Living Fires

I read somewhere
that a flame
is identical to respiration:
The chemical combination
of oxygen with any other thing
both requires and releases heat.

Iron, carbon, nitrogen,
anything combines
when the time is hot enough.
And the turbulent re-creation
is limited only by a lack
of fresh new things to burn.

Like the legend of the man
who fought and fell, and as he died,
instead of growing cold and hard
his body burst to flames.
Intensity alone
makes a flame to glow,

forces us to breathe,
and draws a little line
to separate the living
from what’s only ash and smoke.

You have shown

You have shown me mercy when I was looking for despair.

Please forgive me for the long delay. I have a pretty good size list of excuses, including the ever classic, “I don’t have internet access,” but I don’t think I’ll bother you with those. Life is busy and I was learning how to breathe again. For the moment at least, I think I’ve caught my breath. I have written some new poetry and things, but today at least needs to be a personal entry, and a long one at that. I want to share what’s been happening with me, get everybody caught up, so to speak.

It’s difficult to know where to begin. I think it’s pretty common knowledge that I went through a particularly stressful semester this fall, but I don’t think that was the root of the issue. It was a little bit more complicated and a little bit more philosophical, so please forgive me while I go there a bit.

I guess I’ll tell a straight story, so I’m going to back waaay up: six years ago I moved to North Carolina (is that far back enough for you?). It was basically one giant big long bad experience. It would sound like a pity party if I told you about it. Basically, God sent me here, halfway across the country, and I’ve yet to get a clear answer why. Every time I thought I was heading in a direction, I ended up going somewhere else completely. I wrote a short story about it, called “A Day’s Journey,” where the key phase was “Lord, You lead like a drunken man,” because that is what it has felt like, one giant misadventure. If the Lord had not been on my side (let Israel now say), if the Lord had not been on my side, the raging waters would have swept me away. I would have given up and tried something else. But one thing I was convinced of was that this was where I was supposed to be.

Enter college (Queens University now), one giant liberal experience. Let me just say that it is not for the weak in faith for those of a conservative upbringing to go to a liberal school, or probably vice-versa. I go there and I’m surrounded by what seems like every possible point of view but one I agree with. It has probably been a very good educational experience. Not one I would deliberately force on anyone, but an effective growing time nonetheless. It wasn’t so much that I was surrounded by Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Democrats, and Athiests. That part I could deal with. You just pick the set of beliefs that you believe is true and then stick to your guns until you’re convinced otherwise. The people who got to me where the ones who could listen to two people arguing about whether heaven exists and turn to me and say that both positions were probably completely right, without batting an eye. Relativism is scary, because under that mindset, the only position that can always be wrong is the one that believes in some kind of consistent truth.

Nevertheless, it was into this whirlwind that I was dropped, started looking for a church, and started trying to relate to a huge group of people who, instead of believing in nothing, or in something that was demonstrably incorrect, believed in everything. I was prepared to share my faith with hadn’t heard, or defend myself against any active disbelievers. But what was I supposed to do with a bunch of people who say “Oh, I believe you,” and then go merrily along living according to some other set of principles that are “equally valid”? Do you know what group of people I found consistently were willing to reduce their beliefs to first principles and argue consistently according to them? Athiests. I don’t mean agnostics, a group of people who don’t really know what they believe, but the don’t believe in God, usually because of some terrible thing that happened that God should not have allowed, or even agnostics who are really atheists, but unwilling to admit it in a rabidly religious world. I mean a set of people who honestly believe that there is no God, no originator of the universe at all, who can explain their beliefs in a clear, logical, consistent fashion, and manage to live decent, moral, upstanding lives in accordance to clear ethical principles that happen to lack any absolute enforcer telling them to obey. Frankly, give me a true atheist any day than all that other mush. And that was my problem.

The writer of Hebrews encourages us to “consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching” (10:25). I hadn’t deliberately “forsaken the assembly” but I had allowed myself to become isolated. Our school does have a Campus Crusade group and a regular chapel service, and I did have a church to attend, but the CC meetings, like many student-led religious services, always struck me as particularly shallow, like Christianity lite or something. And as I got more bogged down in school, a lot of these meetings began to seem to me to be more of a waste of valuable time than anything else. Social interaction wasn’t productive. Never mind the fact that to relieve stress I instead spent several hours a day playing video games, because, see, video games aren’t people, so I can’t offend them if I just cut them off in the middle of something. Only, I didn’t cut them off. I played until my stress level went down or I became so exhausted that I had to go to bed, whichever came first. But the Bible doesn’t say to forsake not the playing of video games, it says to forsake not the assembling together. Video games are simply ineffective in relieving the real problem. Not that they aren’t a delightful amusement, but they are not the best medicine for frustration (which leads to worry, which leads to anxiety, which leads to fear and doubt). We need to come together to “stir up love and good works,” and I would add faith and hope because there always come dry times in people’s lives where it’s just hard to get our minds clear enough to experience the living God. He may be showing up, but we’re too dense to recognize him, too distracted to cherish the memory long after the experience. In that time, we need community to lift us up and constantly remind us of the things we ought to remember: that He is real, and that he is there for us. He remembers that we are but dust, but sometimes we like to forget and pretend that we are self-sufficient.

So there I was, by degrees distressed, discouraged, and despairing and for the most part isolated, which prepared me for the next step: deception. I think it’s Rick Joyner who says that when people are thirsty enough, they will drink poison, just to get a liquid down their throats. That’s probably about where I was. I pretty much define myself by worship. It’s what I was made for. I was born only to worship Him. I believe that. But when you can’t get ahold of Him to save your life—what am I supposed to do without a purpose for my life? So I began slowly slipping into a kind of practical atheism because it was the only other totally consistent worldview that I knew of that didn’t require the one thing that I was missing: the presence of a living God.

Now, I’m not stupid. I didn’t go around confessing my atheism. Atheism is internally consistent, thanks to Darwin and Nietzsche and a whole host of others who have managed to facilitate people running from the one thing they need most. People have an incredible ability to be logical and thorough when they wish to. So Hinduism is internally consistent as well as a geo-centric view of the universe, but they are sometimes inconsistent with what we perceive when we gaze into the heavens. Athiesm may be internally consistent, but it is not consistent with my experience. I can point to specific improbable prophecies in scripture and show you how they were fulfilled hundreds and thousands of years later. I can tell you of times that I myself have prophesied and spoken accurately into people’s lives with no natural knowledge of their situation, and I can tell you of the things that God has spoken into my life, that resonate so profoundly within me that I don’t believe I could help but accomplish them. Nevertheless, in the process of being miserable, my mind began making plausible excuses for the way I was behaving. We are furry little mammals, pretending to be gods, making order everywhere. In one sense I was moving toward atheism, failing to seek the Lord, living my life almost as if He didn’t exist. In another sense, I was by default worshiping the great god Nintendo: we always worship something.

Now this is the hard part: Repentance. It’s easy to talk about sinning because, hey, everybody sins, and there’s nothing new under the sun, so I can just talk about it in really general terms with these nice theological diagrams that talk about the steps that Satan leads us down. But when you talk about repentance, you have to own up to it: It was my sin. I was screwing up my life. It was somebody else who caught me going the wrong way and got me to turn around. There goes my pride. Maybe if I was Catholic. Then I could cheat a little: I could go to one church for confessional and to another for mass. But in my life at least, I’m like an unruly dog being housetrained. I have to get caught with my business out in the open, dragged to the scene of the crime, have my nose rubbed in it and then get bopped on the head before the idea of changing my habits crosses my mind. (You can see now why maybe it’s a good idea for me not to have a dog…) Steve Thompson once compared repentance to getting in your car planning to go to New York and getting on the highway headed straight for Florida. You go a couple of miles and pass a friend who knows you were headed for New York. He sees you and immediately starts trying to wave you down. After 10 minutes of honking at you, he finally gets you to pull over and tells you that you’re headed straight for Florida. There’s no need to get all emotional about it. You were just going the wrong way. Get back in your car and turn around. But that’s only partially true. Anyone who thinks they even remotely have a sense of direction would be absolutely mortified that they were going the wrong way, and that they had to be pulled over to learn about it.

That person who pulled me over was my mom, and I thank her for it. I wasn’t happy, but I am grateful. I went home for Christmas break with 2 papers still left to write. All the research was done, all the texts selected, and I knew the basic direction of the papers. All that was left was to make an outline and write the darn things. After about 2 weeks, I had finished one. I would do everything imaginable to avoid working on those papers. All in front of a computer, mind you. I spent three weeks total in front of a computer, working on a measley 2 papers. Mind you, the total length of those papers was just a little longer than this confessional, which I wrote in one night. Somewhere in there, though, my mom and I had a conversation. Eh, let’s call it a fight. I don’t remember exactly how it all went, but she basically wanted to know how I thought sitting in front of a computer, freaking out about work I wasn’t doing was supposed to coincide with getting it out of the way and finally relaxing. I guess my arguments weren’t very convincing (and yes, I did try to defend my behavior), because at the end of one of my lackadaisical defeatist statements, she said something along the lines of, “well if that’s the way you think, you’re not who I thought you were.” And I just broke. I made some sort of blithe comment and went to another room and had me a good cry. I’m sure it freaked her out. In fact I know it freaked her out because she came in there asking me what she said that had hurt my feelings and trying to make me feel better. There was no way to explain to her that what she said didn’t really have anything to do with what was going on inside me. I just sort of got a Holy Spirit download of where I was at and what I was doing and why it was all messed up. All the things I explained at the beginning of this article just suddenly fell into place and I got this huge revelation of all those things that sound so blasé until you actually get a revelation of them: That God loves me, and that he’s there for me and that I need him to survive. It just sort of went on and on and on. And here’s my poor mom. I think I did manage to get out the part about it being so spiritually dry there for me, but nothing to explain why I was all weepy for the next hour or so.

Don’t tell anybody this, but I really do appreciate my mom. If there’s something wrong, she’s going to do whatever is necessary to find out what it is and fix it, no matter what the cost to herself. I can pretty much guarantee that I was an unpleasant person, especially when a certain person started trying to fix the problem. But if she can’t do it with a surgeon’s knife, she’s willing to go in there with a mallet, even if there’s a pretty good chance the patient will grab the mallet and use it back. So, yeah. I really appreciate my mom, and everything she’s gone through for me (and from me). Just don’t tell her, okay?

It was sort of a huge reality check, my little encounter. Who I am, what I’m here for, that sort of thing. And since then, for the first time in a long time, I’ve felt like I’ve really been able to worship. I mean, really worship, where it doesn’t depend on the songs and the circumstance, where you could worship to the tune of Old Macdonald in a Communist re-education camp. Because He is real, He is here, and when you have Him, you have everything. For the first time in a long time, it’s not about the form or the other people: it’s about Him and me. The rest of you people can go play cards in the back for all I care. I’m ready to worship. In every circumstance, I’m ready to worship.

Of course, I say that now, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I can’t put much faith in myself. Left to myself it would be a progression from catastrophe to catastrophe instead of from glory to glory. As far as it is up to me, I could be back in the same slough of despond tomorrow, but I have hope in Someone who will guide me if I will only acknowledge Him.

Incidentally, He’s still leading me like a drunken man. Even with that big experience, it’s still a process. I’m now moved into my nice new apartment, three miles from school, taking only 13 credits, and I am having the hardest time keeping up and looking for a job and finishing moving in. Mostly it’s the fact that I don’t want to do much thinking after a three hour jog/run/bike ride. But sometimes it’s the same frustration about being able to get started in the morning. Also, Valerie and I decided that, while MorningStar is good for many things, intimacy and gentleness are not their strong points. Some of us aren’t used to jumping and dancing and rock and roll music for church, let alone all this about prophecy and miraculous healing. So we found a very nice Baptist church about halfway between my apartment and MorningStar to go to on Sunday while we still go to the crazy church on Friday nights. It’s a very good church, probably the best I’ve been to in Charlotte for maintaining that holistic community feel. My only concern is that I haven’t been a Baptist in about 15 years. I’m scared to that I might talk in tongues or pray for somebody in the wrong way and offend the entire congregation en masse. They’re a small church. They don’t need that. However, they are a small church. Big enough to have programs, and small enough to need volunteers. One of my biggest problems at MorningStar is that, no matter how hard they try not to make the whole thing a show, they’ve just got more volunteers than they know what to do with. You have to start your own ministry just to make yourself feel useful. But at Woodlawn Baptist… well, we’ve already signed up for the choir and I’m looking to figure out how to get involved with the youth, and would to God that somebody knows somebody who help me find a job!

Blessings on all of you
KB

One Hundred Baths In 50 Days

I remind myself, as I turn the tap,
Of the masculine image of bathing,
The wild-west ideal: public bath-houses
With cavernous tubs and nearly naked
Women to bring the towels and cigars.
As if I could ever endure the smoke;
As if I could ever let someone close,
So close and nearly naked next to me.

I still take showers for cleanliness sake,
but once I’m clean and dry, I find myself
Kneeling once again before the faucet.
I lied to myself when I said I was
Better, that the shadows of last autumn
Had finally slipped from the washbed of
My mind, like rotted leaves into the soil.

Instead, I find I’m languishing, stretching
Little bits of work to weeks and longer—
Even months. So feminine to pretend
That pleasure leads to action, that languor
Can be transformed into desire, that if
I lie here just a little longer, I
eventually will want to rise again.

It just takes so long sometimes, after a
Little trauma, to learn to breathe again.
It’s so much easier to slip under
The water, to watch the little pieces
Of oil and skin swirling and floating to
The surface, to pretend that standing
water can somehow lead to cleanliness.

I’ve taken one hundred baths in fifty
Days, lying in the water, trying through
Excessive inundation to restore
The fields of memory to something green.
As if such unmanly activity
Could soak out the tiredness from my insides;
As if the bathtub faucet were a spring
Of Lethe that could soothe my troubled mind;
As if I would do almost anything
To keep myself from doing anything.

Man Made Shores

Today I sat on man made shores
and watched a little river flowing
In the course that we had cut for it

I lay down and felt the current
and listened to the water laughing
as it fed the marsh-plants
In the clefts of man made rocks

I glanced left where cat tails stood
four feet high
waving at the wind
gripping the remains
of some prior earthquake

and wondered who gave them leave
to rest there, and who
had bound me in

Oklahoma Sky

For Margie

Philippians 4:8 says “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.” So here’s some things to think on, if I can do them service:

Each time I come back to Oklahoma, I get a new welcome sign to remind me of
how wonderful it is to live in a place like this. Last summer, I knew I was home when i hit the border just in time for a perfect sunset. The land had just reached that place where it is perfectly flat and there were only a few clouds in the sky. I was hit with this 270º array of bright oranges and reds. It was heaven.

This Christmas, I got to Oklahoma at about 11:30. I missed the sunset I really was hoping to see. What’s more, all the way through Arkansas there was a horrible cloud cover and storms and ice. It wasn’t very pleasant. The sky was completely overcast the entire time.
That night the sunset that I was expecting never came at all. When I hit Oklahoma, though, a miraculous thing happened. The sky suddenly cleared up and, for once, the
wind died down. I was driving I-40, almost to the Muskogee turnpike, about an hour away from home, when I looked up and saw the sky. It was the clearest sky I had ever seen. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The only lights on earth that I could see came from an occasional passing car, and there weren’t many.

For probably the second time in my life I realized exactly why the Greeks called it the Milky Way. That sky was positively infested with stars. You almost couldn’t see the space between them. My favorite constellation, Orion, was just outside my window. I hadn’t realized he was that large. He seemed to take up a full eighth of the sky. And he
was apparently so happy to see me that he was standing on his head. The lighter parts of him, like the club in one hand and the slain animal in the other, I could see with a
clarity I don’t think I ever had before. I almost imagined I could see what animal it was that he had captured. I resolved that, when I reached the turnpike, I would get out and take a few minutes enjoying the view.

About 20 minutes later, I finally passed the turn on to the turnpike. I drove another quarter of a mile, stopped the car, turned the emergency lights on, and stepped outside. I waved at the semi truck and two cars that passed me. They were probably wondering what was wrong with my car that would send me outside in the cold, looking at the
sky. They probably never guessed that it was the sky, and not the car, that drove me out. By this time, the wind had picked up a little bit and was blowing a biting chill, but I barely noticed it. Those stars were too beautiful. What I did notice was that my eyes were watering. I had left my glasses on so I could get the full effect of the view, and normally the glasses would have blocked most of the wind coming at me, the same as my windshield, but I was looking straight up, so the wind was blowing directly into my eyes.
I wish I could say it was the beauty of the moment that was causing me to cry, but it was a chilled wind that blurred my vision and finally forced me back into the safety of the car. But, for that five or ten minutes, what a sight! I suddenly wished that I had studied more astronomy. That star up there that looks out of place, do you think that maybe that’s a planet? No, I was told that planets aren’t supposed to twinkle. Where’s the Big Dipper? Which one is the North Star? Maybe if I just stood here and waited to see which way the stars are moving…

I sat in the quiet of the car for a few minutes while my vision cleared, and then while my now fogged glasses also cleared. The only sound I could hear was the momentary passing of a few cars. It was a beautiful night. Then I started up the car and headed on. Within a mile or two, I began to see the first man made lights again, sitting on top of silos
and far distant radio towers. A few miles more and I began to see the first glow of the city on the horizon. By the time I got to Broken Arrow, the sky had clouded, civilization had taken the landscape, and my moment was gone. But Oklahoma had once again kept her appointment with me at the border. This time she had sent the stars to welcome me home.

Goals

You know, it’s amazing how predictable people are. The job market is pretty crummy right now. I have heard more people tell me this semester that I ought to be an English teacher than ever before. The argument goes something like this: One day, Kyle you’re going to realize how important stability is. You’re going to realize that it’s much safer to have a guaranteed 30K a year than to risk everything for a job that’s fun and pays well, but where you could actually get laid off. I just don’t get this mentality. I once knew a lady, who had an adopted daughter, who was unwilling to take a day off from her minimum wage grocery store job to apply for a job that paid twice as much.

Now, understand, I believe in stability. I understand that it’s necessary to prove that you have a steady income before you can get a loan to buy a car or a house. I understand that most places frown on faith in God as a form of ready capital. I even understand that it is necessary for a Christian to be able to demonstrate stability in their own personal walk in order to be a good witness. But, “I have never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread.” And, for that matter, “All things work together for the good of those who love Him and seek his commands.” There is a distinction to be made between stability in your actions, and fear of instability. Fear of instability leads to looking for stability in a place where it can’t be found: in your employer, or in the government. True stability comes from the God who ever watches over you, who wants to live inside of you. True stability is important, but to make it the number one priority in your decision making process will cause you to achieve something else: mediocrity.

In my own mind, at least mediocrity is one of the ultimate evils in the world. Mediocrity means fear. Mediocrity means a lack of trust in God and an insistence in achieving only what you know you can accomplish. Mediocrity means gradually giving up on goals, dreams and ambitions, giving up on a little bit of those things that God has given us to separate us from the animals. Mediocrity means taking the little setbacks in life as punishment, as a sign to stop, instead of as an opportunity, as a chance to learn and excel. I believe that all things work together for the good of those who love Him and seek his commands. In my mind, that means that everything always works out to my advantage. I always win. If, in any occasion, I completely and horribly fail, I believe that the Lord will so arrange it that I have an opportunity or a chance to learn, so that at the end of things I will be able to say that I could not have been so successful had it not been for that failure.

All that to say, I have no intention of becoming a school teacher. Not that I have anything against school teachers. I know some really great people who are, or plan to become, teachers. They have a divine calling to teach in school. I don’t. I love knowledge, and I love spreading knowledge, setting little hearts on fire. Some people have even told me that I have a gift of teaching. I plan to teach my children. But for me to teach in a classroom, as a kind of career…? My only motivation for doing such a thing would be a kind of fear. Life is hard right now. Next semester I’ll be going to school part time for the last nine credits of my degree. I’ll be living off campus in an apartment where half of the lease is covered by school loans, and the other half will have to be covered by a job I don’t have yet. I just earned the lowest grade I’ve ever gotten in a class since maybe grade school. (Same basic reason too: The final essay, worth 60% of the test was “What are the most important things you have learned in this class?” The professor was very lenient too. The only answer he wouldn’t accept was the one I wanted so badly to give: “This class was totally irrelevant.”) But I am confident that even now, all things are working out to my advantage. Once again, the righteous will not be forsaken, and His seed will somehow manage not to be out begging bread.

Our school internship/career office puts out a weekly newsletter of all the new job offerings in their database. In this week’s list, fully fifteen of them were clerical positions that required an undergraduate degree and several years clerical experience. Nearly all of them practically described my resume before I sent it to them. Perhaps clerical work sounds like a step down from teaching. It probably is. But if you want to be a businessman, you’re better off doing grunt-work at a business than a higher paying job somewhere else. The issue isn’t the money; the issue is the dream.

On a personal note: Having miserably failed my ethics exam and been completely blindsided by a music history exam, I was reminded yesterday why I am an English major. I drastically reduced the effort I put into the other classes in hopes of getting somewhere with this ethics class. The ethics class I still did poorly on. I went in completely blind to the Chaucer class. I don’t think I had even done all the required reading. I am absolutely certain I aced that test. God is good, and He gives us grace in unexpected ways.

Blessings, all!
KB

The Least of These

I met a man today. It was a spontaneous trip to the Krispy Kreme, and we were sitting in the drive-through, locked in our place. We could see him, working his way down the line of cars, the red jacket bending over as he stopped at each car window. We knew what he was about. We could see it coming. I pointed him out to my friend, and she locked the door. We steeled ourselves for the oncoming conflict. One more and it was our turn.

How do you ignore a man outside your car window, wearing a had and a hood and at least two jackets? How do you sit in line at a donut drive-through and yell through a window that you don’t have any money? The truth is, we didn’t have any money. She had no cash at all, and all I had was the single twenty I was preparing to sacrifice on the altar of a half-dozen box. There was no way I was going to be giving my last bill to a dirty stranger. But the one thing you can’t do is lie. She rolled down the window.

The guy was apologetic, and polite. He kept repeating himself. “I’m sorry, sir. I to be doing this, ma’am. I don’t wanna be no trouble, sir. But it’s cold. It’s cold, so what I’m doing is… what I’m doing is walking down this… It’s cold, so I’m asking people, whatever they can give. I wanna go into a restaurant so I can get warm. I don’t wanna be no trouble or anything. I’m sorry, ma’am.”

There are certain cries the Christian must respond to, if he wants to call himself a Christian. One of those is the cry of the helpless when there is anything he can do to ameliorate the situation. He wasn’t even panhandling for money, really. He didn’t want food so much as he wanted out of the cold. I asked him if he wanted us to get out of the line and go into the donut shop and share our donuts with him so he’d have an excuse to be in the warm.

“No man, I don’t want no donuts. I need real food. I wanna go into a restaurant and get some real food so I can get warm. It’s cold out here!”

“Oh, so, like McDonalds, or Wendy’s up the road here.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“A restaurant? Like McDonalds or something?”

“Yeah. McDonalds is good.”

“Well, tell you what: Hop in the car and we’ll go to McDonalds or Wendy’s or something”

“Oh, no sir. I don’t get in nobody’s car that I don’t know. Momma told me never get in nobody’s car that I don’t know. My momma died and now I got nothin. And I can’t trust nobody. I’m sorry to be doing this to you, ma’am. I don’t wanna be no trouble. They just dropped me off here, and so I’m just trying to get some money so I can get warm. It’s cold and I’m…I’ve got three coats on….” He started to unzip and show his layers.

“Ok,” I said, reaching into my wallet. I was convinced. This was no panhandler. This was just a guy who was cold. “All I’ve got is this twenty, and I can’t give you that. When I get through to the other side of this line, though, I’ll give you something.”

“If you’re just trying to get rid of me, that’s okay, I’ll just move on, I mean, I don’t want to be no bother. I’m just…”

“No, we’re not trying to get rid of you,” Valerie said.

“No, I just need to get some change, is all,” I said.

“Ok.” He wandered off, away from the line of cars.

“Do you think he believed us?” Valerie asked.

“I don’t know. I hope he doesn’t just leave.”

“Maybe we should just go in.”

“Do you think I’d be faster?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” The cars in front of us finally started to move.

“Here we go. I think he did believe us. Or he would have gone on to the next person.” I looked into the back seat. The only article of clothing was a sweatsuit I’d used to sleep in at a friend’s house the night before.

“He doesn’t need any more clothes. He needs a place to stay.”

“Yeah. But he won’t get in the car, so we can’t take him any place.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t even know where any shelters are. We can’t let him stay in the dorm: they won’t let us.”

“I know.”

“Did you smell alcohol on his breath?”

“I think so.”

“Doesn’t really matter, though, does it? ABC store is closed.”

“I think the closest one would be a really long walk away anyway.”

“Well. At least he’d get warm. But even if he was going to get drunk…”

“Yeah. At least he’d be warm. I think he’s on the other side over there, by the IHOP”

“IHOP’d be better than McDonalds. Here. When you get the change, give me a the ten and I’ll run up and get him before he gets away.
She gave me the bill and jumped out of the car. But there was no worry. The guy had believed me and was waiting patiently by the IHOP building.

But this is where it gets tragic, and I wish I could remember the words. I gave him the ten and told him it was a ten, but he didn’t go in. More than he was cold and hungry, he needed a friend. He apologized again, and told me how cold it was. He told me about his friends that said he could stay with them, but kicked him out after a few weeks. He talked about his mother dying again. I asked him when she died, and he couldn’t remember exactly. A month ago, maybe, he said. I couldn’t bear to ask if she had had the dignity of a funeral. He told me again, how it was cold and how he had lost his only family. “My momma was all I had” he said at one point. I think that was about where he started to cry. People told him to go the shelter, but the shelter was full. The Salvation Army was full, and they made you fill out all these forms. “I got ID, man” he said, and pulled out his wallet and showed me his license. The man in the picture looked so self assured and secure, hardly the hatted, hooded man that was in front of me. He told me his name. Twice, he told me, but I never quite understood what he said.

When he looked like he was about to go away, and had said everything he was going to say at least once, I decided to take the risk. I offered to pray. I don’t know why I thought it was a risk. People in that position are open to any kind of help they can get. But it was a risk for me. I suppose if I had been better prepared, I could have used the opportunity to share the gospel with him. I didn’t. I couldn’t see how the sorts of things that would lead me to salvation would be very useful to him. What good is prophecy fulfilled and the freedom from the shame of sin and divine purpose of every man, to a guy who can’t think about much more than the fact that he’s lonely and he’s alone and he’s hungry and cold? I guess I could have talked to him about how He’s Jehovah Jireh, the God who is looking out for you. I could have done a spiritual sis-boom-bah about how it was God who sent me to him. But frankly, I would have liked it better if He could have sent somebody who could have actually gotten him a place to stay. I wasn’t even allowed to let him into my own house. So I prayed a simple prayer. I prayed something along the lines of “Father, help!” I prayed for direction for him, to find a place to stay and a way to keep warm and fed. I prayed for food. I prayed for better help than me to come.” When I finished, he said “And protection. I’m from the country. The city scares me. I’m afraid somebody’s going to hurt me.” So I prayed again, for a shield around him, for safety, and for angels on every side to guard and protect him. It was a prayer of faith, because I didn’t feel a single goose bump. It was a prayer of weakness, because being with this man made me feel weak. I was so aware of how little I could do to help.

When I was finished, he said to me, in his repetitive sort of way, that his momma had told him that white people didn’t like him. I tried to say, that although some white people didn’t like him, I had no problem with him. But it came out wrong, and I could tell I was interrupting. He told me that although his momma said that white people didn’t like him, it was the black people, his friends, who had kicked him out of their house, and it was white people who had given him money and given him clothes. I think this is where he said that “Momma was all I had” and really started to cry. Valerie had circled around twice and was parked across the street. I went to her and got some napkins for him to wipe his eyes, and told him that I had to go. “Why you have to go?” he asked. I couldn’t give him a very good answer, except that I had work to do, which really wasn’t very true, since I knew that my chance of getting much work done after this was pretty slim. But as he dried his eyes, he finally turned to go toward the front of the restaurant. There wasn’t anything left for me to do, so I got back into the warm car, and we drove to our warm school dorms, and on the way, we ate our fresh warm donuts. There wasn’t really anything else to do, but to pray and feel bad that there was so little we could do.

Jesus said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me,” and there’s a whole host of prophets that talk about the importance of showing mercy and justice to the poor. But when the problems stand up and get right in your face, it’s almost impossible to imagine what you could do that would ever be enough. I know what that man needs. He needs good food and a warm, clean place to stay. For about six months, he needs nothing but stability and compassion and the gospel of Jesus Christ. You could say that would be enough to make him human, but socially speaking, it would make him little help to anybody else. He needs education; he needs to be taught how to behave and how to keep a job, maybe even how to start his own little business somehow. He not only needs the seed put in him, but to have his ground tended, so that when the seed springs forth, it will have somewhere to go. I couldn’t give that to him tonight, but I pray that will lead him somewhere where he will get it.

I suppose there’s a certain kind of Christian who from here would want to launch a juggernaut. He wants to petition the government to create an agency to help people more effectively than they already do; or he wants to launch his own ministry, create another Salvation Army, expand services somewhere. But I’m a bit more conservative than that, and don’t trust large organizations to do my work for me. All I can think about is how someday I want to be rich. I want to have a spare room in my house, completely separate from the rest of the house, with an outside door and everything, so I can invite people like this, that I don’t know, into my house without making the people afraid that I’m responsible for. I want to be in a position where I feel that I really can help somehow.

I met a man today. I couldn’t really help him. But he reminded me, at least, of where my focus needs to be.


The least of these is hungry.
The least of these is sick.
The least of these needs clothing.
The least of these needs drink.
The least of these knows sorrow.
The least of these knows grief.
The least of these has suffered pain,
And Jesus is His name.

~Petra.

Worse and Worse!

When we last left our hero, he was about to leave for Maryland with his beloved friend. He had four papers to write and little in the way of prospects for getting it done. Visiting relatives is a bad time to have backlogged homework. Well folks, it doesn’t get any happier for our proud commando.

Saturday morning we packed up and left the station by about 7:30. It all looked well. We actually got four college students and their bags into one Chevy Plymouth Sundance. It was Valerie (er… Constance) and I, plus two friends for whom we were giving a ride to Richmond. Of our two backseat companions, Gladys was going to somewhere on the North Side of DC (her mom was picking her up and taking her the rest of the way), and Lynn, an Irish (that is, an exchange student from North Ireland) was picking up a bus ticket and going to who knows where. We got to Richmond around 11:30 and dropped off Gladys and tracked down the greyhound bus station for Lynn. By 12:45 we were visiting some friends of Valerie’s for lunch. The family was that of Jon and Kris Hinley. Jon was the former Music director at Valerie’s old church in Knoxville. They had moved into their new house all of two weeks ago and were glad to have an old friend and her strange boyfriend to lunch. We made nice soft noises about their new home and their two adopted children (at least, I think they were adopted—they had dark skin and curly hair and Jon and Kris are both white and ) and headed off for Hollywood, MD. Little did we know that Doom was about to descend upon us.

That’s right I said Doom. With a capital “D.” When we got back into the car, it started making some funny noises. Well, only one funny noise. It sounded like there was an extra motor going on in sync with the engine. We would accelerate, the engine would go “RRrrrr!” and the other sound would go “Wwrrre!” Right along with it. Now, unless you don’t know, half way through an 8 hour trip is a bad time for college students to have car trouble. There wasn’t really much we could do about it. With much consideration, we decided to drive on (I mean, our options were?) and have somebody look at it before we came back. Unfortunately, it was not to be. We got just on the other side of Richmond when the car went “Wwrrre ya hahahaha!!!!” and decided to permanently stay in first gear. I wasn’t happy.

We pulled over. We prayed. I prayed for everything from cheap car service to supernatural automobile repairs to instantaneous transportation. Valerie started the car again and managed to get it all the way up to 30… in first gear.

A quick recap: It’s now 2:30. We’re in Richmond, VA. We have a broken car. This is not the miracle dispensation of time I had been praying for. We pulled into the nearest shopping center we could find and into the parking lot of a local jiffy lube type place. They were very nice. They couldn’t work on our car, but they did lend us use of their phone for about an hour and a half. We called everybody. We called Valerie’s parents, we called her uncle (that we were going to visit), we called the family that we had just been visiting. We called all these people over again. Ok, so Valerie called them all and I just looked helpful and got important documents from the car. But I looked really helpful! So here’s what ended up happening: Anybody want to guess how many mechanics are open on the Saturday before Thanksgiving? That would be about right. Zero. We were pretty much stuck till Monday. However, the nice people at the generic Jiffy did recommend a place just up the street which was so close that we wouldn’t need to find a tow truck. The Hinley’s decided they just hadn’t gotten enough to see of us, so they invited us to stay with them until Monday. After we got the car looked at and made our decisions about what was to be done, Valerie’s uncle John would come pick us up and take us up to Hollywood (MD, that is). So we impinged on (what were to me) strangers for a weekend, visited a strange church that Sunday, I got all my reading done, and we were back at the generic Jiffy come Monday. We drove the car to the mechanics, had them look at it, wend to McDonald’s for breakfast, and came back for the diagnosis.

Wanna guess what it was? Oh come on, you’d never believe. No really. Fine. We needed a new transmission. But, relatively speaking, it was good. They found a salvage yard that was willing to sell one for only $500. With parts and service it was estimated coming to $950. We had heard warnings from friends, family and random acquaintances upward of $1200. And the phone calls again. Valerie called her parents; I called my parents; Valerie called her parents again; Valerie called her uncle for a ride; Valerie called her parents again (she kept getting a busy signal). She tried calling her parents for a straight 45 minutes. Apparently the phone was off the hook. We made the decision to repair without them. The other option was that somebody had an 11 year old car they were willing to sell for $500. But it was ugly and we were scared. It just so happens (thanks be to God) that Valerie is a pinchpenny. She opens up these accounts, puts money in them, moves and opens up a new account, and completely forgets that she ever had the old account. This is a good thing because when some emergency comes up, she suddenly remembers that she’s been saving up for years for just such a time as this. If it had been my car, I would have sold it (wait… I did sell my car under similar circumstances). She was upset about it, but now that it’s all over with, I think she still has more money than me. Probably always will. I think I must somehow devise a way to claim access to all her assets… hmm… mwahahaha!

I could go on. I could tell you of the contrasts between staying under duress with a mild-mannered suburban couple, who had matching towels for their children, and staying by invitation with a wild gregarious couple out in the countryside, who both had masters in computer science and a total of maybe 10 computers in their house. I could tell you of the generosity of people lending their cars and how many times we used that car to drive across Richmond. I could tell you lots of stuff. But I can tell you’re already getting bored. Suffice it to say that we picked up the car today. It runs fine. We carpooled all the way back to Hollywood.

Now it’s Wednesday, and I still have four papers to write. I’ll be getting on now…

All things come to an end

Well, you didn’t think I could keep it up forever, did you? I had to stop sometime.

Actually, the supply of things to publish has not slackened. But my time has. Things are bad now. Really bad. How bad are they? Pretty darn.

Let’s see, I’ve got about four papers that are more or less late. That’s the biggest thing, really. Homework overload freaks me out, and then I procrastinate. I juggle very poorly.

The other thing is less traumatizing (for me at least), though by far it is more important. The state of North Carolina had decided that I am no longer a resident of NC. This means that I have lost about $4000 in grants from the state. As if this weren’t bad enough, the school, assuming that I would get the same grants I’ve gotten every year, went ahead and credited my account and gave me a $500 refund. I’ve literally had the carpet yanked from under me as I suddenly owe around $2000. If I don’t find alternative sources of funding, I get to get a job next semester, move off campus and go to school part time. Yippy Skippy! And yet this is somehow less bothersome to me than 4 overdue papers.
I think it’s because it’s easy to prioritize my financial problems, and break them down in to steps to viable solutions. I considered getting a bank loan to make up the difference, on the grounds that with an extra semester to look for a job, I’d have a better chance of finding a job. Unfortunately, it seems that they got this here recession on, and the chance of getting a better job in three months doesn’t seem to be any better than getting a “good” job now. It appears that I’m best off to save me the cost of the loan. My other solution involves politics. My advisor (in her indignation) wants me to take this to the president. She thinks that the school owes it to me to make up the difference. I don’t know anything about who owes whom, but I am more than open to other sources of funding. J So I went to the president. The president’s secretary sent me to the dean of the college before I could talk to the president. The dean sent me to the head of admissions. The lady who was the head of admissions left me with a voice mail saying that the school would not allow me to get funding as a NC resident because my “permanent address” is at the college. Tell me something I don’t know. Thus ends the first loop of the runaround. I figure by the third loop, I’ll know whether I have any chance of getting anywhere.

It’s the weirdest thing, though. I’m miserable so far as my classes are concerned. But my finances… happy as a lark. I know that it’s completely outside my responsibility and that I haven’t done anything I shouldn’t have. I’m in a place of absolute helplessness before God. This is a good thing. I know I can finally expect a miracle when I finally need one. The day I found out about my troubles, I was happy as a lark, laughing and ing jokes. I don’t think it was one of those “stress induced” thingies either. I’m upset about my classes, and happy about my finances. What’s the problem? I know I’ve been slacking in my classes and have done everything I could for my finances. No shame—no pain.

However. This here’s Thanksgiving break. Regardless of our classes or our finances, they kick us out for Thanksgiving. I’m going with Constance (and all her sisters and her cousins and her aunts) to visit family in the DC-Maryland area. I’m not taking my computer with me. Homework, yes. Computer, no. You know what this means. I suppose it might be possible for me to borrow somebody’s internet access for long enough to post something over the break. It’s also possible that I may pick up a lotto card while I’m getting gas and win the state lotto and resolve all my financial difficulties. But since I’m not a big fan of the lottery, I really wouldn’t be expecting to read too much of mine. And after I’d done so much to get my readership up…

Check out the archives and nibble on your fingernails until I get back. You’ll hear from me first thin, Monday morning, next week.

Kudos, and happy Thanksgiving!
KB

Zachari’s Song

Lost in the middle of a great big wind
My heart is on the fly
Then I heard Your voice and it’s drawing me in
I think I’m gonna cry

I heard mercy, on the wind
I heard freedom, calling… when

My heart is drawing
I will follow
Now I’m kneeling down

I am Yours
I cannot help me
What a thing is life to me?

Freedom found me
I must follow
You are life to me

I cannot
Help but listen
You are all I have

I stand up
My eyes are glisten-
ing I cannot see

Here’s my cross, Lord
give me a road
as I follow

I am not alone