bleeding out loud

On Monday, my wife texted me shortly after 10am to say that our 1 year old had decided that crawling was no longer a decent means of making her way through the world. In an instant she decided to walk, and there has been no turning back.

She’d taken her first steps weeks ago, but after two or three belly-first, drunken steps, she’d fallen and just went on crawling. But with both our girls there came a moment, a gleam in the eye, where you could see the wheels upstairs turning and a decision being made. And off they went, increasing in speed and range day by day.

But what I have most loved about Clara’s walking is how delighted she is by it. She takes tiny little steps, raising her knees up high with each step like she’s marching before delicately bringing her feet down only inches from where she had just been. She walks laps around the house-through the hallway and into the dining area and then around into the living room and then all over again, and she giggles every five steps or so, simply delighted by her new ability.

Her delight is particularly meaningful to me in light of a recent encounter I had. Last Sunday I had the privilege of having lunch with Steve Ruetschle, an American pastor leading a church in the Philippines. Last June he was in a severe motorcycle accident that left him a quadriplegic. At one point in our conversation, he was describing how his immobility had forced him to face his need for God. Paralyzed from the neck down, he could be in a room by himself looking around for hours. So he started praying and found rest from the monotony in his conversations with God. I’m not sure that I’ve ever met a more prayerful person, someone whose prayerful disposition was so genuine and deep. He is the kind of person who has no need to tell people how important prayer is to him. It comes out in the richness of his conversation, in his attentiveness to whatever it is that you’re saying at the moment, and in his patient slowness, the kind that people only come to through suffering.

Since June, Steve has been defying all the odds of a major spinal chord injury and has slowly been learning to walk again. Each day seems to be another miracle of capability. When we finished lunch, he struggled to get himself up out of the booth and onto his crutches. After several slow attempts, he swiveled in his seat and stood up. “You have no idea what a miracle that was,” he said, nodding towards the booth. I checked out Steve’s blog and found this clip of him learning to walk again.

Watching my daughter walk around and giggle and watching Steve’s miracle getting out of the booth, I am overwhelmed with a deep sense of gratitude for every step. I only hope that I can, that all of us can, become a little more like Clara and Steve as we make our way through the world.

*To find out more about Steve and his story visit his blog www.steveruetschle.com.

My first car was a 1983 Delta 88′ Royale Birmingham Oldsmobile. Measuring roughly 40 feet in length, it had tons of wood grain and a full faced clock on the dashboard complete with hour hands. The hollowed out interior basically had two full size couches for seats, a front bench and a back bench. My only coping mechanism was to add humor to the situation by calling it the hooptee, and even that really wasn’t that funny.

But at the age of 16, with the keys to that massive Oldsmobile in my hand, I felt an impulse. I’d taken choir class as a junior, and as fate would have it, I was seated next to Vicky. She was a year older than me. She was the homecoming queen. She was pretty. And I had an Oldsmobile. It all made sense.

But up to that point, I’d never actually asked a girl out on a legitimate date. I’d only talked to girls that I felt certain would like me back. It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But it was the truth, so I decided that I’d ask her out. For weeks I meticulously planned “the ask.” Then when I asked and she said yes, I was confronted with the reality that I’d put so much energy into the ask that I hadn’t actually considered what to do if she said yes.

In classic first date fashion I suggested a trip to Applebee’s and a movie. At 16, I had absolutely no concept for the art of keeping conversation going. When you’re a high schooler on a date and you try to talk about the weather or comment on the menu, things are pretty much doomed from the get go. Vicky was so nice. I don’t think she noticed, but I was terrified by the silence. In my foolishness, I chose a course of action that would turn out to be regrettable.

My mature way of dealing with the silence was to rely on the Applebee’s free refill policy. If I was drinking something, she couldn’t possibly expect me to be talking. I downed 8 iced teas in 45 minutes, and in my nervousness I refused to leave her presence to use the restroom.

Then came the movie. I can’t remember what it was, but it was long. And again, I was so occupied with the fact that she was sitting next to me that I wouldn’t let myself go to the bathroom. Then about halfway through the movie, the mechanics of nature began to kick in. I could feel my bladder beginning to swell. I began to shift in my seat every 30 seconds or so.

Once the movie was over, I drove her home. By this time, the pain in my bladder was nightmarish. If I’d run over a pothole, I’d have soaked myself. Typically I’m the kind of person who will suck it up and deal with it. I’ll suffer before I do something I don’t want to do. I’ll hold it for hours rather than go in a port-a-potty. But by the time I dropped her off at her house I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to go. So I asked her if I could come inside and use the restroom.

It would prove to be one of the most devastating decisions of my life.

What I failed to mention before is that Vicky’s full name was Vasiliki. She was Greek, and her parents weren’t too keen on her dating someone who wasn’t Greek. In fact, she and I went out for several months, and I was around her father a number of times, and he never once spoke to me or even looked me in the face. I was terrified by the man. Vicky’s grandmother lived with her, and I imagine that she was a wonderful woman, except I couldn’t understand a word she said. She only spoke, what seemed to me, a very aggressive form of Greek.

Anyhow, when we walked in the house, she showed me to the bathroom. It was just off the living room and when we came out of the hallway and into the living room I encountered a group of Greek women huddled around Vicky’s mother. They all immediately stopped speaking and looked at me. Silence. Awkward.

Sadly, the bathroom door was located about 8 feet away from this group of women. I gave a nervous hello and walked past, shutting the door behind me as quickly as possible.

By now the 8 iced teas were wreaking havoc on me, and I had to go. I didn’t just have to pee. I had to unleash the falls of Niagara. This was going to be loud, like microphone next to the toilet loud. I instinctively looked to the light switch for the vent. No vent. Please God. Why is there no noisemaker? There are 10 Greek women standing 8 feet away, and I’m about to pressure wash the inside of this toilet. You’ve got to be kidding me.

To make matters worse, the bathroom door was paper thin. And, as I remember it, the door itself had been hung too high. If someone had tried, they could have reached their arm underneath the door and felt around on the floor. This was not good.

And at this point, you’d think, “Dude, just turn the water faucet on.” You’d think. But I was a 16 year old who was nervous out of his mind. There were 10 Greek women outside the door. I was terrified about pee-ing loudly. I was a deer in the headlights, and I made an unconventional decision.

I decided to pee from a seated position.

This was not a position I was accustomed to, and after securing myself in what felt like the appropriate position, I began. The relief was instantaneous.

Meanwhile, I heard whispers outside the door. Curious about what the Greek women might be saying about me, I leaned in the direction of the door to try and hear what they were saying, which in retrospect is just ridiculous. They were speaking Greek. Even if I could hear them I wouldn’t understand.

About 30 seconds in, I heard a pitter patter. To my horror, I looked over to see that the entire time I had been going, the pee had been shooting between the porcelain and the lid, landing directly in my pants.

The moment played out in slow motion. I remember thinking in slow motion “NOoooooooooooo.” I over-corrected, sending fully digested iced tea onto the floor.

My jeans were wet from hip pocket to ankle.

After cleaning up the mess, I realized that I would have to walk out of the bathroom and confront the 10 Greek women. I truthfully looked at the bathroom window over the shower. It was too small.

Fortunately I had a long winter coat, and I deftly decided to hold it in front of my waist and announce that I really needed to get going. I drove home in wet pants, a Greek tragedy.

A few weeks ago I was reading through Colossians for a sermon series I’d been working on when I came across a passage in Colossians 3 that had always seemed strange to me. It says, “Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

Hidden with Christ in God. What a weird sentence.

I’ve never really known what to make of it. The typical explanation I have heard is that when a person joins his or her life to Christ, from that moment on when God looks at you, God doesn’t see you in all your mess. Instead, God sees Christ. That’s an okay explanation as far as explanations go, but I’ve always thought it was kind of cold, like some kind of legal loophole so that God couldn’t be mad at you because Christ was in the way.

But something happened that brought the passage to life for me in a new way, and I’ve been meaning to write it down for a long time, but I keep forgetting to do it. So when I came across the passage a few weeks ago, I was reminded of what happened and why I needed to write it down.

I was in a pastoral care meeting in 2004, several weeks after Rich had been killed. The topic of the meeting was “how to do funerals.” How awful does that meeting sound? Of course, my grief was still really fresh.

For most of the meeting I sat there quietly, trying to keep my composure as the people around me talked about the ins and outs of ministering to people in the midst of loss. Then, the person leading the meeting (a good friend) looked at me and said, “Brad, you’ve been awfully quiet. Are you okay?” The whole time I’d been fighting back tears, and when he asked the question, the tears finally overpowered me. I couldn’t choke them back anymore. My eyes brimmed. My face got red, and I put my head in my hands and shut my eyes. I knew everyone in the room well. They knew what had happened, and they were all gracious people. Losing it in front of them was no big deal, but for whatever reason, I felt really ashamed. I didn’t want them to see me like that. I felt exposed and naked. So I sat there with my head in my hands, my eyes closed and the tears still coming, and I started praying inside my head, “God, I don’t want them to see me. Can you just make this go away?”

I sat that way for what felt like an eternity when suddenly I felt arms around me. It was my friend, the one who had asked the question to begin with, and I could feel his teardrops falling on my arms. When I opened my eyes, I realized that the way he was hugging me had kept me hidden from everyone else in the room. Instead of seeing me weeping, all they could see was him weeping. That’s when the beauty and the mystery of what it means to be hidden in Christ finally clicked for me.

Last week I was standing in line at a coffee shop when someone came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders and started shaking me. It was a friend. We’d been talking for months about getting together for coffee and had never gotten around to it. It turned out that his appointment had canceled on him, and I wasn’t in a yank to be anywhere, so we sat down to catch up.

It wasn’t long before we were in the thick of things. Life hadn’t been good to him in recent months. From what I could tell, he was in the midst of a business owner’s worst nightmare. We talked for a long time about the complexity of his situation and what it meant to live well in the midst of it. Then he turned the conversation. What had been up with me? How was I?

It seems odd to me how difficult that question can be at times. I experience every waking moment, and every sleeping one for that matter, through the lens of my own life. I live in my own skin. There is no one in a better position to say how I’ve been. But for whatever reason I often struggle to answer the question and usually fumble through something like, “Not too bad.” Or “Things have been busy.” Or something soul-less like that.

I heard someone recently say, “Well, that’s just life.” And everything inside me revolted having heard it on someone else’s lips. That’s just life? That’s it? It just is what it is? No, no. I reject that. When you read the creation poem of Genesis 1 you get this picture of God speaking life into existence, breathing into it, bestowing it with dignity, honor, and potential. The sea teems with creatures. The fields sprout up plants. And God gives all of it this charge to be fruitful and multiply. The poem is chock full of explosive, fertile possibility. Life is happening. It springs up here or there like grass in the cracks of the sidewalk. No matter what you lay over it, life relentlessly grows up from underneath. One of my favorite authors says “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.” That’s the life I’m interested in.

But with the monotony and humdrum of the day to day, I often fall asleep to the explosive, fertile possibility that is life, and the answer that I choked out to my friend was something about how busy things had been. I talked about how recently I kept finding myself in the middle of certain people and situations, trying to navigate everyone around me and their different interests.

Then he simply said, “Don’t let that stuff cause you to lose track of the bigger story.”

Reading the sentence now, it doesn’t seem like a profound insight: Have perspective. Know that your life is headed somewhere beyond this moment and the complexities you face today will be the things that connect you to others or give you wisdom or credibility tomorrow. Yes. Of course.

But what stopped me short and stirred something deep in me was that these words had come from the lips of someone in the midst of a nightmare. His life was a mess, and yet here he was refusing to give into cynicism and despair. That’s just life? No. There’s a bigger story that precedes the present story I find myself in. The story of God creating a world and then marking that world with goodness and order and shalom, and the relentlessness of this God to put things back together when the world fell apart.

I love encounters like this because I regularly need to be reminded and jolted out of my cynicism, to be reminded that “all the death that ever was set next to life could scarcely fill a cup.” There’s something about people who embody a defiant refusal to give death an inch. They look death in the face and instead see life. They look despair in the face and somehow still find it in themselves to be full of joy. Sign me up for that any day.

In college, I played guitar constantly. Everyone seemed to play guitar in the dorms so there was always someone to strum along with, and we’d spend hours sitting in dorm stairwells playing. Back then, playing guitar was a kind of therapy. It did something deep inside me that felt healing or true. There were moments when I’d be almost drawn to the guitar with the deep sense that if I simply picked it up I’d somehow be able to put expression to all the longing, beauty, sadness, or profundity that I found in the world. But then one day, whatever that magnetic force was that drew me, it went away. Nowadays I’m lucky to pick up the guitar and make it through a song start to finish before I start to get bored.

Then in 2004, my sister’s newlywed husband was killed in combat in Iraq. His death was a wrecking ball that swept down through our family crushing everything in its path. It leveled my sister, driving her into alcoholism and depression. Sometimes the suffering of loss is nothing compared to the suffering of presence. Standing by and watching her daughter suffer left my mother feeling completely helpless. My father presented himself as strong but I know him well enough to know what his weaker moments were like. He lived with his own kind of helplessness. I suspect that in the course of a lifetime there are a handful of experiences that completely destroy your worldview, and Rich’s death was one of those moments for Trisha and I.

Relief came in the form of writing. I’d sit in front of a computer for hours on end pounding out my questions, trying to sort out the shards of my worldview to see what could be salvaged. Looking back, I think both Trisha and I came closer to walking away from our faith than we knew at the time, but thankfully the writing was a relief. Over the past 6 years, I’ve come to have the same sense for writing that I used to have for the guitar, and I’m sitting here writing this, not knowing if I really even have a point in mind other than that I was standing in the kitchen just now and felt the longing and the ache and the pull. I’ve come to trust whatever that force is. Is it creativity? Is it the Holy Spirit as so many of the people I know would suggest? I’m not sure what it is. I just know it’s there and that I feel compelled to follow it.

I’ve never really understood the Holy Spirit (and I’m a pastor for God’s sake!). Maybe it’s because I grew up as a Southern Baptist and we seemed to leave about as much room for the movement of the Spirit as we did the third verse of any hymn. Besides, we didn’t call it the Holy Spirit. We called it the Holy Ghost, which was a name that only complicated things as far as I was concerned. People who were “prompted” by the Spirit were weird.

And even though I wouldn’t say I know a ton about this mysterious presence that is somehow the gift of God to his people, my gut tells me that the Holy Spirit isn’t as strange as I’ve come to think it is. For instance, there are always people coming into the church wanting to talk with a pastor. They’re usually in the midst of some kind of crisis and really just need someone to listen more than anything-someone to sit in a room with them and keep his or her mouth shut long enough for the healing space that’s already inside them to open up. So I do my best to ask simple, honest questions-the kind of questions with no hidden agenda or right answer. Somewhere in the midst of our grieving for Rich and a world that no longer seemed right, I came to believe that we don’t need to give each other answers as much as we need to give each other our selves.

So that’s what I try to do in those moments, and one of the only ways I know to do this is to pray for whoever it is that’s comes in, and I’ve started to notice a strange phenomenon. There are moments when I find I have an incredible spatial sense of nearness to whoever is sitting there. We’ll be sitting several feet apart, but when this happens I have the overwhelming feeling that they’re invading my personal space, like we’re being drawn close to one another as a magnetic force. Weirder still is that there are other times when I sense just the opposite. As I pray, I might feel a spatial sense of distance as if we’re miles apart and traveling in opposite directions even though we happen to be sitting in the same room. It’s an odd sensation, and I’m only ever mildly aware of it because it only happens when I’m praying for someone. Then there are other times when I don’t sense anything at all.

But my guess is that the pull, whatever you may choose to call it, is holy, and in that way, my gut tells me that whatever it is that has happened inside me as I’ve written this just now is holy even though, at the moment, it only seems like senseless jabber.