Black Coffee and Oatmeal (Part II)

I'm ready, God.  Ready for whatever you want me to do.  Even if it means moving here to Vietnam or donating my limbs to the poor.

But I wasn't ready to sit on my butt and be still.

Rockwall, the city where I grew up, breeds a strange kind of group.  It attracts people who are wealthy enough for Dallas but not liberal enough for the crowd.  So we ended up with a city full of families and senior citizens.  And the weirdest mob psychology I've ever seen.

The parents pour their money into their kids.  They're all in band, or football, or choir.  They're taking AP classes and never taking a break.  They dart from one thing to the next all day and hardly sleep.  They obsess over test grades and name brands.  Because they're reflections, and they have to look just right.  These parents are living through their kids.

And let's not forget the churches.  You can't drive a mile without passing one.  The traffic is worse on Sunday mornings than any other time.  There are crosses hanging from rearview mirrors and on billboards and sequined onto the pockets of designer jeans.  The local barbecue place's marquee says: "JESUS IS LORD.  BRISKET SPECIAL $8.99."

So all the kids are pushed to join Bible study groups, to volunteer in the nursery, to go on mission trips.  To do everything you can do and be the best Christian you can be.  Why?  Because it's what everyone else does.

I grew up in this and I had no idea how weird it was.  How dangerous it was.  I perfected the art of being a Christian, and that meant doing things.  Posting Scriptures on social media.  Talking to the loner kid about Jesus.  Discipling girls in their faith.  I would literally get up hours before dawn to go serve at a soup kitchen with my friends every other Sunday.  I broke my back in a living performance because I thought it was normal.

Don't get me wrong, I did have a real relationship with Jesus.  But I had it wrong — I was acting for him when the only role he wanted me to play was myself.

All of that began to change when I walked into this place for the first time.

A church where the worship was pitchy.  Starbucks and Chacos were scattered along the front of the stage.  There was a huge cross littered with nails, staples, and names.  And people would talk about the fact that living in this city made them want to kill themselves.  

Fast forward; years passed and I found a family here.  God used them (and all kinds of adventures) to teach me to stop faking it.  He told me to throw away my face.  I did that in Saigon.  Threw it right out the window.  But when the plane hit the ground and I was home again, I still had a lifetime of workaholic mentality wired into my brain.  I still wanted to do things for God.  I had a different motive this time — gratefulness, not appearance — but I was still trying to earn his love.  Which, when you think about it, is both absurd and insulting.

After Vietnam, I helped with the middle school retreat.  I put in hours upon hours at my church job.  I went to coffee every other day to mentor girls.  Then I helped with high school camp. And to finish off my wonderful summer of showing God how much I loved him, I turned around the very next day and set off for one last mission trip.

I got to day two before I passed out.

"Be still and know that I am God," he was trying to tell me.  "I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth."  (Psalm 46:10)

Be still?  But there was so much to do!

Yeah, I wasn't going to figure that one out on my own.  So God pulled me from the game.

On day two, I was a wreck in every sense possible.  I spent the whole day in shifts of sleeping, being driven around the campsite, and crying unstoppably.  I had officially reached the end of myself.  On day three, I went home.

I spent the following forty-eight hours in a room with my Bible, my journal, and my computer.  No people.  Just God and me.

See, he had done so much in just three months.  As I read through my old journal entries, I wept because I was sure God had lost his mind.  How could he possibly have blessed me in so many ways I didn't deserve?  Right in the middle of my ignorance?  I was completely blind to what he'd been doing all summer, yet that didn't stop him from doing it.  Here I was, holding pages of evidence for a lawless love.  My rational brain didn't understand it.

But one thing I finally do understand, at the end of a half-year's journey.  God loves me no matter what I do or don't do.

That means rest.  Which, for an INTJ, is an extremely hard thing to accept.

So all the time that's passed has been an experiment in letting go.  I'm at college now, and I'm learning about compound interest and anaphoras and the 1960s, but above all I'm learning how to surrender.  How to listen for my Savior's voice instead of the voices of people who tell me what he says.  And day by day, moment by moment, I'm learning so much.

My first meal in my own apartment with my own life was oatmeal.  And a cup of black coffee.  The simple fare of someone who's just starting down the road.  

Can't wait to see where it leads.