"Wow. It’s cold outside. I belong near the beach somewhere, a place full of sand, umbrellas, and fried shrimp. My bronze skin can’t take this! However, instead, I find myself in the parking lot of my daughter’s school waiting to pick her up, and the last time I checked, my favorite ocean spot is 1,463.4 miles away.
I’m still getting used to the idea that I am a parent who has to go pick my child up from school. Well, big school anyway. Just last night, my daughter revealed to me that she now knows how to rhyme. Where did that come from? It seems like yesterday my wife and I were explaining the letter ‘P’ to her, and now she’s rhyming? I’m almost certain that one day she’ll want to work on multiplication tables together. Then, she’ll want to debate ‘hot topics’ with me like foreign policy, public education, and theology. But for now, I’m happy with rhyming, because I have this strange suspicion that she is going to graduate from high school, maybe even college. Also, there’s little man. Yeah, I’ve got one in school, and one that entered the world 3 months ago. Recently, he woke up and started smiling. Now, he makes beautiful, incomprehensible noises when he smiles as if he is trying to talk or at least communicate. Pretty soon, he’s going to ask for the car keys.
Every Sunday afternoon, a house church gathers in my living room. Makes sense, doesn’t it? (house church – living room) I really enjoy participating in a house church. People are real, or they’re at least learning how to be real. Too often church centers around the ABCs: attendance, buildings, and cash; however, in the context of a house church, it seems we really experience a deep journey together. People share their successes and struggles. We pray for each other, for the mission of God, and for our kids. It’s not perfect, but it’s a foreshadowing of the Kingdom to come. Maybe God wants people, not perfection.
Our house church is new, just a couple of weeks old. Newness is fun. Newness is exciting. Last week, we were talking about encountering Jesus outside of organized church. Astonishingly (or maybe not so), it was extremely difficult to do. Thinking about Jesus in terms of a personal, active, outside of the church walls kind of being was a stretch. This was a mind-bender for us. It was easy to remember Sunday School, potlucks, worship services, service projects, and summer camps. But, Jesus, in our ‘every day lives’, what do you mean? Jesus spent some of his time in synagogues, but the majority of his interactions with people (namely sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes) occurred on mountainsides, in boats, or at the dinner table. If when Jesus was on earth, people encountered him out in the world, why do we have to go to a building with a marquee, steeple, and library to find him today? Couldn’t we meet him out in the world, too? Maybe he doesn’t like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or pawn shops. If so, I wouldn’t blame him.
After our feeble attempts to wrap our finite minds around this spellbound brain teaser, people began to share. However, even in what we shared, there were connections to organized church. Placing that aside, stories were told of other house church encounters, fire and brimstone sermons, and personal times of prayer, Bible study, and meditation. Without too much thought, I began to tell the story of a man I met in the playground area at a local fast food restaurant.
I remember it being a Sunday night, because a group of ladies connected to our church were going out to a steakhouse or something, and the remaining Dads whose kids were too old to just go home and be put to bed were going out for processed hamburgers, slimy, imitation French fries, and Dr. Pepper flavored club soda. (You can almost taste my sarcasm, can’t you?)
There were three of us and our kids, and after finishing our illustrious banquet of a meal, one of the Dad’s split leaving me and Jason as the remaining hardcore Father of the Year candidates. Jason and I were still getting to know each other, so we small talked for a while. After noticing his club soda had run dry, he trekked into the main area of the restaurant for a refill, and I turned in my seat to watch the kids. I can’t even remember how it started, but I’m sure it had something to do with the playing kids. Anyway, the guy seated at the table next to us struck up a conversation with me.
I think we began by laughing about how funny children can be sometimes. He was a grandpa probably in his early 60s. His wife sat at the table with him staring at us from time to time out of the corner of her eye, but other than yelling at her grandson, she remained silent. I remember him wearing a green auto mechanics’ hat of some sort and a plaid flannel shirt. Without too much prodding, he began to reveal to me his Catholic upbringing, catechism classes, and pathway to what I have begun calling functional atheism. He told me that he believed in God, but he didn’t believe in the Bible, and it didn’t matter what they (religious people) told him, he didn’t believe in their book! It was just a collection of human thoughts written by humans who, I guess, pretended to know what God was thinking and saying. He continued by saying, “I don’t go to church, and I don’t have a reason to.”
Two things struck me about this man. First of all, he was a grandpa. I thought back to memories about my Grandpa. Earlier in life, Grandpa smoked, and I don’t just mean, he smoked. There’s a factory real close to where I live. It’s located right along a major freeway, and in the center of this factory are three, gigantic smoke stacks. They reach high into the sky as if to say, “Something important is going on here.” Anyway, most of the day, they spew soot, smoke, and other harmful vapors high into the sky like a huge black rainbow covering the freeway. The smoke stacks…this was my Grandpa. He would snore while he slept, and we would lovingly refer to it as World War III. You may be thinking that I’m making too much light of the situation; however, deep inside, we were all concerned for Grandpa. Grandpa had this lime green chair with a tall back that he used to sit in, smoke, and watch the news. I’ll never forget the Christmas morning my sister and I came running down the towering flight of stairs to find Grandpa’s solid green chair on its side, because Santa had bumped it over in the night. Grandpa was strong, weathered, a John Wayne type whose smile would light up the entire house.
Now, because my Grandpa lives hundreds of miles away, my wife’s Grandpa has really taken over this role for me. It struck me like waking up in a harried, disheveled state in the middle of the night. I thought one of the major problems in the church was that there were too many gray-haireds, and here was one telling me he didn’t even believe in the Bible.
This did not fit into the worldview I had formulated. What was I to do with this piercing insight? How was this to reconcile in the fortress of my mind? Secondly, what was he doing in the Bible belt? Didn’t he know that we lived in the part of the United States of America where everyone was a God-fearing Christian who never missed a church worship service, Monday night visitation, Wednesday night Bible class, Thursday night discipleship group, Friday night bridge club, or Saturday afternoon service project? He was like a Texas State Fair turkey leg in a room full of 7th grade boys. How could he speak with such confident defiance? Let me say, he was not rude. He was not condescending. He just spoke his mind with this terse yet soothing finality.
I wish I could tell you that I baptized him later that night, but to tell the truth, I have never seen him again nor would I recognize him if I saw him at Albertson’s, but I do know that he did a lot for my faith in God that night. You see, I have this problem. I haven’t ‘officially’ had a doctor diagnose it yet, but I affectionately refer to it as ‘Chris’. Sometimes, when I am really honest with myself (which rarely happens), I come face to face with my own self-guided, power-asserting, intensely selfish, applause-seeking, people-trampling idolatrous pride. Following Jesus is hard, because it means that he is number one, not me. So, here I was talking to the Grandpa who hated the Bible realizing that nothing I could say, nothing I could do, nothing I could give, and nothing I could buy would change his mind. Nothing. It was then that I remembered that I am just a ‘jar of clay’, and that I exist to show that the “all-surpassing power is from God and not from [me].” That only God revealing his love and presence to this man could bring him back.
As I drove home that night, I wondered. How many more were out there? How many more Grandpas living in the Bible Belt didn’t believe in the Bible? How many more people were out there going to work, volunteering at their kids’ schools, buying groceries, filling their cars with gas, and cutting others off in traffic who did not want anything to do with God, or at least the things and people of God they had been exposed to thus far in their lives? I felt small and insignificant. I was a dreamer who, at least for this brief moment, caught a true glimpse of what this dream’s fulfillment might mean. I gazed over the lights of the city wondering what I had gotten myself into. This must be about God, because I could never do this on my own. Of course, I would never really want to anyway."
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