I Am Not Good Enough To Be Anything Else

There are a lot of reasons to be Christian, but there is only one reason that I have heard from another person that I deeply resonate with. She said, “I am Christian because I am not good enough to be anything else.”

I am too emotional to be a stoic. I am not very disciplined in my logic to be a philosopher. I am too jittery to be a Zen Buddhist. I am too theistic to be an atheist. I am too angry at injustice to be a hippy. I am too ignorant to be a social justice warrior. I am too privigleged to be voice from the margins but not famous enough to be a leading voice from the center. I am too unsure of myself to be a life coach and too hesitate to be a leader. I suffer from imposter syndrome most days and on the other days my head is larger than a balloon in a parade. I am too clean to be a shepherd and too dirty to be a priest. I am too happy to be a pessimist but not Pollyanna enough for optimism. I like to be a realist but find that I am not practical enough but still not intellectual enough to be thought leader. I don’t spell well and have all sorts of bouts and fits with grammar.

I have learned about many different religions and am just not good enough to make the grade.

I am not good enough to be anything else and so I give thanks for Jesus Christ who gives mercy and grace in more abundant ways than I could imagine. Christianity is the last best hope that I have to belong with others, discover God and receive Good News.

Maybe this is where Christian preachers fail. We have been preaching a gospel of striving, achieving and success and few people are good enough for that news. The Good News is that Christianity is full of sinners, losers, failures. Or as I like to call them, people like me.

If you are good enough to be something else, good on you. If you are not, then you might be the best Christian.

Pastor, I know you are busy...

About every fourth or fifth email I receive and about half of every phone conversation I have, I hear something like, “I know you are busy, but…” I cannot speak for every pastor but I believe that this modified story from the spirituality of the desert story might speak for many clergy - including myself:

There was a student who went to a teacher and asked for a word. The teacher shared a word with the student who went back home. The next day the student forgot what the teacher had said, so the student returned to the teacher.

“I am sorry teacher, but I have forgotten what you said yesterday. Can you share a word with me?”

The teacher spent a little more time with the student this second time, and then the student went back home.

A week later, the student returned and said, “Teacher, I am so sorry to bother you and I have asked now two times, but I have forgotten and would you share a word?”

The teacher sat all day with the student before the student returned home.

After two weeks, the student returned to the teacher. The student felt ashamed and was embarrassed to ask the teacher, yet one more time, “I know you are busy, and I know that I have taken a lot of your time already, but I have forgotten what you said. Could you remind me again?”

At this point the teacher took the table lamp that was to his right and asked the student to pass him a candle that was on the entry table. The teacher lit the candle, handed it to the student, and asked the student for a second candle from the entry table. The teacher lit the second candle, handed it to the student who was asked to retrieve a third and then a fourth candle.

The teacher lifted the lamp up and looed at the student who was now holding four lit candles. The teacher said, “Is the lamp diminished because it gave some of its light to the four candles?”

The student understood and said, “No.”

Never again did the student hesitate to visit the teacher and both of their homes became full of light.

Tears: Helping Us See Clearly

Like a lot of men, I have very little experience with personal tears. I bet that I have such limited experience with tears that I can name 90% of the times I have had tears (not as the result of being kicked in the groin or allergies):

1. I “sports cried” when I watch Dirk hold up the 2011 NBA championship. Yes, I joined the rest of the human race in tearing up watching the opening sequence in “Up”.

2. I was caught off guard when tears came over me when I was talking about the beauty and brokenness of the UMC after returning from General Conference 2016.

3. When I was appointed to a new church and had to say goodbye to a dear friend, I was grateful that she was shorter than I was so she could not see me ugly cry when we hugged for one of the last times.

4. Seeing my children for the first time was a big tear moment. So was waiting at the end of the center isle when those doors flung open and there stood the one person who I was about to make covenantal vows with. Then there was those two times where I sat in a parking lot and heard a song that made my eyes so red that I drove around the block just to try to minimize my eyes puffiness.

5. I suppose there where those three Easter sermons over the years where I was so moved by the story of light and hope and resurrection accompanied by images of love and delight that were also very tearful.

That is it.

There are many stories of ancient desert Christians (called the Abbas and Ammas) that feature tears or weeping. Often in these stories, tears and weeping come with of some understanding of sin or awareness of truth or revelation of love. In fact, it might be argued that tears did not come as a result of new awareness but the new awareness was the result of tears.

Meaning, it was the tears that helped the ancient one see more clearly than they had before.

We are told that tears in our eyes cloud our vision, however, that is not always true. Many times tears allow us to see more clearly by washing out what was clouding our vision to begin with. Tears are not the product of, but the initiation to new sight.

Maybe this is why so many of us (and I am talking to myself here) are blind. We have little experience with tears to wash out our blind spots and ignorance.

The Good Little Giants “Birdsong” has a stanza that goes:

Sometimes a grown man cries
To grieve the years he spent believing lies
He sees more clearly now through tears in his eyes
Maybe sometimes, baby, sometimes

And so, may we be blessed with tears.