Day 66
Ideas Have Consequences
Some species of Porpoise feed at night. This happens to be the time that fishermen set their driftnets and gillnets for salmon, squid and herring. Thus, man using these fishing methods kills thousands of Porpoise each year.
Josh was one of the young adults in our youth group. He was large for his seventeen years. He towered over the other kids. He spent most of his adolescent years playing video games at home in his apartment. He had been kicked out of high school for lighting off firecrackers when school was in session. He never finished high school and spent his nights skateboarding with the younger kids in the barrio. Josh was basically harmless, in my opinion. He had a big heart and would help others whenever they needed help. Josh approached me one day and confided he needed to find a job but didn’t have a clue how to go about it. (Truth is, his parents were sick of him hanging out in the apartment all the time). I gave him some pointers along with the essential encouragement.
Three days later Josh was on the phone. He had landed a job opportunity with a major retailer as a cashier in their home improvement department. (Admittedly, I was baffled and wondered how a guy who was used to sleeping until noon everyday was going to be able to get out of bed on time to get to work). All he needed to do was pass his drug test and provide the potential employer with one letter of recommendation. Of course, as the leader of his youth group, I was the only human he could think of who could a. write and b. write persuasively c. write anything positive on his behalf. Well, I wrote it. A few days later, Josh called. He was floating. He got the job! (I almost dropped the phone and couldn’t stop trembling). Josh asked me to come over and pick him up so we could celebrate. The celebration turned out to be a trip to a local department store where I bought him two pair of pants and two white shirts that he was required to have to begin training the next morning. “I’ll pay you back with my first paycheck. I promise!” He said.
After two weeks, Josh graduated from training. He had not been late or missed a day of work. I was so amazed and overjoyed, I forgot about the fact he owed me the money for the work clothes. Over the next couple of months Joe began making appearances after work in the neighborhood sporting new threads. Then came the new devices: The newest, coolest CD’s, Gift DVD’s for friends, a new, portable DVD player, a digital camera and a mini video camera. Every time I would see Josh he would scream “Bill! You gotta see this man!” He would play his most recent recording of the guys that he had captured on his mini cam (I thought for a moment that I could be witnessing the birth of the Hispanic version of Steven Spielberg). The visual display of the fruits of Josh’s employment had created a dialogue about getting a job amongst the neighborhood guys that were his age. “This is fantastic!” I thought.
The phone rang at our place unusually early one Saturday morning. It was Josh. He was calling from the confines of the Costa Mesa jail, where he had been afforded free room and board since early Friday evening. He begged me to “get me outta here! Please! Now!” I drove over to the neighborhood and picked up two of Josh’s friends (this is something I didn’t want them to miss). I lied to the Officer at the main desk of the jail, telling her I was Josh’s pastor and wanted to see him. (I have been a layperson all my life). She immediately called the tombs to have Josh escorted to the Visitors cage. As pastorally as I possibly could, I inquired with the Officer about what “young Josh” had done. He was charged with several felony counts of grand larceny. He’d been helping himself to a consistent portion of the daily receipts from his employer, that he had been responsible for counting out and depositing in the vault before closing. Furthermore, store security had been videotaping his misdeeds in action for the last couple of weeks. “Slam dunk!” the officer said, shaking her head in amazement at the stupidity of it all.
Josh’s eyes were bloodshot from crying most the night. He was trembling and said he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast the day before. “I refuse to eat the crap they serve in here,” he said defiantly. (I thought “Hunger strike? Already? They’ve got you on videotape you idiot!”). Over the next 20 minutes, Josh confessed to it all, expressing deep remorse through the heavy sobs, mixing tears with the snot that now dripped from his nose. (They don’t provide Kleenex on the prisoner side of the Visitor’s cage in the Costa Mesa jail. Come to think of it, there isn’t any on the visitor’s side either).
Then, the moment of truth that every Youth Pastor dreams of seemed to unfold right before my eyes. Josh asked me to pray for him. He wanted to accept Christ into his life. He was done with all the other stuff that had been preventing him from making this life-changing decision. We prayed together and Josh was saved. I floated out of that jail, sharing the triumph of this momentous event with Josh’s two buddies who had to wait in the lobby. “I wish you could have been there!” I told them.
A week later, after arranging legal representation gratis through a buddy of mine (Yes, he really was an attorney), Josh was a free man. I sat smugly victorious holding the hand of Josh’s mother, weeping tears of joy, in the courtroom, as Josh agreed to the sentence of community service, repayment of the stolen money, and other terms of probation.
A year later, a warrant was issued for Josh’s arrest. He hadn’t done one damn thing he agreed to do in that courtroom. This time, he showed up at my home with his mother (still weeping). I got my attorney buddy again (whose only motive was to salvage his professional reputation with this particular judge) and the four of us went down to the courthouse to “turn ourselves in.” The judge granted a ninety-day reprieve allowing Josh to complete all the terms of his sentence. I shadowed this kid for the next 90 days. I even picked him up at his house and dropped him off at work release to get on the bus to perform community service.
Change is a messy business. It’s filled with starts, stops, steps forward, backward, falling down and getting back up. Josh’s story troubled me for a long time. He let me down. I felt used. I thought of myself as naïve. I felt like a Porpoise unwittingly entangled in a herring net…I should have see it coming.” After I stopped blaming him, a new perspective began to unfold in my heart. Why had I expected a deeply wounded young man who was socio-economically, developmentally and psychologically impaired to somehow instantly become a brilliant, upstanding citizen of this world, simply because he cried out tearfully, “Jesus, I need you! Please! Come into my life!”
The answer is that is what I wanted. I yearned to see the visible, end result of the transforming power of God displayed in one, just one, human being at the initial utterance of a cry for His entrance into their life. I wanted to see the end result of a lifetime process following the moment the initial event occurred. Frankly, I probably wanted to take credit for it as well. (God spared us both from that). I desperately wanted Josh to be a poster boy for the other kids in the neighborhood (and the friends of mine I could share this story with, taking pride in the fact that God had used me in the process). My ideas about this event had a consequence: It wasn’t Josh who was all messed up. It was Bill!
One of the things we human beings have a habit of doing is transforming our ideas into expectations. Our ideas about God, His nature, and the way He works or should work in our lives is no different. We develop expectations about God. How the real world stacks up against those expectations can become consequences…particularly when we impose those expectations on somebody else, and their behavior falls short of the mark. What happened to me with Josh (I’m not alone) occurs to millions during their faith journey: We become presumptuous, as characterized in the following:
“The most annoying religious believers I have been around, of any faith, are those who presume to have an exclusive copy of God’s script for their lives, and the lives of others, in their hands. They pontificate with surgical certainty about who is in with God and who is out. They preach about what real righteousness is. They wag their fingers at popular culture, detailing what, when and how God will deal with our wicked world and our failed organized religious and humanitarian endeavors. All this is done in an effort to prove that they have gotten to know God so well that they now speak exclusively for him. What presumption.” [i]
Presumption blinds us to the perils of the idea to rush headlong after others guided by a specific set of end-result expectations. In these cases, we are typically driven toward danger by a desire to somehow please God and/or satisfy our own selfish cravings. Unfortunately, the consequence is that we end up, as I did, ensnared in the net of our own making, along with the people we’ve been pursuing.
Restraint is a difficult habit to develop for many in the spiritual life. This is particularly true when it refers to darting off in a certain direction, pursuing the wounded herring God places within our field of vision. I’m still learning to pause and examine my motives, methods, and expectations when the opportunities to act in these situations present themselves. Regarding the conversion event Christianity has emblazoned on my soul as a primary responsibility, I’ve begun to appreciate the fact that it’s the ideas that preceded my actions and my expectations about the results that God is acutely concerned about. The results are His, not mine.
NOTES
[i] Taylor, Tom PARADOXY – Coming to Grips With the Contradictions of Jesus, Baker Books, A Division of Baker Publishing Group, Copyright © 2006 by Tom Taylor pp.146-47.
