June 2006

my spiritual gift is not fixing cars, so i’m always a little conflicted when i see somebody stranded at the side of the road.

i always wonder what i’m supposed to do, because having me as your car assistance angel would be kind of like sending my mom over to fix your computer. no offense mom! … but no good. i can offer you my cell phone, but even 6 year olds have cell phones these days, so that’s not much.

today, for example, driving home there was a guy in a brand new jetta who was stopped at the end of the freeway exit ramp. i say stopped, but that would probably imply he had a choice in the matter, and i don’t think he did. he had the car in neutral and when the light turned green he began pushing. he was driving alone, so he didn’t have anyone to help him push; fortunately there is a gas station right there on the corner so he only had to go about 20 feet.

i slowed WAY down, hesitating, doing one of those “should i go!? should i stop!? should i go!?” motions with my brake-pedal-foot.

maybe jesus would have given him a little push with his car (a hybrid, no doubt) or conjured up some of those little light wand thingies with which to direct traffic around the scene, but i just drove past. most of the time, i’m a fairly terrible human being when it comes down to it.

i looked back in my rearview mirror to see a kind young black guy wearing a basketball jersey who was filling up at the station running to his assistance. there was another lady looking on to see if there was anything she could do, too. as i pulled out of sight, i saw the b-ball kid jump behind the jetta and begin pushing.

anne lamott says we’re always looking to connect with Spirit, and most of the time it’s when we are still, when we listen to music, or when we help somebody that we find it.

in that split second before i drove away, i saw It there, in the young man helping a complete stranger, whom he’ll most likely never see again, and probably won’t even know his name.

yesterday, june twelve, two-thousand-six, i turned twenty-five.

the strangest thing about turning a quarter of a century is that i feel it.

i feel like i’m twenty-five.

i don’t know exactly what that means, but i do know that i feel like i can look forward and look back across my life with some amount of clarity that wasn’t afforded me at my last birthday.

i can see how my history has shaped me and how my family has molded me. i can see glimpses of light through holes that appear in my possible futures. i can see a bigger picture than i could see a year ago; the edges of the canvas have stretched outward, in some sort of reverse-photoshop-anti-crop motion, and there’s less of the photo that was greyed out than before.

of course in all of my blinding clarity, i wonder if it is perhaps a disservice to myself to be so damn aware. perhaps i should allow myself the rash insecurity and passion of my youth while i’m here, and while it’s still acceptible. perhaps i shouldn’t try to be an older twenty-five, but a younger one.

and maybe — just maybe — i should think just a little bit less. relax more. let the hamster off his wheel. take a friggin nap. play more nintendo.

perhaps this doesn’t make any sense to you. but i’ve always been a work in progress, and perhaps i’m just now realizing it.

but who knows.

i don’t live in an area that you might call reminiscent of, say, beverly hills. you don’t really come to my neighborhood to play outside with your kids at night, if you know what i mean. it’s not a terrible place (in the day) and the corner where i live has been fixed up pretty good (don’t go too far down the street), but occasionally there are some questionable things that “go down,” as they say.

yesterday i pulled into my driveway with my wife, we stopped home to get some things. as i’m walking through my front door i hear a mean scratchy voice coming from across the street, yelling fairly loudly.

“i told you, i want my money!”

many brilliant obscenities followed and the arguing went on, loud and raucous.

i couldn’t see anything. it seemed like the screaming was coming from an alley behind a convenience store. but i could tell it was pretty serious.

i decided to shut my front door.

allison got the things she needed to get while i peeked out the front window. “what’s going on out there?” she said. “beats me. i guess somebody’s fighting about something.”

a couple minutes later, a scruffy looking fellow starts walking down the street, turning back every few feet to give just another little piece of his mind to whomever he was apparently fighting with. he didn’t seem to have any kind of gun or anything with which to knife us, so we figured it safe to walk back to our car.

i tried not to stare — you know, i don’t really have any desire to attract any negative attention. i’m already pretty white the way it is, so i kind of stand out… especially when the sun is glaring.

we get in the car and i turn back to look. he’s walking down the street further now. he seems OK.

but then he’s not. he turns back around and starts yelling. we can see down the street now.

there’s nobody there.

nobody’s listening.

somebody’s a few fries short of happy meal, i fear.

i fear that many of the people in our american evangelical churches are yelling, screaming, but there’s nobody there. nobody’s listening.

we scream about homosexual marriages and we scream about abortion. we scream about the da vinci code and we scream about evolution.

but nobody cares, because they think we’re crazy. we’re bigoted and judgmental, and we look a lot more like pharisees than like jesus. we don’t know what we’re talking about or who we’re talking to — we’re just yelling.

we’ve been so focused on our need to be different that we’ve forgotten our similarities. we’ve neglected our common ground. we’ve forgotten what it means to be human.