I think everyone has moments, points of reference, in their lives they wish never happened. But alas, too many people know about the distressingly awkward incident to show grace enough to ever allow you to live it down.
One typical, uneventful Sunday morning, I stood in the choir room at 8:20, getting ready to go onstage to worship. All the choir members usually gather upstairs by eight fifteen to run through the choir song and then just hang until we single-file it downstairs and onto the platform.
Coffee decided to set in.
I knew I had about ten minutes to spare, so I dashed to the men’s room. It would have to be a quick trip—no reading the newspaper. I raced into the stall. Dropping my pants, with my bechunkis hovering over the throne (yes, when all is said and done, you may feel the need to slaughter a pig to get this visual out of your head), I noticed clean toilet paper in the bowl, so I reached behind me, grabbed the handle, and flushed.
For some unexplainable, unforeseeable reason, the commode exploded. Water went everywhere in a nanosecond. I was apparently in shock; I just stood there waiting for the tide to ebb back out to sea. Or maybe I was waiting for Moaning Myrtle to come screaming from the depths of the Chamber of Secrets. Nonetheless, a few seconds passed before I realized water was all over the floor, swirling around my dropped khakis and out the stall door.
When I finally became conscious, I grabbed my pants up. I grabbed them up so fast, in fact, my wallet and iPhone, nestled snugly in my back pockets, popped out and into the small creek forming around me in the stall. I wasn’t sure what to grab first: my pants or my wallet-and-phone combo. I was in The Matrix. The blue pill or the red pill? I grabbed the combo. They were both soaked. I laid them on top of the double toilet paper dispenser and then grabbed my pants up. They too were drowned. But just the back of them was soaked. The front rested comfortably on my wet shoes.
I knew it was only a couple of minutes before my presence needed to be onstage. I couldn’t see how bad the wetness was since most of it was on the back of my pants. I ran into the now empty choir room, threw the wallet-and-phone combo into my music locker, raced down the stairs and onto the risers, and deliberately stood in the back row so no one could see me from behind. I sang with all the gusto I could muster as toilet water ran down the back of my legs and pooled onto the riser at my feet for approximately twenty to twenty-five minutes.
Of course, worship time would soon come to an end, and the choir would climb back up the stairs to the choir room. Being in the back row, I would climb the stairs in front of everyone else. You have no idea how difficult it was to climb up fourteen steps backward with forty people watching me make a complete dipstick of myself. Or remove all doubt from their previously undecided minds.
Anissa Hodges, climbing the stairs right behind me—or in front of me, depending on your point of view—furrowed her confused brow as I ascended backward up the stairs. Before she could comment, I tried to answer her baffled expression. “The commode exploded—not my debris—and my pants were on the floor. They’re soaked in the back.”
By that time, we were in the choir room, so I turned and continued my journey. Then Anissa said, “Oh, that’s why there’s toilet paper on the back of your pants.”
I just knew she was joking. “Stop it! That’s not even close to funny.”
I could feel the red rising from my forehead to the back of my neck as she said, “Well, not exactly toilet paper. More like toilet-paper beadlets.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
A concerned bass was right behind her and said, “Um, there really is. Come on.” He ushered me immediately into the bathroom, grabbed paper towels, and courageously and dauntlessly proved what a true friend looks like. He began swatting the back of my pants with paper towels.
Suddenly, a tenor walked into the bathroom and froze midstride, just staring. The bass, not missing a beat, said, “Somebody had to do it.”
When he’d removed all the offensive beadlets, we went back into the choir room. I grabbed the wallet-and-phone combo out of my music locker and began wiping them down. I tried unsuccessfully to get the cover off the phone, when Anissa said, “Did your phone get wet?” I nodded.
She grabbed it out of my hand since I was obviously a total dolt at getting the OtterBox off it. Before I could even get “You know how to get that thing apart?” out of my mouth, Anissa had wholly disassembled the phone. Totally. In less than five seconds. Impressive.
I took it back, wondering what to do next, when Anissa punched my arm and said, “Don’t put it back together!” I was attempting to do that very thing. She made sure I understood I was to take the disassembled phone home and not try to use it till I’d buried it in rice overnight. I nodded in obedience to her command.
At that point, I went back to the throne room to see if I needed to mop up any water that might have missed the drain in the floor. The grate, not draining, apparently needed as much repair as the offending depository.
With my normal good fortune in place, I walked in to find Pastor David Richards, our beloved choir director, grabbing paper towels out of the dispenser by the handful and throwing them into pools of water. He briefly glanced at me and continued his exercise as he said, “I’m afraid someone will slip and break something.”
I lowered my head in shame and not a little mental discomfort and whispered, “I think—well, actually, I’m pretty positive—I caused this.”
He paused and shot his eyes in my direction for the slightest moment, just long enough to mutter, “Why am I not surprised?”
I’m sure, if we’re honest, we’ve all experienced a few of our own epic failures, whether they are from mistakes of our own choosing or from bad choices by others and whether they are remembered with heartache or grief or even laughter through embarrassment. We all have and will experience them.
A few months after the toilet-paper debacle, I began my thirty-first Celebrate Recovery step-study at a men’s correctional unit. Twenty men sat around me as I explained the program and the guidelines and how the meetings would take place every week. Close to the end of the session, just before we stood shoulder to shoulder and said the Lord’s Prayer together, one of the guys said, “What a refreshing change to get to come to a place and not be afraid to just be me.”
I feel the same way. At the beginning of every study, I say pretty much the same thing to the guys. Before I begin, I silently ask the Holy Spirit to stand guard around that room, and every time, I feel a sense of protection, a vacuum. It’s a wall that’s impenetrable. The Enemy can’t get through.
“Guys, this space every Monday night will be a safe place. We’ll make it safe. I know where you are as much as you do. And I know that you’ve been put in a position that screams ‘Failure!’ But I’m here to tell you it doesn’t matter why. You’re here. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past. The Creator of the universe, the one true God, has a plan for you. He’s prepared you for extraordinary things. You’ve made mistakes, sure. But we all have.
“Look at Peter. He walked with Jesus. He watched Jesus turn water to wine, heal blind people, raise cripples to walk, and forgive the unforgivable. He heard words and saw actions proclaiming forgiveness. And then, with just four words, Peter committed possibly the most epic failure of all time: ‘I don’t know him.’
“But here’s the miracle of the story. Jesus—while fully aware Peter would soon deny him, turn his back on him, and walk away—reminded him his name was Peter, and on that rock Jesus would build his church. And the gates of hell would never conquer it. God’s plan for Peter never failed or changed. It stayed constant and sure and true. Just like God. And you are no different. Proverbs 23:18 (ESV) says, ‘Surely, there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.’
“Here’s the truth of you. And here’s what I know the Lord wants you to know. You are God’s masterpiece. He created you anew in Jesus Christ, so you can do good things he planned for you to do long ago, even before the world was put into orbit around the sun. His plan for you was in his heart before you were born, and he even wrote about those plans in his book before you were conceived. If you’re worried about what he thinks of you sitting here all in white, feeling like a failure, remember Peter. Your failure is nothing compared to his.
“God’s plan for you has never changed. He will see it revealed and completed if you choose to do the hard work and, like Peter, find the trust and courage to say, ‘Yes, Lord, you know I love you.’
“We’ve all failed in one way or another. We’ve all messed up the plan in one way or another. You’ve listened to voices all your lives that have told you you’re not good, you’ll never amount to anything, you’re stupid, or you’re destined to fail. And you’ve believed those lies, and you’ve lived those lies. They haunt you, and you hear them in your waking and sleeping. It’s what you’ve been taught. It’s all you know.
“Now it’s time for you to work. God wants to renew the plan for you that he laid out so long ago. If you let him, he will equip you with everything good to fulfill that plan that will be pleasing to him. His heart is to use you to bring glory to him and his Son, Jesus. And you can rest, knowing that the ripples from his plan for you will reverberate against the shores of heaven forever and ever.”
The room is always filled with supernatural activity. I make it a conscious choice to lock on the eyes of every guy there at some point while I’m talking. They are transfixed by the words, which, trust me, come not from me but from a Father who loves them dearly. I often read hope in their eyes and a renewed resolve to trust the work and the process—some for the first time in their lives.
My final words to them are always “Encourage each other this week. If you’re out on the yard or walking to chow and see one of your classmates, just say, ‘You are God’s masterpiece.’
“I know some of you think that it isn’t true for you. You’ve failed too much. God couldn’t possibly love you. Let me tell you what’s true about those beliefs. You cheapen and devalue a unique and rare gem the Lord has created. That, my friends, gets to be your last failure. His plan for you is real and has never changed.
“There’s a phrase in the Bible that I love but never really understood until recently: you are the apple of his eye. In ancient times, the pupil in the eye was believed to be a round, solid object, like an apple. And since the pupil is essential for vision, calling someone the apple of your eye meant you cherished them.
“The Bible says you are the apple of his eye. Why would he say that? Because when he looks in your eyes, he sees the reflection of his Son. It means you are treasured. It’s okay if you are afraid to believe because of the hurt, pain, guilt, and shame you’ve experienced in your past. It’s okay not to believe that right now. Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t make it any less true.”
Then we stand arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, a band of brothers and begin: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name …”
