Today, the door opened and the winds blew my significance away, again.  It seems I can’t hold it very long.

I have these terrible needs.  I’ve learned how to bury them behind facades of social niceties and self-discipline, but there they lay, just as powerful and unmet as ever- seething and growing like a cancer in my skin; like an open sore on my heart.

In seconds, anything meaningful is blown out the window, and I remain alone, frantic, impatient, despairing – grasping at papers swirling in the wind.  How do I make meaning stay with me?

It takes me to my knees.  It cuts me to the heart.  It breaks my wind and steals my breath, and collapses me into a heap of string on the floor of my lonely life.  What am I to do?  More therapy?  More pain?  More reading, praying, hoping, dreaming, believing, goal-setting, mind-control?

I can’t breathe.

HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME! (eyes tightly wrinkled shut)

Like the first sign I ever saw in Vegas – THE LOOSEST SLOTS IN TOWN – I don’t know why I remember it, or why I recall such a seemingly obscure and inconsequential memory, and why at particular moments it surfaces more lucidly than at others; perhaps this is all the Spirit of God deep in my soul, perhaps it’s just a happenstance of electrical impulses surging through my brain – or perhaps it’s both.  Regardless, like the first sign I ever saw, I remember each of you, standing tall out in my memory, illuminated bright, with a clear message that I both remember so easily, and yet, long to remember with everything I can humanly tolerate.

It’s a messed up world, and I know that you know that we all know that.  In the face of it all, the one-minute details of micro-fine-focus, or the wide-lens view of a twelve-year journey to find a home-place, there is, strangely, in this extended pursuit to venture high and low on the heels of truth, a settling call to come back to what I already know to be true.  A place, though the wave is coming and casting an ominous shadow over me, that is as soft and peaceful as I’ve ever believed such a hopeful and loving place to be.

Equally strange to the calling, is the discovery.  That I have ventured off to distant places to only discover that what I’ve been looking for was at the very starting point of my adventures, gift-wrapped and tagged.  Odysseus’ return, I suppose.  The great irony of life breathes her kisses on me.  It has been here, and it has been available.  But sadly, it is only in the run-around, in the stumbling, in the piss-fear sighting of my life-ending tidal wave, that I come to see what I’ve left behind.  Though, in one respect I’ve spent these years shuffling aimlessly for pig-feed, it is equally the case that I am such a person, and god is such a guide, that we agree it to be the only path I could ever step foot upon; the stumbling, pain, loneliness, embarrassment, and self-ridicule I’ve faced was all part of the purpose; the path, in her beauty, has required it of me so that I may have one single experience: to come home, again.

Maybe we’re all destined to be lost much of the time.  Maybe that is exactly what life is, in it’s most genuine, most precious, most opened-eyes-of-wonder element; that we spend our time, battling whatever we need to battle, fighting through whatever the path has laid out for us, only to come to one single moment on a hillside.  To come to a place, when the clouds move, and a glimmer of god-kissed sunshine falls upon our faces in such a manner that we feel held, we feel…home.

One single moment of peace, like the sight of a dove flying past, whipping her faint image across my own fading memory, so that I may, like other moments of good-purity, hold onto them like signs.  I am building my collection.  I am grateful.

So now, tonight, I’ve spilled out what was inside this dusty space of memory.  I rolled up the large bay door to a hollow echo, and walked through the empty dim-lit spaces sounding my footsteps to the rafters.  Off in the corner, I found what I’ve been needing to take with me; not the signs themselves, but their meaning.  I know all of you have your own discouragement.  I know life often seems like a careless toddler, dragging hard-colored crayons across the walls we’ve tried so hard to keep clean.  And as each of us spend the time coming to terms with the stains that no matter how diligently we work to clean up, remain almost as stark and vibrant as the day they were scrawled, there seems to be less and less inside of us that we have to give over to the attendance of those stains that streak across the heart-walls of others.

And at moments along the journey, I was mad; feeling lost and alone in the naked embarrassment of my imperfection.

But now, for some reason of which only God knows, I have come to see two pieces of this great puzzle connect – and what a wonderful experience that can be!  First, now matter how high and heavy the sign may be, up on a hillside, or locked away in the dark, the message of the sign can be carried with me.  Like that one off in Vegas that I glanced at only momentarily, yet I’ve kept it all with me, remembering it clearly.  The same holds true for each of you, and the messages that, for some time now, you’ve been allowing me to read, signs standing tall up in my world of tidal waves, at times swallowed in the rising of the waters, are messages that I carry and keep close.

Secondly, while I was once convinced that I needed more signs, and hoped that the messages I was reading would somehow transfer onto my own patchwork walls, in such an effort to hide the crayola-stains that damn toddlers smear on me, and establish in me something worthy of being read itself, I’ve become even more convinced that such isn’t quite what signs are made for.  At least, that’s not what I’m reading of those messages that are comprising the perfect picture of what I see from each of you now.

In fact, it is the very streaks and stains, these wall-marks, that, though up close reveal deep wounds, yet when viewed with some distance, attest to the beautiful harmony by which those careless lines of crayon are coming together, in a very deliberate way, to form the words of faith and hope and love a man like me has been quite often dying to read.

In all, I suppose I’ve gone on another long journey to deliver a message in a package that has been sitting in this same spot all along.  I know life has her way of jutting her elbows into us, of cutting into line, and cause separation; physical and emotional.  But, tonight I am with you.  And there is nothing of more significance than that.  Except, perhaps, the extension of gratitude that beams out of my spirit as I recall how each of you, and even tonight, have been with me as well.

The greatest irony of life is finding contentment – she’s ever elusive, until moments when I stop looking high and low, and sit down to open the gifts that have been at my doorstep since I can ever have memory to recall.  I sit, honored and hopeful by your presence to me, and to this world.  In the greatest sincerity some son’bitch like me can offer, I am deeply thankful for you, and have gifts from all of you to open for some time; I pray this next go-around isn’t the Odessey that last has been, but I trust your messages will establish me even still.

Much Peace, Much Love,

It’s the heat of a desert sun, and the oven-hot gravel road that vanishes miles and miles off into the distance.  Funny how emptiness and loneliness are so closely related – cousins, if not more.

As I move about my day, I can hear myself:

Mike – you’re empty.

And in that, there is a very poignant and believable desire to return.  It’s nearly instinctual.

Now maybe several years back I wouldn’t have even recognized it.  Maybe I’d just have run off to the bars or the clubs, or the girls, or whatever else I thought held the water for my thirsty soul.

But today things are different.  Perhaps it’s me.  Perhaps it’s god.  Perhaps, it’s both;  we’ve reconciled our differences enough to start moving forward again.  Perhaps…

I’ve spent the last 2 hours sitting in candlelight, listening to contemporary christian praise music.  If you know me at all, you know how deep and shameful it must be for me to admit that.  But, I’m listening still.  And I’ve come to find something very particular with this…

It’s isn’t working.

I’m still sickly lonely, and empty as death.  And there is a great anxiety within me to push and praise and persuade god to give me what I need; to give me something substantial so I may go about my day, happy and full.

It isn’t working…damn it.  Just like the bars, and the clubs, and the girls.  It all fades…and nothing stays.

But when I can relax (even momentarily) I hear something beyond the music – rather, someone.  It may be god, or it may be my own wildly fantastical self, but regardless it’s good to me.  God is here, and has always been here, because he lives in those around me.  He lives in you, as you read this.  He lives in me, as I write.  He lives without condition; he doesn’t need me to believe him for him to bless me.

That is a very magical, and extraordinary truth for me, especially now as I’m dying of thirst: God lives.  And if god is patient enough for me to try all my attempts at returning, even by listening to a “god” category of music, then there is indeed hope for my soul to find and build something substantial with him.

I hope he knows just how much I want to be with him.  How much I believe in him when he talks of living waters and an ultimate overflowing……how tremendously rejuvenating…to think there’ll be such a day where I’ll be drenched in his love, satisfied.

Though it doesn’t change the fact that I’m currently so thirsty, I strain to swallow my own spit, I refuse to complain – at least not right now – because I’m believing again.  My house is not clean, and I’ll probably not sign up for any community bible studies any time soon.  But there is a window open, and god is singing his song for me still.

I wonder how many lonesome nights he’s spent, singing to me, while I, in my drunkenness, cursed his careless absence?

I wonder how often he came to my window (or my door) and peered inside to see what I was up to, and if I’d be willing to open up a bit and share a little face-to-face conversation?

I wonder, even now, as I listen and feel a small rainfall onto my burdened guilty-soul, just how much I am not able to see, just how much god is doing for me.  Even now…

I used to understand that statement as a recognition that I see eye to eye with god, or I understand some particular sentiment of faith as: I believe that Christ died for me.

And such a statement remains there, motionless like a shirt on a hanger.  It’s out in the open, but that is all it can be – a statement of fact, and nothing more.

Maybe that really isn’t the type of belief god is calling from us.  Maybe, and this could just be as far-fetched as peace in the Middle East, but maybe there is more of an activity to belief than just statements flung at the dartboard of religiosity.  Maybe, there is something of a giving and taking to believing; a relating.

I can say that I believe anything about the christian faith.  Christ’s enormously personal sacrifice for me, his unending magnificent ocean-love, and those particular blessings that remain, like gifts beneath a tree, with my name on it.  Yes, I believe in those things – just as I believe in good air quality, social reform, and low taxes.

At night, in the deep, I am bare-boned and tormented in pain.  I quiver, shake, and whimper to a moon that remains static and unyielding.  My beliefs, even those in Christ, don’t save me…not one bit.

So maybe the name of the game really isn’t “I Believe” afterall.  The “I Believe” statement is incomplete.  And I suspect the missing piece is the only piece: “In Jesus.”

Perhaps the truth of our beliefs has very little to do with who we are as believers, or even what it is we are believing.  The truth of it, I’m coming to see, is the nature and presence of the person we are believing in.  The “I BELIEVE” isn’t quite as important as the “In JESUS.” In fact, we could probably dispose of the earlier sentiment, and hold the entirety of our thoughts (and salvation) on what remains, offering it out into this world as a admition of everything we are: “IN JESUS.”

Belief used to mean well formulated, coherent thoughts.  It used to reek of academia (I went to a christian college), polished clean with historical evidence, philosophical proofs, and testimonial accuracy.  The “I BELIEVE” statement was a self-reflected, self-promoted articulation.  The believing was about ME.  The “I” was the subject, and “JESUS” the object, if he were even mentioned at all.

So what am I getting at?

No place, really.  Except for the growing surrendering of my dominant willful attempts at ordering and synthesizing my faith in order that I may make it work.  Believing has very little to do with myself, or the beliefs themselves.  The very act of believing is in itself, a gift from god.  I believe, because god believes in me first.

Much like everything else, god is less concerned with what we consider or believe than the fact that we are considering and believing as a means, at some level, of trying to bridge the gap that exists between the two of us.  God allows us the time and space to contemplate our thoughts, and formulate our positions, but more often than naught, they are misguided and ridiculous – not because of our incompetence, but because so much of god and life and love are not fully illuminated to us, and certainly not so in a stoic conjecture about such things the very nature of which require a long life of blood and tears before any insight may be gained, even a little.

We believe, and that is a good and noble thing – to understand what we believe.  But the power of god doesn’t reside in my recognition of it, or of him, or even of myself.  The power of god, and his beauty, exist as the truth of the universe – beyond all recognition.

The more our belief statements become less about the I BELIEVE, and more about the IN JESUS, the more we open up our lives to be used as a good and worthy vessel from which the love of god and his faith will be poured out on the men and women who surround us.

Religion is about man, and his work and attempt at doing something good for god.  Faith is about god, and his work and attempt at doing something good for man.  I’ve lived inside both realms.  Truthfully, I feel I catapult back and forth between the two – even multiple times a day.

I attempt to choose faith, even recognizing that faith must also choose me first.  God must choose me to receive the faith that is offered me.  He’s not so concerned with what or that I Believe, knowing that what I believe will be at times more accurate and symbolic than he ever intended our beliefs to be.

However, he’ll accept the I Believe, because he loves us.  And from such a position of worthiness we feel our beliefs entitle us to, there is an opportunity for Jesus to enter, and to sit at our feet, and to remind us of his endless love reserved solely for us – not because we believe, but because he is Jesus.

Slowly, (probably more so for me than for any other), the love of god and the grace he extends us will break down the barriers to our faith – and more and more we will hear less and less of our beliefs, and more about a love and faith and reckless trust in a god whose love can never be outdone.  God’s love, like the oceans of water, encircles us always, and is more than enough – forever available for us to dive in and swim about.

Birthdays and Christmas are our days to salivate unashamed in our birth-sweat of ego-centrism and unapologetic self-concern.  We receive one gift after another; wrappings fall to the floor in a heap of colors it looks like a shattered rainbow.  There is something inside for me!

I wonder if I can ever have that same anticipation and self-freedom in my relationship with god.

He’s a gift-giver, for sure.  He’s sealed the deal on being on of the most generous; Ted Turner gave $1 Billion to the U.N. – but god saved the entire history of the human race!  And his gifts don’t stop at the big picture either.

We can all, no matter how deep in the muck we are, acknowledge even a small gift that god is giving us right now.  And it is in these small gifts, in the seemingly minutia of relating to the Mega-God, the forever god of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, that everything shifts into a danger I’m still coming to terms with.

It’s much easier to relate at distances.  Yeah God! for giving us salvation and saving our souls – a very personal, but also equally impersonal experience.  Buechner talks about this in my favorite essay of his: The Sign by the Highway from The Hungering Dark – that things with god are much more difficult as we personalize his gifts.

Jesus Saves is much easier to manage than Jesus Saves Me or Jesus Saves You. But even more: Jesus Saves Mike – that is a very difficult thing to admit; an extremely ego-swallowing gift to receive.

For most of my life, I went along with it, thinking it was easy to admit – Hey! God loves me, and Jesus died for me.  But it slowly becomes much more difficult.

Maybe that’s because as I grow up and out into this world I start to take a small section of it to make my own.  I become vastly competent in my tiny corner of the world.  People recognize me, ask me advice, seek me out for my knowledge, capabilities, and personality.

I am quality – no matter what I do or think or feel or say.  I am quality to some, and that is richly invigorating and powerful.

But sadly, it does not save.  Not long-term.  And for that, I need to remove myself from my world – as rich as it is – and crawl back to the base rocks of my own personal ruinous plight – I need salvation.

The worst salvation is the personal one.  I can accept my global salvation, me lumped into a heap of other me’s, me as a part of the collection of history.  That’s easy – it allows me to feel piously connected to god without impeding on my fanciful experience of contextual fame as found inside my silly little corner of influence.

But the gifts keep coming.  I can hear god calling out to me to come back – and stand at the foot of the cross, gazing up at the man, the only man, who died for me, for exactly me.  To confront my own personal salvation – and to do there, I know not truly what else but to finally, finally, finally, be free from the monsterous shame and self-abuse of my incompletion.

I used to jump in, both feet, holding hands with god. But over time, somehow things grew to become much more difficult. To the point even that I spend most of my time justifying why I never put my suit on anymore. I stay locked up indoors. I keep things inside; I know real life is outside, but it’s just too dangerous.

I have a heart that is fragile, with walls as thin as rice-paper. I don’t know if I can bare the bumps and bruises and pokes and stabs of living life exposed to the elements. I don’t know if I can handle being free.

The world isn’t the monster I fear. The world doesn’t have any more tricks; she dumps on you maybe once or twice a lifetime, but after that, she’s very predictable.

The monster – the one I fear – lives inside me. It’s repelled by the light; it’s sedated in the darkness. So I stay inside, fearing that, should I step out into the sun and air and openness of the world outside, I’d be ripped from inside-out, and something savage and uncontrollable will be loosed.

I have so much inside me – right in my gut – that I often wonder if I’m ever going to find a place to put all these things? A place for my anger, and one for my pain. A place for my hopes and another for those deep regrets that form scares around my soul. I need a place for laughter and joy, as well as for my bitter tears that fall like fading-stars into the icy ocean of my childhood hurt.

I don’t have the power to control myself; I cannot open myself up, letting out the monster of my personality, and then try to call him back home like a dog, tethering him neatly on a chain.

No- If I let him go, everything changes.

- – -

I don’t read much about monsters in the bible. I don’t see much hope for the likes of me. Unless…

Unless…what jesus was speaking about when he called for all men to embrace the glory of his father, was a calling to those who, like me, lived timidly inside, to come, regardless of their own internal viciousness, and worship a powerful worthy god who can, of course, handle monsters.

Not only that, but a god who WANTS to handle monsters.

Maybe all this talk of fearing monsters is just another way I avoid putting on my suit and jumping in. I know I have fists to throw, and tears to cry, and kisses to give. Maybe jesus can handle my punches and tears. Maybe jesus can see through all the bullshit and fear – knowing I’m terrified of letting go – and take this midnight brain-dump as an answer, imperfect at best, to his call to come and visit with him.

Maybe I’ve just set a date with god to go swimming again.

The power of the gospel is that it is indeed a power come from heaven. It is a power separate from and entirely foreign to any other manifestation of power that exists presently here on earth. In so being, it is then a power that can influence and shape the world, both the physical and metaphysical, in ways that are seemingly foreign and unnatural; it is the power where miracles are made.

So I may indeed go swimming again. A two-footed plunge, or a belly-flop perhaps. But I can trust, that the power to hold onto me, is not of my own self. The power that shapes me, and the power that restrains me, and the power that propels me into a future of growth, and fulfillment, is a power that is not my own.

What a glorious god we have looking over us. He invites us to swim again, somersaults, and cannonball splashes. All the while, our own faith and salvation comes from above. I am responsible only to jump in. Even the swimming is god’s goodness…

So I stand with my toes creeping to the edge. The sun sparkles on the blue water surface like tinfoil. I bend my knees, close my eyes, and lean forward…

When I was a small child, I’d crawl into bed with my mom. She’d be reading a book or magazine, and I’d just stumble to her bed, hike on up, and lay back against her, facing away from her.  On an impulse she’d begin to rub my back.  Sometimes using her long nails, sometimes her firm palms – either way, it was safe and satisfying.

God is a mother – just as she is a father.  She is a good mother, too.  She has that ability to sit with us, in the silence of the night, and allow us to fear, and to fail, and to fall, and rub our back, and soothe us in ways that are so pure and true that everything else, every other claim to our own modes of self-preservation, is rendered insignificant and unworthy.

We long to be soothed – we long for god’s hands upon us.

It is a good thing, to be in the presence of god.  Whether it’s at mid-morning and the shinning of the sun, or at the mid-night, when things heavy and menacing haunt us.  Even the thief on the cross was near god, and it was good.

God knows this and desires for us to crawl into bed with her.  Considering the glorified truth of the gospel – that jesus became flesh and blood, and grew up to be beat down, all for the salvation of the world – I anticipate that there is really no other purpose for god than to be with us, and us with her.  To be together.

Inspecting my life, there appears to be no other reason for circumstances that occurred other than god simply wanted me to come to her.  The midnights were too difficult, my fears too gruesome, my hope losing light.  I had to turn to god, and each time it looked different.  But each time, god’s hand were upon me, and her generous soothing nature enraptured me – even when I fiercely doubted it.

God is calling me to her, just as she is calling all people to her.  There is room in the bed.  There is a place of us, together; to be together, you and I, with her.

One lady cleans the house, the other sits at the feet of jesus.

And there is the picture of our entire earthly struggle.  For most of us, it would be impossible and impractical to simply sit and be with god.  We’ve got priorities, and meetings, and events that we must scuttle off to; schedules that require our attention and implicit obedience.

But then, there is also jesus – sitting here for us to sit with.  And what are we to do with that?

Nothing, perhaps, but just recognize that god is uniquely able to understand us beyond our own understanding.  That she knows how busy we are, as well as the reasons why we keep ourselves busy.  Either way, it’s not that important.  When we want, she is there for us…and we crawl in, with our busyness, with our fears, with whatever small portion of faith we can pull out of the cracks of the day, and lay with her in a delicate moment of affection.

On Mother’s Day we celebrate the unique qualities of our humanity – what we hold as the delicate, soft, and nurturing aspects of being alive and being real with one another.  We celebrate who and how we were nurtured ourselves – some were nurtured better than others, of course.

But what remains constant and consistent between all of us, is our undeniable desire to be nurtured in the soft and safe ways that we either once were, or once longed for.  And that desire can only be a prayer to god and an invitation that she again receive us, even for a moment, to rub our back and help us through the night again.

We are toddlers, all of us.