Long ago, I read a book that claimed Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or Lord of all.
In either capacity, he claimed a mission to save us from the deceiver of this world.
And since his entrance on the world stage, billions and billions have come to believe in him as option three, Lord of all.
If he had indeed been a lunatic or liar, his mission against our deception would have been a heinously more evil imposition of a more perverse deception in its place.
That’s not the Jesus understood by even lunatics or liars, leaving us only one divine option.
Around this time every year for the last 14 years, I’ve come up with some new way to announce my gain of another year sober.
I don’t refer to being clean much anymore because unless you’re clean from the use of drugs, alcohol, or whatever addictive nouns once possessed you, you’re not sober. And to me, sobriety is the bigger gain.
Now while I thank God for the gift of another year and hope to continue the trend each year until I’m fresh out, celebrating birthdays becomes a lot more insignificant whether it’s a year spent on this earth or another spent back in your right mind.
There’s a nuance.
Clean generally refers to the physical aspect of recovery, meaning free from substance use. Sober often encompasses a broader scope, including the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of recovery.
It implies a deeper transformation, a new way of living and thinking not just in the absence of a substance but in the presence of life overall.
At Celebrate Recovery meetings, I’m asked what’s helped me most to accrue so many years off Meth and a half-dozen other substances who’d become my best friends for nearly 10 years.
The older I get, the more my story changes.
Getting clean and staying clean is entirely dependent on the discovery of something that gets you higher.
For me, it was my three kids and the sudden September 4th, 2011 acknowledgment of a once promising life going nowhere in accord with my faith and values.
It took seven felonies and handcuffs but the light came on and sobriety became the engine that promised to lead me on the track where I’d been a mere caboose for so long.
A burning desire to write came next, and I started my LifeMeansSoMuch.com website which is now the repository of over 500 stories about life, living, and my philosophical pursuit of true happiness and faith.
So, 14 years are just around the corner and I expect a bunch of folks will wish me congratulations, all of which has become a little more impotent with each passing September.
Awake in bed alone in the early morning hours and my mind wandered into enemy territory.
I realized a return to sleep was increasingly out of the question when I found myself compiling a mental list of life regrets.
Very poor use of time and an otherwise mentally healthy disposition I know, but I live on the edge occasionally and allowed it to continue a lot longer than I should have.
I wish I’d served in the Navy right out of high school when first offered that scholarship.
I wish I’d gone into insurance or real estate early on and I’d be rich and retired by now.
I wish I’d have beaten the hell out of Tony Franciosa when he called me out in 6th grade.
I’d like to have been able to grow more than 12 hairs on my chest by now…
And the list went on seemingly reciting itself in every category another 20 minutes or so.
I don’t recommend it.
Few other mental gymnastics can ruin a day you haven’t even begun.
The monster list had kept growing as if it had lied dormant under my skin much too long and I’d awoken to scratch exactly the spot it where it had been hiding.
It was way more easy than it should have been.
So I switched on the light, kissed my dog, and came to my senses.
I said a brief prayer and laughed at myself for the waste of time and brain cells.
I’m fine. No damage done.
The list of regrets dissipated more with each sip of coffee, but the lesson that remained is how readily we can live and die in those regrets, should-haves and unrealized wishes with such ease, but can’t just as easily turn the tables to be thankful and happy with where we’ve landed in life so far.
By then I’d advanced to my laptop typing into a new Word document every fortuitous blessing, turn of events that had once saved my life, and motive for living another day that typically accompanied my first step to the floor out of bed each morning.
I reminded myself I’m generally a radically positive guy, very slow to anger, and mentally astute as a better list began filling the second page of the document which became my second prayer of thanks this morning.
Today, he leaves on the trip of a lifetime and I don’t expect him to return in one piece.
Going home for the first time in 40 years rarely returns the same person.
Things change, people change, stories change, and his youthful life on a now abandoned small town Colorado farm is liable to answer many questions he’d rather not.
But it’s time to grow up and he’s driven by the gnawing truth of a need to know.
Ignorance is bliss when you’re a child.
But as grown man, decades later, ignorance loses the soothing capacity that made a difficult life bearable at 7 years old. Truth tends to sour the sweet and connect family dots in ways that never made sense in single digit years but every sense for a 50 year old in need of answers and their consequences.
Going home again breaks family secrets, exposing well-intended protective lies which have haunted him with so many questions he’s now compelled to answer before all depositions are dead and unavailable and it’s too late to correct history.
So he’s going home.
Like so many, we grow up with fond recollections of what we were told was a normal life but with a persistent, grating curiosity about the real truths behind them that we’ll address on a better day somewhere, somehow, sometime.
But time is not the great healer it promised to be.
So many events of our lives are proudly recalled in cocktail conversations which didn’t end the unnerving, silent question marks hidden from others and ourselves because we just want to fit in, and be normal, and for them to just go away.
But forty years later, we find we’re no more normal than we’d chosen to believe all these years, and living with those nagging inconsistencies drags us back to the place of their birth for a private intervention that will very likely drop him or any of us in pieces on the floor of an abandoned farmhouse somewhere alone in Colorado asking all the whys with no one there to answer.
Go home, good friend.
And when you return, I’ll be here to help you pick up those shattered pieces and assemble your once favorite stories into a painful new narrative of truth that hurts so much but heals so much more.
I’ll be waiting here with no better answers but to help unpack the discoveries in your new baggage and put it all away for good.
And maybe then, you can finally grow up. I promise it will be wonderful.
I hadn’t considered myself among “the least of these” until starting over at 51 as an ex-felon working a $9/hour church janitor job apparently exceeded the qualifications.
But the surprise of a fifty dollar bill tucked in my back pocket by a passing stranger at Christmastime was eclipsed only by the words accompanying the gesture.
“You’re making more of a difference than you know, young man.”
I’m not sure if I was more shocked with being addressed as a young man or by the unexpected generosity of his acknowledgement of a stranger working a lowly, invisible job during the busiest time of the church calendar.
I’d just returned from plunging a TeenTime toilet full of poop and was en route across the courtyard to a hazardous cleanup in KidKare made by siblings who’d had bad blueberries and Alpha Bits for breakfast.
I’d like to report our encounter was an interaction but his swift disappearance into the festive crowd of evening Christmas servicer was as angelic as his act of kindness.
By the time I put my mop and pail to the ground and wiped my hand on my shirt to shake his, he was gone.
I reached into my back pocket to find the gift he’d bestowed, and while $50 was a helpful blessing this time of year, his words had held much greater value.
Invisible people are all around us.
Janitors, cashiers, clerks and others are such name tags we rarely if ever read or better yet, take notice.
Doing so need not cost 50 dollars or 50 cents, but only to know the words to their song on a not so silent night that hoped someone might care enough to notice and at the very least, tell them that in this world, they’re making more of a difference than they know.
Jesus is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone. Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. Acts 4:11-12 NIV
A cornerstone serves as a foundation or starting point for a building, monument, or other structure. It is typically the first stone set in the construction of a building, and plays a significant role in the overall stability and integrity of the structure.
It represents the values, principles, or beliefs upon which the building or institution is founded.
She went and told those who had been with him and who were mourning and weeping. When they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen him, they did not believe it. Mark 16:10-11 NIV
Unbelief.
The cross and the Jesus story is a stumbling block to man and was even to those who had been most prepared to believe it.
Living with him and serving him was at times still not enough to keep faith alive.
And now challenged to believe the unthinkable, they arrived at a crossroads that would either steal it all away or seal their faith and devotion for eternity.
After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it. Mark 16:19-20 NIV
“I believe but please help my unbelief.” An all too familiar cry plaguing followers from the start.
Jesus doesn’t leave us there in limbo but speaks to us all the reasons and experiences that have undergirded our faith and decision to follow him.
The miracle of his resurrection isn’t just a story but the very nexus on which our faith stands.
People who want real change in this country will put their votes behind one candidate with hopes—but no promises—real change will actually happen.
People who want real change in their communities will put their money behind charitable causes that promise to create real change.
The power of charity over government, however, lies in its requirement to be held accountable to actually deliver on what politics only promises, and then usually at less than half the cost.
If you’ve ever observed someone at the end of life it’s an experience that stays with you the rest of yours.
I recall when my mother died, her eyes opened and then closed before her final breath and it left me with more questions than answers.
The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”
Mark 15:37-39 NIV
Albeit a little late, the centurion’s own acknowledgment was on the money and certainly made a profound impact on his life and on those he shared it with.
It took witnessing Jesus’ final breath for his belief to materialize, just as it did ours.
