The Man Who Knocked On My Open Door

Yesterday, a man came into the building of the church where I work and knocked on my open door. He spoke in rapid phrases that never quite formed into complete sentences. He immediately took to calling me "Bowen," I suppose because he spied my last name on the nameplate next to the door. He sat down without being asked (not that I wouldn't have offered) and proceeded to tell me about his prison time, how he did not deserve the manslaughter rap or sentence, and many more things that all came out garbled and rushed despite his friendly, talkative demeanor. For the life of me, I cannot remember what he said his name was.

I think it is depressing that I knew almost immediately why he was there - money. He told me several times that he had talked to the pastor, whom he called "the rev." However, a few times before he could get in to see anybody, security had escorted him off the premises (please remember, this is also a school). I think it is even more depressing that often while he spoke, I was thinking about how I was going to get out of giving him money. Now, this was not necessarily because I did not want to give him money. In reality, I had no money on me (unless you count the forty or so euro I have leftover from the honeymoon in a envelope in my desk). Also, since the main church offices have been relocated during a remodeling project, I had no idea where the safe is even if that was the procedure when people come asking for money.

He circled the point several times, that he was asking me to place my trust in him and give him something so he could go get some food. He smelled distinctly of alcohol - at first I thought I was imagining it, but there was no mistaking the odor as he talked on and on. Finally, after bouncing back and forth between his incarceration, receiving some sort of help from Jeff Bagwell and Ken Caminiti (before he died), and the stingy ways of people in River Oaks, he finally laid it all out and asked for money. I shrugged regretfully (only halfway an act) and told him I had no money to give and that, when the pastor returned from the trip he is currently on, he might come back and speak with him. However, I mentioned that I did have some snack food, being a youth minister and all, and I led him out of my office and to the youth room refrigerator, where I gave him a root beer, and then to a closet where I found - it's lame, I know - an unopened jar of peanut butter. I apologized to him that I had no bread or crackers, but, though he seemed annoyed, he thanked me nonetheless, and I followed him to the door. After noticing some of the Hispanic remodeling workers, he made some crack about immigration and how he needs a job too, then left.

I returned to my office and to the e-mail I had been composing, and I felt like a failure. For several reasons, I guess. I know, obviously, what I could have done and what I couldn't have, but I work in a place that, simultaneously, people try to take advantage of (inside and out), and people look to for help when no one else wants to provide.

What do you do when you can't tell the difference for sure? How far do you reach out? How close can someone come to actually doing the things Jesus did?

A Standard Easy to Break

Last Wednesday evening, during the discussion time with the youth at my church, I wrote the simple sentences on the dry-erase board. "I am individual. I am community. I am a Christian."
Then I spoke about the difference between community and conformity, and explained that much of the "community" expressed in Christian circles and churches is not true community at all, but conformity.

I have read a lot of blogs lately that have been calling out the American Church on everything from its exclusivity to its politics to its legalism. There are people, Christian and non-Christian, who are fed up with the cliques, the seemingly close-minded acceptance of policy, and the hypocritical standards, to name a few things. Regarding all these issues, I wonder if our view of sin and mercy is deeply skewed, so that the above things are natural outputs from our churches today.

In my youth group (and more broadly, in my church as a whole) growing up, there were several things that could open a chasm between you and other people. The first, and most obvious, was sin, especially committing a sin that was popularly spoken against and avoided. To associate with someone who tripped and fell below the standard became much more difficult - it was almost impossible to view them in the same holy light as you had before. Another way to drive a wedge between yourself and others was to question things - anything from the existence and/or actions of God, to the historicity of Jesus and the science behind his resurrection, to the certain code of morality supposedly upheld in Scripture. To question such things meant you were doubting something, and doubting something meant lack of faith, and wavering faith, in any arena, was yet another way to plummet beneath the standard. Therefore, association with those struggling to accept carte blanche was just as difficult. A third way to divide yourself was to simply be a part of a family that held an overall different political, social, or denominational outlook. The size of this division varied depending on how radically different you family was from the standard, but woe to you if you were on the extreme - you might as well have been living in a leper colony.

The fourth fool-proof way to drive a wedge was to suggest the offering be taken up at a different time or that the pulpit might not be necessary.

I explained to my youth that part of being a Christian - of following Jesus - means that you have come to a place where your individuality should perfectly meet with a community. Hence, becoming part of a church should never challenge who you are as an individual, but you should be able to bring all of who you are - talents, ignorance, resources, questions, skills, fears - to the group without worry that you will be forced to change the way you are and how you think about one thing or another. After all, Jesus never seemed to demand a change of individuality in a person, but simply how they act and associate with others. A friend of mine said it best once: "God glories in diversity." And, I believe, the church is at its healthiest and most loving when it has learned to accept everyone as different - people who are at different places in their journey, struggling with different issues and situations, seeking the best way to personally connect with the God in whom they have placed their trust.

Conformity, on the other hand, is losing your individuality for the sake of the group. Shaving off the parts of you that don't gel with the group so that there are no hiccups, no speed bumps as you cruise to where you're going (even if you're actually going nowhere in particular). Unfortunately, there was a lot of conformity in some of the churches I grew up attending, and it is a deep-rooted problem that pervades many churches today. That is why it is so easy for me to think up the things that would be certain to drive a wedge between a person and the rest of the group.

That is not to say that, growing up, there were not people who lived above such things, who cherished community and did everything they could to preserve it. And I'm sure there are people that are the same way in your church communities as well. But, I wonder, how often do you find yourself working and living toward conformity rather than true community, whether because it is easier, less stressful, or is less likely to cause problems of a foreign nature.

Don't read me wrong - I am not arguing against behavioral, moral change. Salvation does spark change within every part of us, but my understanding of individuality goes much deeper than this. We are the persons God made us, with personalities all our own. The last thing we want to do is bring all of who we are to a group only to have them squint at us as if they are gazing at us from an insurmountable distance, confused or shocked and peering back at us from the other side of their road to eternity.

In third grade we made fun of a kid because he spoke different, had a bit of a mean streak, smelled funny, and didn't socialize in the normal way. He grew up right alongside me and some of my friends, and to this day I struggle to see him for who he is rather than who I once determined him to be.

Return of the Writer

The following confession and resolved resolution can most closely be considered the blog equivalent of a long, deep sigh...

Over the weekend, I became more familiar with a writer that I had known about for some time - had even passed several times in the narrow corridors of Flowers Hall, the English building back at Southwest Texas State. As I finished what is arguably his greatest work to date, I felt a bit guilty.

The writer, Tim O'Brien, had become a guest instructor in the graduate-level creative writing program back at SWT, and though I did not end up applying for the program (which was one of the reasons I enrolled there as an undergrad) and therefore never sat in one of Mr. O'Brien's classes, it was hard to avoid his literary work. Besides giving many public readings, back in 2000 he was a celebrated, yet still burgeoning, writer producing some wonderful pieces of contemporary literature and my professors spoke well of his skill in crafting stories and novels. His most famous short story, "The Things They Carried," (which is also the title of his Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel and the lead chapter within it), was quoted and/or assigned in many a literature or writing class.

Did I read The Things They Carried? No, not at the time. It wasn't because it was a daunting, thick-bound book heavy to carry and even heavier to read. Actually, O'Brien's books are quite succinct, and astonishingly gripping and readable given his choice of themes and subject matter. And it wasn't because The Things They Carried was about Vietnam and was heavily autobiographical. As much as I was not interested in that war-before-my-time, it turns out that I avoided O'Brien's work simply because I was already overwhelmed with a host of writers and titles newly-introduced to me. It was around the same time that my jaw dropped, as if weighted with an anvil, when I read E. Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" for an assignment, and I realized I was a long way from the neat n' tidy, PG, Christian-genre literature of my middle school and high school days. In short, I was already taken aback by this strange new literary genre - which I was discovering was no actual "genre " at all, but real, real fiction - that swirled around me throughout my pursuit for an English degree.

It took me years to fall in love with the real stuff, but I'm so glad that I have, and the times when, in talking about other genre fiction, I seem like a snob, it is only because this real fiction has become my Juliet, and those genres that came before were merely my Rosalyn's. I am now completely smitten by another.

This past weekend, I read The Things They Carried. I embraced the book, knowing hardly anything about Vietnam, and coming away feeling as if, while still not understanding the reasons or strategies of that war, I have come face-to-face with the heartbeat of the 'Nam soldier, and the angst of all that went before his tour and pummeled him after he returned.

In the same vein, I have been reminded of my own passion to write. On my computer both here at work as well as on my personal laptop, there sits fragments of stories, and chapters of two different novels. Beside me now, in my filing cabinet, there is a whole drawer full of stories, novel excerpts, and vignettes from my college years up until now. In two different cardboard boxes at home, there are stacks of older writing pages, from second grade (when I first found my life's dream) through high school.

Moving, marrying, and making a home has kept me quite busy, but today, I hear those pages calling. I cannot avoid them, and I will not ignore them any longer.

Let the stories return to me, and let them roll on...