this “in real life.” Well, here’s the real life lesson: young people spend way too much time and waste way too much energy simply trying to survive, and they need someone to help them be more than what the world has convinced them they are.
