Every Summer when I was a kid we drove 90 miles to the big city of Dallas, stayed in a Motel 6 or some other chain with a “Magic Fingers” bed, and spent a day at Six Flags. My parents may remember it differently but I’m pretty sure those were some of the best days of my childhood. There’s just something exotic about skyscrapers to a small town kid. And is there a kid alive who doesn’t feel adventurous just by spending the night in a hotel?
Nowadays a tall building and a Hampton Inn aren’t all that thrilling. Neither is herding three kids through an airport at five in the morning. But to my kids? According to Gresham (age 6) today is “the best day ever.” And we’re not even in New York yet.
We’re heading to the big big city for a couple days to see the Statue of Liberty, eat dirty water dogs from a street vendor, check out the American Museum of Natural History and, yes, spend the night in a hotel. Fancy.
I won’t be blogging. I’ll be technology-free the whole time...except for the Magic Fingers. (And possibly some Twittering.)
I have a lot of flaws. One of my biggest is envy. I don’t envy salaries, houses, cars, phones or guitars. I envy the guy who plays to 5,000 people every night. It’s not the money those crowds spend at the merchandise table that I wish for - though I could sure put it to use. It’s not the ego boost and fun of so many singing along that I want - though that’s a pretty intoxicating high.
I find myself falling into a familiar trap: My inner critic grabs a megaphone some nights after a few kids have been sponsored and says, “Yea, you might have done some good here, but how much MORE could you do?” And suddenly I’m unsatisfied, discontent, pondering a job at Chick-fil-A.
But today I pity the rockstar with his thousands of fans. There’s one thing I can do that he can’t. (Ok, two. I can’t do jump splits.)
I can stand in the lobby at the end of the night and talk to people. There’s plenty of room. No one’s mobbing me. I’m not stuck behind a table signing autographs while a road manager sees to it that every interaction is as brief as possible. “Move along. We’ve got a lot of people in line, folks. Move along.”
It’s not the rockstar’s fault. Not entirely. He’s truly too popular to be with people. There’s no space, no time, no way it can happen if he’s going to get on that bus and make it to the next city for the next packed-out show.
And that’s a shame.
Last night a former sponsored child from Uganda (Olive) and another from the Philippines (Kiwi) came to my show. Olive opened the night with a too-brief testimony about her life as an invisible child in Northern Uganda hiding in the jungle every night so she wouldn’t be kidnapped and forced to fight for the Lord’s Resistance Army. She told us how Compassion and her sponsor had changed the course of her life. “My sponsor didn’t just pick up a packet at a concert,” she said. “She picked up MY packet.”
I got to hug Olive’s neck and thank her personally. I got to look into her eyes and listen to the rest of her story - she’s now a social worker in Georgia. There I was with these two healthy grown-up women smiling and talking and all I could think about was how, once upon a time, they were faces on packets on a table at somebody’s concert. Until someone picked them. I got to be inspired.
Then a woman with a familiar face took my hand and told me through tears about the night she came to hear me in Knoxville in 2004. She reminded me about her story, about the divorce she was beginning all those years ago, about what I’d said to her back then. Then she told me about her life over the last five years, about moving to another city and starting over again, about how her divorce deepened her understanding of God’s love for her - how she’s felt that love more through her struggles than she ever did in her years of comfort.
I told her about a friend of mine who’s filing for divorce soon and asked her to pray for her. I confessed to her that I just don’t know how to talk to God for my friend but I think she does. She promised she would. I got to be served.
On Saturday night I met a couple - a dentist and a blogger - who read Angie’s blog and followed our recent trip together to India. I’ve never met fans like Angie’s fans. This woman, Stephanie, called Angie’s blog “the mother blog” and then told me how Angie inspired her to blog and how she’s now discipling her own readers through conference calls. I think she said there are 46 of them right now from all over the country going through a bible study over the phone together every week for nine weeks. Then, at the end of the course, they go out and disciple other women in their own communities face-to-face. I got to be convicted.
I wouldn’t trade ten minutes with any of these people for thirty seconds with a thousand. Not today. Today, I pity the rockstar. But I still envy his tour bus.
Who said this?
#1 “My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized [his enemies] for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.”
Um, John Eldridge?
#2 “I have examined all the known superstitions of the word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”
Richard Dawkins?
#3 “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”
Christopher Hitchens?
#4 “Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”
Perverted system...hmmm...Osama?
#5 “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
Oh, a liberal...let’s see...Ginsburg?
#6 “The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality. Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years.”
Falwell? Pat Robertson?
Where the heck was I in history class? I don’t remember any of this stuff.
A Hindu organization threw a reception to honor Mother Teresa after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Dignitaries were in attendance: the prime minister, his cabinet, various diplomats. Mother Teresa was asked to address the crowd so she chose to tell the story of one man who had rung her doorbell a few days before.
It was a leper shivering with cold. I asked him whether he needed anything from me. I wanted to offer him food and a blanket to protect himself from the bitter night of Calcutta.
He replied in the negative. He showed me his begging bowl. He told me in Bengali: “Mother, people were talking that you had received some prize. This morning I decided that whatever I got through begging today, I would hand over to you this evening. That is why I am here.”
I found in the begging bowl 75 paise (2 cents). The gift was small. I keep it even today on my table because this tiny gift reveals to me the largeness of the human heart. It is beautiful.
Mother Teresa kept the beggar’s small gift on her table but the Nobel medal was temporarily misplaced following the reception where his story was told. It was eventually found under some coats in the entry way of the reception hall.
My grandmother played bridge with her friends every week. For years she did this, no matter what. When smoking gave her a stroke and left her paralyzed on one side of her body, leaving her unable to hold her cards, she didn’t stop playing. She had my uncle make her a little tray filled with sand she could stand the cards up in. She wasn’t a compulsive gambler. It wasn’t about the game at all. It was, I think, about the people.
If you’re new here, here’s the arrangement: Brian is my brother-in-law. Our wives are sisters. I live in a cul-de-sac and Brian lives in the neighboring cul-de-sac, a short walk from us. This is the stage for our community, sometimes referred to here as the cult-de-sac.
Lots of people come and go from our front yards. Redneck Neighbor moved his family to the country where they can raise cows and chickens and be, well, more redneck without home owner association interference. Mr. Wizard started his PhD and then took a job with NASA and just doesn’t have the time anymore for sitting in a lawn chair with us. Brody started his own successful business and that’s taken him away from us too. J, an eight year-old who’s an important part of the basketball games in my driveway every afternoon, is moving soon.
A couple in my cul-de-sac who’ve been good neighbors for a while now are becoming good friends. A family from South Africa just moved in across the street. Their sons have given my girls the giggles and me a reason to buy a shotgun. And there are houses up for sale all around us that new neighbors will soon fill and hopefully, in time, they’ll bring their chairs over to our shade and let their kids run wild with ours.
At the risk of sounding cynical though, these new friends won’t be around forever. Our society has us all in constant transition. Jobs, mortgage companies, marriages, the McRib - almost everything is here today and gone within a couple years at the most. Almost everything.
Yesterday, me, Becky and the kids took bikes, basketballs and banana pudding over to Uncle Brian’s and Aunt Amy’s front yard to play with the six cousins. We sat and talked in lawn chairs like we’ve done for years. Brian taught my six year-old son the arts of basketball and smacktalk simultaneously - ”You need a break? Thirsty? Want a bottle?” Our little girls fought over scooters and eventually settled into drawing princesses on the driveway with chalk. Our older girls played school and tried to catch a rabbit.
This is the way it is almost every day. As I type here at the kitchen table I can here Nathaniel - one of the cousins - and my son Gresham bouncing basketballs and plotting what they’ll ask me to make for lunch. My girls are at Brian’s house playing dress-up or something.
I’m gonna be a little sappy here. It’s extremely comforting for me to know that no matter what changes or who comes in and out of our life, the people on Brian’s lawn last night, my family, are always there. Always. I know I can’t run them off. I could make them mad, or disappoint, sure - and I have - but I couldn’t make them go away entirely. I haven’t been able to yet.
They’re not “friends” accepted with the click of a mouse. They’re not the kind of “community” that follows me on Twitter or reads my blog. Our connection isn’t work, meetings, softball or something else transient. Our connection is each other. This is unchanging face-to-face community in an age where almost nothing else is.
I’m an idealist I know, but I really think, God willing, we could be sitting around in our eighties gumming banana pudding and watching (great) grandkids run around us in the front yard. Brian and I will have matching hairdos by then and I’m sure most of the conversation will be about what hurts and what needs replacing, but I can see it happening: Brian and Amy, Becky and me, still getting together under shade trees to laugh and remember everyone who came in and out of our lives over the years.
