Day 56
Thar She Blows
The first thing a Porpoise does after being submerged for a while is to blow it all out. Most people think blowouts are something to be avoided. Actually, they’re essential. Let me explain.
One evening, I attended a gathering of thirty to forty people. The purpose of the assembly was to get together every week and share what was going on in our lives, contemplate inspirational literature, and grow spiritually. As I listened to the sharing from the participants, I became increasingly uneasy. The people who were sharing were only sharing the good stuff…goodness reports I call them. It’s like none of these people had a difficulty, fear, doubt, challenge or worry in their lives. One person after the next seemed to pick up on the theme of everything’s wonderful and continued to maintain this theme in the content of what they shared with the group. There was only one problem: It was superficial and inauthentic.
I sat there thinking, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me and my life. Perhaps I need an attitude adjustment. Could it be that I’m just too critical tonight? I wonder what these folks drink and eat. Maybe I need to change my diet.” Just as I finished contemplating these thoughts, all heaven broke loose.
There was only one other person in the room who was visibly uncomfortable with the tone of the sharing during the evening. There was a small, elderly Native American woman nestled in an old, over-stuffed chair, in a dimly lit corner of the room. Throughout the hour that had just passed, I noticed her squirm a bit, shifting her position in the chair as if she was uneasy. She shut her eyes several times as other people shared. On one occasion, she brought a handkerchief to her eyes and dabbed beneath her glasses. Her name was Adrianne.
As a middle-aged guy finished his sharing, Adrianne jumped to her feet and screamed, “God Please Help Me!” She fumbled with her glasses, as she attempted to remove them. She was shaking. The tears flowed down her cheeks, beyond the capacity of her handkerchief to catch the flow. She just stood there, shaking, crying, looking out over the room, attempting to catch her breath
For the next fifteen minutes this woman shared the authentic reality of her life. She was in jeopardy of losing her primary residence, her mobile home. There was some problem with her deceased husband’s pension and she had been notified that this essential financial support and healthcare coverage would cease. She lived on a fixed income that barely covered her most basic monthly expenses. She had a medical condition that required expensive prescription medication and bi-monthly appointments with a specialist. There were plumbing and electrical problems with her home that required repair. She had no money to fix these problems. She had no food in the house and her check would not come until next week. Her son had just been jailed. She ended her sharing as she had begun it: “God Please Help Me.”
As Adrianne spoke that evening, it was as if the roof had been lifted from above this gathering. The winds of honesty, authenticity, courage, vulnerability, and humility swirled throughout the room. Whatever was in that room before Adrianne began sharing, I can assure you that it was gone when she was done, replaced by the sweet fragrance and freedom of being real. As one author says, “There is great risk in abandoning the artificial in pursuit of the authentic. Yet, if we’ve never known the real thing, it is easy to understand why we are mesmerized with the best versions of the imitation.” [i]
I love reading the Psalms. There’s an authenticity there about the human condition that nobody could have made up. Real accounts of real people struggling with real life, shouting from the depth of one’s soul, “God Please Help Me!” [ii] Just as the Porpoise blows it all out upon surfacing, we need to understand the fundamental principle of “Thar she blows!” in our relationship with God. Too many people think our communication with God needs to be all cleaned up and nice, before God takes notice. That’s simply nonsense. One author summarizes this point very well in the following: “The church loses its vitality when its speech is cleaned up, pruned down and domesticated to insure that our relationship with God is predictable and nice. Today’s church suffers from suffocating niceness and domesticated metaphor.” [iii]
There’s an over supply of maps and map-readers in world today. It’s people like Adrianne who have contributed significantly to the development of navigational skills in my Porpoise Diving Life. Adrianne is no map-reader. She’s just a woman focused on a God she knows is the source of all. “The church needs navigators tuned to the voice of God, not map readers. Navigational skills have to be learned on the high seas and in the midst of varying conditions produced by the wind, waves, currents, fogbanks, darkness, storm clouds and perilous rocks.” [iv]
Get real. Try blowing it all out with God to get beyond the surface of the relationship you may or may not have with Him. Come to Him just the way you are. Don’t try to clean it up or get nice. Perhaps this story from my life will help you begin. Start with Adrianne’s prayer: “God Please Help Me!”
NOTES
[i] McManus, Erwin Raphael UPRISING – A Revolution of the Soul, Nelson Books, A Division of Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, TN Copyright 2003 by Erwin Rafael McManus p.35
[ii] See Psalms 20,22,31,40 and 107 as examples of some of my favorites.
[iii] Hauerwas, Stanley and Willimon, William H. Resident Aliens – A Provocative Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People Who Know That Something Is Wrong, Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN Copyright 1989 by Abingdon Press, p. 149.
[iv] Gibbs, Eddie LeadershipNext – Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, Copyright 2005 by Eddie Gibbs, p. 66.
