Day 45
People Are Strange
As I watched the Porpoise from the beach, I wondered what they thought about people like me hanging out on land. I figure they think my presence on the beach is about as odd as my feelings about their life in the ocean. When they leap above the surface and get a glimpse of the people on the shore, I’ll bet they think “Wow! There’s one of those strange creatures again.”
In the book of Matthew, the first guy Jesus ever met was a very strange dude named John. He was born to his elderly parents who died while he was very young. John lived in the desert by the Jordan River. He wore clothes made of camel’s hair and a leather girdle. He ate large grasshoppers and honey. [i] I saw people dressed like this in west Hollywood last week. It didn’t take reading the Bible or a song by the Jim Morrison and The Doors to enable me to figure this one out. Hey, people are strange. Christians are even stranger.
My wife called me one evening while I was in the middle of a meeting. This was unusual. The person who delivered the note to me wrote “Wife on Phone – URGENT” in big bold letters. There had to be something strange going on.
Jacki said she answered a knock at our front door. There was a young man we knew named Erik standing there sweating, shaking and wild-eyed. He asked to come in and speak to us. Jacki told him that I wasn’t home. Erik begged her to come in and talk with her for a minute. He also told her he needed to borrow a drill. Jacki consented. Within two minutes, she was calling me.
After returning home, I threw Erik in my car and sped off to the Emergency Room. The nurses loaded Erik on a gurney and paged two doctors over the intercom. I took a seat in the waiting room. About twenty minutes later, an ER physician came out and called my name. He told me Erik was in critical condition and could die at any moment. He did not expect him to make it. He said I could see him and should get in touch with his next of kin immediately.
I pulled the curtain back and sat down in a chair at Erik’s bedside. His eyes were bugging out of his head. Torment and horror scarred his face. He was trembling, sweating and his eyes were darting uncontrollably around the room. He had an IV in his arm and was hooked up to a monitor that kept making distinct, eerie, alert noises every few seconds that only added to the insanity of the situation. I grasped one of his hands, prayed silently and left.
I found a payphone in the lobby and called Erik’s parents. I had never met them. I introduced myself by name and quickly went on to describing the seriousness of the situation and the need for them to come down to the ER immediately. “We don’t know him!” his dad said forcefully. “I’m sorry. Do I have a wrong number?” I asked. “Nope. You just need to know we gave up on Erik a long time ago. Thanks for calling.” I heard a click and then a dial tone.
I stood there with the phone in one hand, staring in the direction of where Erik lay dying. My mind wandered to a passage in the Bible where Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. This weird guy I mentioned above named John, John the Baptist, did the honors. When Jesus emerged from beneath the water, a voice from His father was heard to say “This is my Son, Whom I love; with Him I am well pleased.”[ii]
Porpoise are fortunate. They are unable to hear the cruel things we humans say to one another. I wondered how many wounds Erik’s soul was perforated with by years of verbal jabs by his parents about not measuring up, by being different, by being strange. I pondered the question about the relationship between that sort of verbal abuse and Erik’s struggle with cocaine, an attempt to cope with something very deep within the wounded soul of this young adult.
Most people make the mistake of translating the experiences they have in life into a sense of what God is like. It’s the same process Erik’s parents imposed on their son. They created a box for Erik and when he didn’t fit in it, they ridiculed him, chastised him and progressively excluded him from their lives, callously unaware of the pain this rejection was incurring in their beloved. Nothing grieves the human heart more than this strange distance between a parent and a child, the Creator and you, His creation.
The drill that Erik wanted to borrow — he just wanted to release the pressure pounding inside his head. He was absolutely convinced that a few holes drilled in his skull with the drill he had seen in my garage would relieve his excruciating pain. As I recall this day in my life, I am compelled to ask the question: “Who really had the holes in their head?”
As you ponder this story, what is your reaction when I ask you to hear the voice of your Creator say, “This is my child, whom I love; with whom I am well pleased.” If His voice is contorted by voices from your past akin to Erik’s parents, you have boxed God inside some strange confines within which He was never intended to reside, nor can He be contained. It’s time to blow up your God box. Sound strange? There’s a term for this, it’s called reaching out in faith, knowing that there is more to the God of More than you have crammed into your cranium. As one author says, “There’s a word for this reaching out in confidence and hope beyond our current understanding: faith.”[iii]
Throughout His live on Earth, Jesus hung out with the strange one’s, frankly, the strangest of the strange. Guess what? You’re one of us. If you don’t think so, stop a few strangers on the street and ask them the same question Jesus posed, “Who do you say I am?”[iv] You’ll get the answer from the look on their face as they scurry by.
Pray with me for Erik’s parents that there will be someone sitting by the side of their deathbed, holding their hand, whispering, “This is my child, whom I love; with whom I am well pleased.” If you’re wondering whom the God of the Christian faith is, the One who asks, “Who do you say that I am?” He’s the one seated beside Erik’s parents’ deathbed when nobody else on Earth showed up because they were too strange.
In some curious way, those Porpoise swimming out there speak to me. It is unspoken yet, it is understood. They remind me that my God, my Jesus, is the One who is constantly whispering to me, “You are my child, whom I love; with whom I am well pleased.” My apologies if this sounds a bit strange. God’s like that.
NOTES
[i] Matthew Chapter 3
[ii] Matthew 3:17
[iii] McLaren, Brian D. The Church On The Other Side – Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix, Zondervan Grand Rapids, MI., © 1998 and 2000 by Brian D. McLaren, p. 199.
