It was a hot and sticky day. A humid, sleepy, sticky day. That summed up my last sixteen hours in the fireworks tent. Tired, I struggled to stay awake and spent time alternating among packing up the last of the fireworks, burning boxes, petting my dog Falkor, and dozing. At one point, I heard someone say, “Hey!” I woke up to find a family looking for deals on leftover pyrotechnics. 

Later in the afternoon, I got a text from my high school buddy Jimmy Campbell, owner of the stand. He said he would be at my location in thirty minutes. He was bringing his big rig to load up the last of the fireworks and tent. I burned empty boxes behind the fireworks tent, picked up tidbits of trash, and decided to grab my iPad for a little Candy Crush Saga. 

I glanced over the counter where my iPad should have rested, but I didn’t find it. I looked around the tables and under papers and bags. It wasn’t there.

I panicked. More than just a tool, my iPad had come from a friend. He’d believed in me and chosen to affirm me by giving me something he knew I needed. I could get another tablet, but I couldn’t replace the sacrifice it represented.

When Jimmy showed up, I told him my iPad might have been stolen. 

I immediately pulled up Find My iPad on my phone. I couldn’t believe the app would actually work, but when I activated the app, it showed my iPad a few miles away, near a shopping mall. 

Trying to act calm, I talked to Jimmy about the fireworks business. Jimmy, always the steady one, stopped me midsentence and said, “If you know where your iPad is, you need to go find it.” 

So I took Falkor, my Labasset, who does not travel well due to severe motion sickness, and jumped into the car. 

On the way to the mall, I called the North Little Rock police, who told me to call them when I was a block from the location, and they’d send a car. Upon reaching the site, I used the tracker again and found my iPad had moved from North Little Rock to downtown Little Rock. 

I was beginning to get a bit miffed at that point. I couldn’t believe some loser had taken my iPad, and the farther I traveled, the madder I got. I called the North Little Rock police. They informed me I would have to call the Little Rock police since it was now in a different city. 

I got to 1000 West Third Street in Little Rock and called the police. They said they would have a car there in a few minutes. 

My sense of justice in full throttle, I visualized every possible scenario as to how I was going to love watching the police handcuff the scumbag. I imagined the satisfaction I would feel in seeing the thieves hauled off to jail while I stood smiling in the background. The gratification of being responsible for saving the world from a degenerate criminal. 

While waiting for the police, I decided to update the location. The app said my iPad was just around the corner. I decided to run around and take a look. That didn’t work. I saw nothing more than a corporate office building and not a soul anywhere. I drove back to the parking lot and waited for the police. 

I updated it again. This time, the app said my iPad was back in North Little Rock, just off JFK. So I headed back across I-30 toward North Little Rock. I called the police again and told them where I was headed. 

At that point, Falkor was exhibiting critical signs of travel distress. I knew exactly what to expect. All things come from the earth, and all things return to the earth. Falkor returned much at that time. 

Holding the steering wheel with one hand, I used the other to spread out a hoodie on the passenger side so Falkor’s lunch wouldn’t get on the floorboard. Then, using the same hand, I grabbed his snout and held it over the floorboard so he wouldn’t puke on the seat. 

My frustration was mounting. I couldn’t believe the stress—all thanks to one thieving slimeball. I couldn’t wait to nail the reprobate to the wall. I had a pocketknife, and I wasn’t afraid to use it. 

Just as I crossed the river into North Little Rock, driving with one hand while attempting in vain to keep Falkor from fulfilling Proverbs 26:11, I heard a voice as clean as a glass of cold, fresh water. The voice of my Father in heaven said, “How much have you been forgiven?”

I love the way God chooses flawless words to make his perfect point. I have no scriptural precedent for this, but looking back and processing, I believe if he’d said, “How much have I forgiven you?” I would have felt guilt, shame, and self-condemnation. I didn’t realize from the beginning how I should have been feeling about the person who’d wronged me. 

But because he said, “How much have you been forgiven?” my body instantly relaxed. A supernatural calm and understanding came over me. I felt forgiven. He gave me the gift of peace, love, and affirmation that can only come from knowing I am totally, unconditionally forgiven. My eyes filled with tears as I whispered, “Lord, so much more than I could ever begin to pay back, much less understand.” 

I knew then that no matter what the law might do, no matter the consequences that might await the individual, my job was to show forgiveness and mercy. I thought of what Jesus said in Luke 6:35–36 (NIV): “Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” 

At that moment, my phone rang. Jimmy was calling from the tent. I was sure he wondered why I’d been gone for more than an hour. 

When I answered, Jimmy said, “Someone is here, and he wants to talk to you.”

Jimmy handed the phone over to the someone, who said, “My name is Alex. My brother stole your iPad for drug money and sold it to me. I have it here, and I want to give it back to you.”

Incredible! I said, “I’m on my way back there now. Can you wait ten minutes?” 

He said, “I’ll wait here all night if I need to.”

When I arrived at the tent, I let a grateful Falkor out of the car. Sighing deeply, I glanced at my hoodie on the floorboard, thankful it was washable. Deal with that later. I saw a young man and lady waiting. Walking toward them, I could see the fear and anxiety on his face. Immediately, I calmed him by saying I wasn’t going to involve the police. I told him what had happened over the last hour and how the Lord had sweetly dealt with my attitude and changed my heart. I also told him exactly where he lived. He asked how I knew. With a calm resolve, I answered, “That’s the address where the police and I were going to meet.” 

He then informed me, “I’ve recently been released from prison, and I’m trying to do the right things. My brother told me the iPad belonged to a friend of his who needed money and said he could sell it for sixty dollars.” Alex bought it, and his brother left. When Alex looked at the iPad screen, he could see tracking information. He knew immediately the thief would face prosecution. 

Knowing that could cause big trouble for him, Alex called his brother and said, “What have you done? This iPad is someone else’s.” His brother hung up. Not deterred, Alex texted him and said, “I’m calling Mom.” 

That, to me, is far worse than threatening police action. I guess Alex’s brother thought the same. He immediately called Alex and told him where he’d gotten the iPad. And Alex brought it back.

I asked Alex if he knew Jesus. He smiled and issued an emphatic “Yes!” I invited him and his wife to come to church with me sometime. 

The consequences of sin might include whatever the wheels of justice and law deem appropriate. My job, as a follower of the One who paid the price for me, is to offer forgiveness. 

Alex’s brother needed mercy, not judgment. Just like me.

I have always loved the idea of a father running to meet his runaway boy. I imagine it this way: not only did he sprint to meet him, but he waited for him, watched for him, grieved for him, worried about him, lost sleep, and aged, thinking about the trouble his son might have been in. 

After waking up one morning and seeing the waste and ruin of his life, the younger son came home. His speech, prepared ahead of time, based on what he perceived his father’s reception would be, convicted him. The prodigal deserved condemnation and judgment. After all, his father had no idea where he had been or what he had done. So he tried to spare his father the details and hide the life he’d lived, ashamed, simply saying, “I have sinned against heaven and you.”

But when his father reached him, the boy barely even got that first sentence out before his father began to bark orders—not at the son but toward the servants. “Bring a robe. Let’s party. We need food and lots of it.” It only took that small confession to get the party started. 

I notice that the father was interested in a contrite heart and a humble spirit. He was far less interested in the sin. Graham Cooke, founder of Brilliant Perspectives, says in The Way of the Warrior, “When the Father looks at you, He doesn’t see anything wrong. He’s not obsessed by sin; He’s not like us. He is consumed by life! God is relentlessly kind. He is never going to quit on you.”

Does our Father want us to be aware of and confess sin? Absolutely. But does he want to end there? No, absolutely not. He wants us to throw a party. In Luke 15:7 (MSG), Jesus begins these parables with the moral. In the parable of the lost sheep, he says, “Count on it—there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue.” I believe we need to build a vertical avenue of celebration between earth and heaven when a renegade comes home and throw a blowout bash horizontally. We do it for birthdays and weddings, and we even have memorial services and going-home celebrations. What better reason could there be for a cake, burgers, joy, and applause than one who was lost but now is found?

In a small way, I experienced one of these parties a few years ago. I regularly go to a prison where I lead Celebrate Recovery step-studies. In step four, we are to do a fearless and honest inventory of our lives, which means taking responsibility for the pain we have caused others and also acknowledging the pain that was inflicted on us—even by ourselves. It’s imperative that we speak our inventory out loud to someone we trust. 

One guy asked me to be the one to hear his story. We stood outside the prison chapel one bright, unusually hot, sunny day in February. I leaned against the wall as he paced back and forth and courageously, in brokenness, confessed his past and how he ultimately had ended up in prison. He’d been born into what became a broken home and shuffled back and forth from his father and stepmother, who hated him, to his biological mother, who stopped physically abusing him as he got older and started using emotional and verbal abuse. 

He would occasionally land with his grandparents, whom he adored. But they would tell him he needed to work on his relationship with his parents. 

The cycle would begin again: back and  back to parents who didn’t want him and then to grandparents who thought he needed to be responsible at too young an age for gaining his parents’ approval. He was abandoned and alone. 

Growing up, he loved music, the arts, and writing. It was the only time he felt alive. But he made unwise choices and began using drugs and alcohol to cover his loneliness and self-hatred. He was consumed with fear of being abandoned.

He fathered a child with a woman he wasn’t married to. He sabotaged all relationships with drugs and alcohol. Drug-driven fear drove him to cover lies with more lies, suicide attempts, crime, and, finally, murder, which ultimately cost him his freedom. 

He began a descent into deep depression, guilt, and shame. 

That man, large, physically strong, and ridiculously gifted by God, hung his head down to his chest, heartbroken by his failure. No one had ever said to him the one thing he needed to hear. 

Once he finished his inventory, it was time for us to go into the step-study session. During that hour-and-a-half class, I noticed him watching me. I knew without a doubt he was sizing me up, sure I would turn my back on him like everyone else now that I knew him to be a miserable horror of a human being. He was sure I would find him worthless and not worthy of love.

As for me, the whole time, the Holy Spirit was working on me. He was, even before I was aware of it, forming the words in my heart that would pierce the fear of that wounded child of his and open him up to allow the truth of God to course through his heart, veins, mind, and soul. 

First of all, of course I wouldn’t do all those things he feared. Of course I would continue that journey with him. His story broke my heart for him, just as it broke God’s. 

Yes, hearing his life story was brutal. I was exhausted while driving home that night. But I believe what God said: we are to bear one another’s burdens. Confession sets us free. Or I can walk away from a burden, relieved, because it’s just not a happy feeling.

His life experience told him what he had learned, and as he peered at me during class, he thought, No one is trustworthy. 

After class, I pulled him aside. “Listen, I need to tell you two things. No, actually, three—I just thought of a third. First, you in no way have any responsibility for the abuse you endured at the hand of your mother. Zero! Nada! You were nine years old, for crying out loud. You were just a kid. No one deserves that. You are not guilty!” 

He said, “Yeah, but—”

I furrowed my brow. “No buts. There are no buts here—except the people who abused you.”

He said, “I know, but—”

“No buts! Period! You have no responsibility there. It’s time to be free of that guilt. It has brought you nothing but undeserved pain your whole life.” 

I wasn’t going to let him out of that truth. He smiled and said, “Okay, I hear you. I believe you. I’ll work on it.” 

I surprised him with another nugget of truth. “I believe you feel guilt and shame over your love to sing and write.”

He hung his head. “Yes. I guess I feel like I should have done something else.”

I said, “Dude, you were given those gifts by God. Yes, you chose to use them in unhealthy ways. Hear me clearly: God’s plan for you, in whatever way he chooses, includes those gifts. Even though your unhealthy choices landed you here, his plan hasn’t changed for you. He will still use you if you stay surrendered to him and seek him. Do you get that?”

“Yes.”

He tried to read me, as if he felt it was impossible to believe that his life could matter and that God had ever had a plan for him. I saw it in his eyes. They said, “I believe what you’re saying. But it can’t be true for me. How could God ever stick with me after all I’ve done?”

Then the Holy Spirit nudged me. I spoke the words that man had waited his whole life to hear and had probably never heard. I took a deep breath. “One more thing. And you’re not going to want to believe it, so I need you to let go of everything you have known your whole life and, even if only for a few seconds, hear me and trust me. Can you do that? For just a few seconds?” 

“Okay. Yes, I’ll try my best.”

“Unless the Lord comes back or calls me home, I am never going to abandon you. I will not leave you. I will walk this journey with you as long as you need me. Do you hear me? I will never abandon you.”

The spiritual implications became physical. For approximately thirty seconds—an eternity—our eyes stayed locked on each other. 

Then, slowly, his shoulders relaxed. For another thirty seconds, our eyes remained locked on each other. I became acutely aware that my jaws were firmly sealed, resolved. The bones in my cheeks clenched and unclenched over and over. My brow was furrowed. I do that when I make my mind up about something and take a resolute stand.

His chin began to quiver. He corrected himself for a few seconds and pulled himself into the tough-guy stance again. Then he took two steps back; his eyes filled with tears; and, broken, he said, “You have no idea what that means to me.” 

I said, “Oh yeah, I think I do.” 

He ran forward and grabbed me. Remember, he was not a small guy. He was a runner who lifted weights, all muscle.

I couldn’t breathe. That so-called hardened criminal held me in a bear hug, with both of us crying and me not breathing, until I was able to squeak out, “I need air.” 

Now, don’t think I was being altruistic. As the words I spoke were coming out of my mouth, I was thinking, What are you saying? Do you realize the implications? The responsibility you’re putting on yourself?

If I had listened with human ears, I probably would have never said it. 

I like my aloneness. I like giving to those guys once a week and then coming home to my quiet house and my pooches. No real responsibility. No real need to be vulnerable. 

But for once, I listened to the Spirit of God, and I obeyed. 

One sentence. One statement of acceptance. One moment when I willingly allowed the Holy Spirit to work through his small, feeble fallen son. Is that all it took? Yes!

That was ten years ago. We are still walking the journey together. I’m more observant now. I listen better. I pray I will be an instrument of God’s grace and mercy, which he has generously poured out onto me. 

I pray I will hear the plea of a hurting heart and will be able to, with a party, celebrate a homecoming; legitimize the wounds; bear witness to the truth that God’s grace is sufficient, even for the prodigal; and lead them to a clear understanding that they are not alone. Lead them to truly know and believe they are uniquely made and dearly, eternally loved by the One who hung the stars in the heavens. I pray they will live a life knowing that God willingly sent his Son to earth to bear their sins on a cross and that by believing in him, they have not only become his kids but also been given all rights as heirs.

I want them to know that God created the entire universe to sing his praises and that they know—they truly know—at the core of who he is, his desire and plan for them has always been that they be part of the great symphony. 

I have great memories of my time as a server at Dalt’s American Grill on White Bridge Road in Nashville, Tennessee. Back in the mid-1980s, the eatery enjoyed a quick acceleration from infancy to heyday. Golden days, I thought. We employees were family, and to this day, as many as we can find stay in close contact with one another.

Working at Dalt’s was always an adventure. I could write a book on just the time I was there. I went in thinking I would be there for, at most, only a couple of years. I remember one of the first shift meetings after the extraordinarily strenuous schedule of two full weeks of training behind other more seasoned servers and taking countless tests. We were required to remember every ingredient of every dish offered on a War and Peace–sized menu. 

During that shift meeting, Kitty, one of my good buddies, got her red three-year 50-percent-off-everything card. I thought, I’ll never be here that long. Surely I’ll be well on my way to an Academy Award by then. However, I was saying the same thing when I got my gold ten-year appreciation ring. 

One of my favorite memories at Dalt’s occurred when a nearby elementary school held a fair. The president of the PTA came to Dalt’s, hoping we’d come to their recess yard with giveaways and coupons. Fortunately, we were rolling out our brand-new weekend brunch menu, and we were supplied with incredible Disneyesque costumes for street advertising. 

An egg costume consisted of a cracked egg with the two halves held together by a stream of bright yellow yolk in the middle. The top half featured a broad face complete with a huge, happy grin. One of my best friends, Ann Estelle Stanley, wore that costume.

The obligatory bacon costume, which was, well, a slice of bacon, again with a bright, happy, huge-eyed, smiling face, was worn by Ann Green. 

Mr. Pancake was the fattest, bulkiest, most hulking, most awkward costume of them all. That costume, that creature, became my alter ego. Mr. Pancake was round. Big, round, and heavy. His infrastructure was, I’m sure, made of two-by-fours. His humongous golden-brown body had two holes in the front. The wearer of said costume slid his or her arms through the holes on either side of the splat of butter in the middle, which also contained the enormous eyes and demented smile of a Steven King character. The eyes were not functional. A small patch of matching yellow mesh just below the joyful eyes was where the occupant could actually see through—a little.

The frames for the costumes were not made of fabric. Perhaps double-walled steel. Galvanized chain mail maybe. They were like the characters one might see at a theme park: solid and equipped to handle the onslaught of childhood misconduct. 

We drove into the school parking lot, far enough away from the entrance to put on the costumes without the students watching. Ann Estelle and Ann Green slid into their costumes fairly easily on their own. 

Mr. Pancake was laid on the ground with his deranged face to the clouds so I could lie on my back and slither backward into the dark chasm. Then Burt, the restaurant manager, stood behind me and, with brute strength, deadlifted me into a standing position. 

Wearing brown costume footwear the size of small kayaks, I rested the weight of the costume on my shoulders by two metal straps with padding that was not much thicker than 2-ply toilet paper. With that, we began the trek toward the school entrance. We knew we would find the fair behind the school, on their recess field. 

We turned left toward the front entrance. I glanced to our right, and through my mesh peephole, I noticed a big, long, happy banner announcing the merry event. The banner, held in place by a rope stretching through the top of the banner, ran across the front drive of the school, all the way from a tree across the drive to a flagpole outside the front of the building. Very impressive. 

We walked in hot and sticky Nashville humidity in late May. That meant I quickly got the impression I should have been sizzling on a well-oiled griddle. 

From the get-go, all three of us characters asked how long we were required to be at the event. Could we possibly endure? Without an answer and only a shoulder shrug from our intrepid leader, we courageously moved through the halls and out the back door. 

The minute we stepped onto the field, kids thronged around us. Burt handed out balloons and coupons as boys and girls squealed over Mr. Pancake, Miss Egg, and Miss Bacon. We waved, blew kisses, and shook hands. Miss Egg and Miss Bacon gave hugs because they could slightly bend over. It was so much fun—for all of four minutes and forty-seven seconds.

We were sweltering, feeling like the Parker Solar Probe must have felt traveling 430,000 miles per hour toward the surface of the sun. The more our maniacal, smiling faces growled at Burt to get us out of there, the more he said between a forced smile and clinched teeth, “Just another few minutes.”

Burt, believing it was in his best interest, I’m sure, led us to the back of the brick building so we could at least lean against a wall. But even that was in the thick of booths, parents and kids, and a kitchen of activity. Kids were running everywhere. We just stood and waved with our outward heartwarming smiles and our less-than-cartoon attitudes. 

Then came Fred, a sweet-looking little kid with a Popsicle in his hand. Fred walked up to us and smiled and waved, and we waved back. I slightly attempted the pirate dance but stopped short of bending my knees too far, out of fear of collapsing. No one enjoys a crimped up pancake. Mr. Pancake weighed 89.5 pounds, and the metal shoulder straps with toilet-paper padding were digging into my shoulders like a backpack filled with cinder blocks.

For some unfortunate reason, I kept Fred’s attention longer than I should’ve. Fred looked around to make sure his mom was nowhere in sight and then walked straight up to Mr. Pancake and kicked him in the shin. Mr. Pancake was not happy. When Mr. Pancake felt as if he’d just come out of a frying pan, it was unwise to slap him with the spatula. 

Mr. Pancake, still trying to convey the same spirit as his animated face, whispered, “No, no.”

Precious little Fred stepped forward and planted his foot again into Mr. Pancake’s shin.

“Be nice to Mr. Pancake now.”

Fred, perhaps feeling the slightest pang of guilt, walked away for a couple of minutes. However, when he returned, he again made sure no one was looking before he, with a vengeance, stepped up and struck Mr. Pancake’s leg with his offending Kangaroo tennis shoe. 

At that point, oppressive, glass-fogging humidity and brutal shin pain joined together to override any logical cognitive brain activity. Mr. Pancake shook a bit as he hissed, “It’s not nice to kick Mr. Pancake.” With perhaps a bit more Pennywise demeanor than intended, he added, “And it’s dangerous.” 

For some unexplainable reason, all three of Mr. Pancake’s comrades were facing other directions when Fred came in for the kill. He sauntered up to Mr. Pancake, looked around with a heinous grin, and just as he threw his leg back for the fatal blow, Mr. Pancake raised his own leg. 

I want to believe it was only to protect himself. However, and I’m sure it was totally accidental, Mr. Pancake’s foot came in contact with Fred’s chest. Mr. Pancake’s foot was only raised. It was not moving. Fred did, in fact, run into Mr. Pancake’s kayak. 

I also want to believe it was purely unintentional that the toe end of Mr. Pancake’s shoe slightly pulsed forward as Fred came in contact with Mr. Pancake’s happy footwear. 

Whatever the case, darling little Fred went sprawling backward. As there was a small downward slope behind him, he rolled a couple of times. Just a couple. Nothing serious. He stood up and stared at Mr. Pancake with eyes, I’m confident, as big as the breakfast character’s, except Fred’s chin was quivering in disbelief. He looked as though Mickey Mouse had attacked him with a spinning teacup. As he ran off bellowing into the distance, Burt, sensing trouble ahead, proclaimed, “Okay, time to go.” 

Because of where we were standing, because too many people were pouring out of the doors we originally had come out of, and because Burt was horrified we might run into Fred and his mother, he chose to lead us all the way around the school and across the front drive. By then, sweat was pouring off my body in buckets, and I imagined the two Anns must’ve felt equally tired and sticky. 

When we got back outside the front of the building, all I could think of was getting that convection oven off my body. Unbelievably, with a wild burst of energy, Mr. Pancake started galloping. Indeed, he sprinted straight down the front drive toward the parking lot when he saw the big, lovely, happy banner announcing the merry event strung across the asphalt. 

I knew it was held up by a rope at the top, and I was aware that as I ran, I would hit the banner, and it would flap away as I galloped under it. I could not, at that moment, have cared less. All I could think about was getting out of Mr. Pancake and perhaps rolling him like an old tire into a lake. 

I didn’t realize at that pivotal moment, however, that another rope held the bottom of the aforementioned banner in place as securely as the top.

Imagine, if you will, a vertical trampoline. 

One second, Mr. Pancake could see an oasis in front of him. In the next, he was flying backward through the air as if a skeet shooter had just yelled, “Pull!” 

I vaguely remember lying on the 400-degree concrete, as flat as a—never mind. Too easy. I was staring through yellow mesh directly into the sun. After a moment of silence, my companions checked to see if I was conscious.

Then I heard Miss Egg. I was able to see just far enough out of my yellow mesh to observe her motionless egg face, every bit like one of those bizarre mechanical clown mannequins outside a carnival funhouse, laughing its head off.

The whole thing felt surreal. Burt swarmed around me, asking if I was all right. Miss Bacon stood there wondering, I’m sure, if she was about to live up to her namesake and start sizzling. Miss Egg was still belly-laughing. I managed to crawl out of my costume the opposite of the way I’d crawled in, looking and feeling as if I’d just stepped out of a sauna. I stood up, glared at all of them, rubbed my sore shoulders, and said, “Okay, who’s ready for some brunch?”

So next time you decide to eat pancakes, remember: don’t mess with Mr. Pancake. He’s dangerous.

Jesus is the Son of God. He was with God from the beginning.

John 1:1 (MSG) says, “The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God, in readiness for God from day one.” 

I have wondered at what point in his life Jesus’s mother, Mary, understood his mission on this little ball of water and dirt that Jesus himself made from nothing. What were the points in Jesus’s life when different aspects of his mission became clear to Mary? 

I have to believe Jesus always knew. The fully human part of him learned how to walk, talk, and eat independently, just as the rest of us do. He learned a trade by using his earthly father’s carpentry tools. At the same time, the fully divine part of him was always aware of who he was and is. Always. He is, after all, God. 

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

—Philippians 2:5–8 NASB

I don’t believe deity and divinity are attributes one would or even could lay down. The idea of Jesus leaving the face of his beloved Father; leaving the love and affection of his Father’s home; and discussing and deciding in the great halls of eternity to come down to this tiny, time-inhibitive, gravity-grinding planet is incredibly claustrophobic to me. 

First, in willingly walking away from his Father and coming to this tiny speck of dust in the universe, not to mention knowing ahead of time that he would be completely cognizant while deliberately floating in amniotic fluid for several months, Jesus understood that he was wrapping himself in the very dirt he’d created. 

I can’t imagine the sacrifice of his Father, by design and with foreknowledge of what was to come, as he let the hand of his Boy go so he could leave home for a while and go away to fulfill a mission that would ultimately be rejected by many. 

The one lesson I can carry away from all of it is service. Giving. The simple definition of sacrifice is “the act of giving up something or enduring the loss of something you want to keep, especially in order to get or do something else or to help someone.”

It’s easy for me to think of the sacrifice of Abba in relation to Jesus coming to earth to help us, teach us about God, and serve. But I equally love the idea that he sent Jesus to earth to get me. It tells me there is nothing he wouldn’t do and no opportunity he wouldn’t present to ensure I’m with him forever, and in fact, he made the most significant sacrifice by giving up his Son for a season. 

I have, obviously, not seen Jesus, my Buddy, face-to-face yet. Though Jesus’s human existence was just thirty-three Earth years, it breaks my heart for Abba. He willingly went without the physical presence of his most precious possession, the One who knew him best; the One who was always with him; and the One who, for all of eternity up to that point, had lavished his love on his Dad. 

But God and Jesus were willing and did it for us. Abba Father let go of that mighty, perfect hand, the hand that had created the universe, knowing that it would one day come back but would never look the same again. That hand would become, for a while, small and fragile, reaching up to be supported and held by parents and relatives. Those fingerprints would grow to heal the sick, hurt, and broken and even hearts. That wounded hand would one day become the symbol of my salvation. That wounded hand would, figuratively, never heal. The blood from that all-powerful hand still flows. It has covered me and saved me. 

How can I, knowing the absolute reality of that love and sacrifice, not raise my own hand to reach up to such perfect devotion? I give such a small token as I hold on to the mystery and the hope of Jesus’s birth. 

A few days before Christmas, even at the Christian bookstore where I worked, the stress was palpable. I could taste the anxiety in the demeanor of the guests I checked out. Every morning, I prayed before I walked through the front door that I wouldn’t let them get to me. Although 90 percent of the people I checked out were excellent, those remaining 10 percent pulled me down. A couple of times, I seriously wanted to just stop, look them in the eye, and say, “Tell me something. If I were not a follower of Jesus, what is it about your attitude right now that would ever make me want to say, ‘Wow, whatever you’ve got, I want it’?” Seriously, it was getting bad. 

One day, after standing at the register nonstop for five hours, I looked up and saw a lady walking into my line. Just behind her, I saw a couple of my friends smiling and heading toward my queue. I couldn’t wait to connect with them. I knew they would make everything okay with a smile and a hug. If I could just get through this one lady first. 

I looked down at the tiny woman. Her head was slightly bowed, as if she hoped I wouldn’t notice the tears streaming steadily down her face. I froze. I’m not talking about a few tears. She was silently sobbing; her body was discernibly racked with the pain of sorrow and terrible loss. 

All I could do was respond. I leaned toward her. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head and said, “I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not okay. If you want me to check you out, you’re gonna tell me what’s wrong.”

With tears still streaming down her face, she sobbed, and her voice trembled. “My son died three months ago.”

I leaned closer. “Oh my. What was his name?”

“Aaron.”

“This is your first Christmas without your boy. I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry. How did he die?”

“Meningitis.”

“How old was he?”

“Thirteen.”

“What is your name?”

“Sarah Ann.”

“Well, Sarah Ann, would it be okay if I prayed for you?”

She nodded. 

I looked at my friends behind her, who’d heard the whole conversation. I motioned for them to move to the next checker. They nodded with full understanding and moved to the next queue. I put up my “We would be happy to check you out at another register” sign.

Sarah Ann and I moved past the busyness of holiday shopping to the children’s section. I took both her hands in mine. 

At that moment, a miracle happened. 

Remember the precursor to a miracle: there has to be a problem first. It is that moment when we give the Holy Spirit permission to move in and build a vacuum, an invisible yet palpable fortress, around us. The Enemy can’t penetrate the holiness of that place, no matter how hard he may try. Grief was the problem here, and in that moment, I physically felt the presence of the One who breathes out stars into the universe, understands grief, and is fiercely engaged in the next breath we take. 

I began to pray. I prayed to a Parent who perfectly understood the specific emotion Sarah Ann was feeling—the excruciating loneliness—and was acutely acquainted with the impossible horror of experiencing the death of his own beloved Son. 

I said it made no sense, from our vantage point, for this boy to die. But even if we couldn’t understand the experience, we could trust his heart. 

I prayed for Sarah Ann. I asked the Lord to wrap his strong arms around her. I prayed that God would hold her so tightly she would have no doubt he was right there with her. I prayed that he would cover her with his feathers and that under his wings, she would find refuge. His faithfulness would be her safe hiding place. I prayed he would send angels to stand in strategic places around her so she would find a peace that the darts of the Enemy could never penetrate. I prayed he would hold her son’s hand and tell Aaron his mom missed him very much, loved him, and couldn’t wait to see him again one day. I told Jesus and Sarah Ann that I looked forward to Sarah Ann introducing me to Aaron one day. Then I said, “Amen.”

Sarah Ann turned toward me and wrapped her arms around my neck. We stood there for many seconds with her heart-wrenching tears falling into a deep ocean of loss. 

I held her there, a pretty shabby life jacket, beaten and weather-worn, held afloat only by the buoyancy of grace. 

Finally, Sarah Ann was able to stand on her own. She looked up at me with tears pooling in her exhausted eyes. I couldn’t help but, in that moment, see Jesus’s mother and think about how Mary must have grieved when she realized her Boy was gone. The searing emptiness. Confusion over what the future would hold for her Son. Lost hope. 

But what that pivotal moment must have been like, and how glorious for Mary, when she finally reached out her tiny hand and once again wrapped her fingers around the warm, wounded hand of her resurrected Son. 

I’m certain that somehow, someday, even in light of this inconsolable loss, Sarah Ann and Aaron will reach for each other’s hand, and there will be absolute joy in the reunion. 

For the first time that season, there was only one thing I could say to Sarah Ann, and I genuinely meant it: “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Sarah Ann.”

In biblical times, the practice in Israel was for all relatives of a conquered king to be killed. This tradition ensured the safety of the newly seated king and kept him from being assassinated by the descendants of previously dethroned royalty.

King David faced a dilemma. After several years of battling neighboring nations and soundly defeating them, he finally took time to grieve the death of his beloved friend Jonathan, the son of King Saul. Earlier in their friendship, knowing that David would one day be king of Israel, Jonathan had asked David to promise that once he became king, David would take care of his descendants. Of course, David promised. 

After Jonathan’s death, David asked if any of Jonathan’s family were still alive. His heart desired to show kindness to them. Mephibosheth, whose name meant “One who destroys shame,” was hiding in Lodebar, a barren, dry, lonely brown village to the east of the Jordan River. He had lived there in fear and resentment for many years. 

Mephibosheth’s nurse had fled with him after the death of his father and grandfather, fearing the new king would kill him. In her haste, she’d dropped him, rendering him lame for life. 

Imagine his horror when King David’s soldiers showed up at the home of Machir, where Mephibosheth was living. Now in his thirties, the lame man must’ve felt the tightening grip of a decades-long fear. 

Taken to the very throne room where he’d spent his childhood, Mephibosheth concluded that one of the possible outcomes for his eventual death was about to come to fruition. How many times had he practiced his death in his dreams? How many ways had he imagined he would be found out by the king? And here it was. Mephibosheth had recognized from an early age that this moment was not only possible but imminent.

When David entered, Mephibosheth fell facedown on the floor of the throne room. 

Seeing Jonathan’s prostrate son, David must have felt a surge of compassion. He said, “Mephibosheth.”

How David’s heart must have broken when Mephibosheth looked up and said, “Yes, sir.”

David surely saw the resemblance of his dearest, most trusted, covenanted friend, Jonathan, in the eyes of this panicked, confused young man. 

Then David said words that Mephibosheth never, in all his imaginings of that moment, had allowed to enter his consciousness. Instead of watching the sword fall in his last moments on earth, Mephibosheth heard the one who held the continuance of his days in his hands say, “Mephibosheth, don’t be afraid.” 

I’m not even sure the relief of his life handed back to him was the first thing that registered in Mephibosheth’s brain. All the years of knowing he would die by the king’s sword were mercifully exorcised from his imagined scenarios.

His first words demonstrated disbelief rather than gratitude. He stuttered and stammered, “Who am I that you would pay attention to a stray dog like me?” Almost as if he were admitting, “Wait a minute. You’re supposed to kill me.” 

But David chose words of life instead of the words of death that Mephibosheth expected, like many of us expect, to hear. I can’t even begin to comprehend Mephibosheth’s response when David returned to him all the land and everything that had belonged to his father and even his grandfather, King Saul. 

When David ended the moment by telling Mephibosheth that he would eat at the king’s table for the rest of his life, he must have felt like a dog with two tails. 

Proverbs 18:21 (MSG) reads, “Words kill, words give life; they’re either poison or fruit—you choose.”

There is no neutral ground here. No disengaged, disinterested, noncommittal, isolated rock to stand on. This scripture says words bring either life or death. If I’m honest, I can’t say I spend the majority of any day deliberately choosing to disperse life over death. 

That’s not to say that everything I dish out has to start with “Jesus loves you” or that I have to end each phone call by saying, “In accordance with prophecy.” I don’t have to announce to anyone that I am uberspiritual by saying, “Have a blessed day.”

What it does mean is to give life, which, in this instance, is the word zoe, the Greek word for eternal life, God’s life. 

Jesus’s death and resurrection have secured our forever life, our zoe life, so it just makes sense we should be speaking with an ongoing eternal mindset. Our words to others should be seasoned with that mindset.

I am amazed that many times, when I give people encouragement or a word of hope, they respond as though they don’t deserve it. Or they feel guilty about receiving a blessing. I can even recall incidents when certain people were on the giving end of a compliment but seemed uncomfortable, almost as though my offering a kind word left them weak and vulnerable. 

Recently, I talked with someone who recounted a conversation he’d had with an employee. He had gotten frustrated with the employee for not doing a project the way he would have done it.

First, I asked if the employee had gotten specific directions. He said no. Then I wondered if the employee had finished the project. He nodded. Finally, I asked him how the employee had taken the criticism. “Not well,” he said. He then asked, “What would you have done in my place?”

I told him, “I have been thinking a lot about my legacy. I’m not talking about at my memorial service. But even now. The legacy I leave on a daily basis. I would have told that person, ‘Good job. You finished the project. Thank you for getting it done.’” 

Doing something my way is just another way, not the only way, and what I might think is a better way is still not the only way. It’s just my way. If the project gets done, it’s done, no matter whose way it gets done. Doing it my way will not make either of us a better person. But man, what gratification I get when I can tell someone, “Well done. Great job.” 

So what does our living legacy look like? Are we dispensing zoe (eternal) life? Or death? 

Everything we say will make a difference. Everything. We will either ride the popular wave of uplifting ourselves or disrupt the status quo. Most people won’t get it. We will leave them feeling uncomfortable but uplifted, confused but questioning. Some will feel vulnerable without having to strike a defensive pose. 

I want to live out the process of feeding life instead of death into people’s lives on a far more regular basis. I believe we are chiseling our epitaph every moment of our life. It doesn’t matter what is actually etched on our monument. What we pour into people’s lives—even the lives of strangers—is what will be read on the tombstone that ultimately matters. 

I muddled through one of those moments a while back, but that day, I specifically asked for it. It was a rainy Sunday morning. A very rainy Sunday morning. I was singing a solo that morning at church. I accidentally woke up a little past two o’clock in the morning and found my electricity out. I decided if it was still out when my phone alarm went off, I would pack everything in the car and go to the vet clinic where I worked, take a shower, and head to church. 

When the alarm went off at 5:00 a.m., the electricity was still out, so I turned on my phone flashlight and gathered everything. I took the dogs out in pouring rain. I gathered my clothes and toiletries and made three trips to the car. It was like taking a shower every time I walked outside. 

With everything loaded, I jumped into the car. Just as I turned the key in the ignition, the porch light came on. I sat there in a short-lived state of postal before I got out of the car and made three more rain-soaking trips into the house. I took a shower, which at that point seemed a bit redundant; dressed; and ran to the car. 

Finally, on the way to church, I attempted to settle down, asking the Lord to help me not be a distraction that day. I asked him to give me the chance to bring life to someone with my words. In my thoughts. I was referring to my song at church. 

When I entered the worship center, I felt God’s calming in my soul. I sang and soaked up my pastor’s message.

Afterward, I decided I would stop at the local grocery to get some stuff for lunch. 

There’s a streetlight at the corner before you turn right into the parking lot of the grocery store. That particular day, the red light was blinking. I assumed it was because the power had been out the night before. I was relieved to see plenty of cars in the parking lot, which let me know the store was open, so I pulled in.

I walked into the store, grabbed a handbasket, and spent about thirty minutes gathering avocados and supplies to make guac—I was having a hankering. 

Going down one aisle, I ran into a young man, obviously doing family shopping, with a cart full of groceries. I needed to get past him and asked him to excuse me, which he graciously did. 

A few minutes later, as I approached the self-check aisle, the same guy was ahead of me, and I heard him say, “No way. Are you kidding me?” 

The register assistant tiredly said, “No. I’m not.” 

He replied, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” 

She said, “You can go to the customer service desk.”

I glanced up and saw a fairly long line of brow-furrowed people at the service desk. I jokingly said to the guy, “Are you giving her a hard time?” 

He looked at me, trying to hide frustration, and said, “I hope you have cash.” 

“Why?”

“Because every credit card machine in the store is down.”

I had no cash. My first reaction was to get my back up like a spitting cat. But then I remembered the prayer. 

It was not fair. I wanted to be mad. But I noticed the other guy refrained from exhibiting frustration. He must have shopped for at least an hour. He asked, “Why didn’t they announce it over the intercom?” 

She said they had. But I’d never heard it while I was in the store. The other guy said, “What should I do with all this stuff?” She told him to just leave it, and someone else would take care of it. 

He left, and then she turned her weary eyes toward me. She had her shoulders squared, ready to be defensive. I looked at her and said, “I feel so bad that someone is going to have to return all this stuff to the shelves. But I know it’s not your fault. So don’t think I’m going to be one of the people who try to make it your fault.” 

Her shoulders drooped as she said, “Thank you.”

Then I drove to the closest discount center and bought all the same stuff cheaper. 

The next day, I was recounting what had happened to a friend, and she said, “Well, you were a lot nicer than I would have been. I would have told her they wasted a half hour of my life. And there should have been notes on the door in big red letters. And there should have been people standing at the door to tell people the credit card machines were down.” 

I said, “Yeah, that may be right. But the bottom line for me is that I know if that lady remembers that moment, I may have been the only chance of her seeing Jesus that day. And if she saw something different from the rest of the crowd, then that’s to God’s credit.” I want that to be my legacy. Besides, it just felt good. I didn’t walk away feeling like I needed to be justified, stand up for my rights, or have a “Guess I showed them” moment. It may have taken thirty minutes, but I learned something, so it was worth the time. 

That’s what I want my life to look like. 

Today what will my legacy be? My days and weeks can prove stressful, especially after a torrential downpour and power outage. Will I speak words of death? Or will I choose to leave others with words of life? 

Have you been given the opportunity today to treat someone with undeserved respect? Or will you avoid another’s eyes as you insist on having something done your way? My challenge for you and me is to feed words of life to someone today. We may not see the chance, because we are so used to reacting without thinking instead of responding.

First Peter 3:10 (NIV) says, “For whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech.” 

There’s no neutral, drab, or flat color to it. Words either bring vibrant, active responses that resonate eternity or are passionless, monotonous, indifferent platitudes that blend in with the rest of the world. If you pray for the chance to give life today, you’ll get it. 

Old Testament giants, such as King David, knew the value of life-affirming words. So did Mephibosheth when he received them. That’s the kind of legacy I want.

Popular culture will answer with “Cheese and pepperoni.” But the eternal maxim still stands: “What do you want on your tombstone?”

One of my faults, and this would fall under the column of faults that begin with a T, is that I tend to trust people far too easily. My unspoken motto has been “Trust people until they prove they are not trustworthy.” 

I realize this is not necessarily scriptural if you take into account scriptures like Jeremiah 17:5 (ESV), which says, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength.” 

Ouch!

It’s not usually a conscious choice on my part. I just lean toward giving others the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s because I want to live as someone who can be a trustworthy and faithful friend. 

I don’t trust the Lord less than I should. That’s not what I mean. I do, however, believe people are more reliable if they have a relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s probably why hurt and betrayal seem to sting more acutely when they come from someone I should be able to trust freely. 

As I’ve grown a bit older, hopefully a bit wiser, and definitely closer to the Lord, I’ve begun to make the deliberate choice of looking for him in every situation. If he’s not there, then it’s not for me. The Holy Spirit is good at giving me a nudge when I need to know.

Even when—especially when—it concerns relationships with other believers. If I firmly see that their walk is not matching the Word and that they speak words that don’t bring life, I will adjust the relationship accordingly. As impossible as it may feel at the time and as rarely as it happens, I have ended relationships that proved to be drastically unhealthy. 

I grew up believing that breaking the Third Commandment included phrases like “Gosh,” “Gee whiz,” “Golly,” “Oh my God,” and a slew of far worse interjections. I learned at an early age which words and euphemisms for God or Jesus were unacceptable, and it still catches my attention when I hear someone use them. But I’ve also learned there are other possibly more insidious ways to take the Lord’s name in vain. 

An individual in my life, over the span of a few years, three times, gave me the same message: “The Lord told me you are holding on to something you’re not letting go of. I don’t know what it is. He didn’t tell me that. But you’re holding on to something, and you need to let go of it.” 

“The Lord told me …”

The first two times she said it, I went home in shame and failure. I asked the Lord to tell me what I was holding on to that I wasn’t surrendering to him. There was no response. The Lord knows I’m willing to work on anything that keeps me from being totally his man. 

Eventually, the discouraging feelings passed, only to be resurrected when the person repeated the message. 

“The Lord told me …”

Finally, in a meeting in front of others, she said the Lord had given her messages for everyone in the room. She proceeded around the room, telling everyone what the Lord told her about each person. The messages, filled with encouraging words, made the ones receiving them feel valued. 

However, although the words spoken were valid and affirming, they didn’t reveal fresh revelation or new direction. Anyone in the room could’ve delivered the messages. Although the words were important to hear, they weren’t from God.

When she came to me, she repeated the same message she’d delivered twice before: “The Lord told me you’re holding on to something, and you need to let it go. He didn’t tell me what it is. That’s between you and him.”

This time, I noticed she couldn’t look me in the eye when she said it, and once it left her lips, she quickly moved to the next person, giving me no room to respond. Interesting.

However, as soon as she made the pronouncement “The Lord said …,” the guilt- and shame-invoking statement, I began to feel the same pressure and angst I’d experienced two times before. 

Suddenly, the Lord gave me clarity: The Holy Spirit is a Spirit not of confusion but of unity. Yes, you do hold on to something. But so does she. So does every person in this room. Whether it’s anger, bitterness, resentment, lack of forgiveness, or pride, whatever the particular sin looks like, everyone holds on to something. If they didn’t, Jesus would never have needed to come die for them.

I felt immediate peace and freedom. I didn’t need to carry guilt and shame with me again. Other unnecessary, unkind encounters soon followed. I prayerfully and deliberately made the choice to separate myself from the wounded, broken person, and I haven’t looked back. 

There is one who speaks rashly like the thrusts of a sword. But the tongue of the wise brings healing.

—Proverbs 12:18 NASB

I realized that guilt, if it is from God, always leads to a resolution. The shame and guilt deliberately used to gaslight me were not from God. Those emotions threatened to fill me with fear and feelings of failure. But through his gentle whisper, I peeled back layers of doubt and recognized that all those negative emotions rang only in my head and nowhere else in the universe. No one on this planet other than the broken one who willingly manipulated my emotions believed the painful nontruth ascribed to me, and the Lord certainly did not. 

From that moment forward, I decided my response to someone breaking the Third Commandment would be “Thank you for that word. I will pray about it and wait for the Lord to reveal to me if that is, in fact, a word from him. And I will act on it accordingly.” 

People tend to justify their desires, their sin, and their disobedience by saying, “God told me.” People attempt to gain power, influence, or their chance to speak by saying, “God told me.”

My pastor, Rod Loy, wisely once said, “Be careful when you say, ‘God told me.’ Or ‘I have a word from the Lord.’ If you try to communicate what God wants or thinks, if you do that in a selfish way or a trivial way, ascribing your desire to God’s name, you’re violating the Third Commandment. When someone says, ‘The Lord told me that you’re supposed to do this,’ doubt it. Most of the time, the Lord will tell you what you’re supposed to do, not reveal to you what somebody else is supposed to do. Don’t be fooled by people who try to manipulate you into doing their wishes by using the name of the Lord. The Lord will only reveal through someone else to you what you already know.”

Part of my relationship with Jesus during these aggravating trials is to look for blessings. They are always there. They are sometimes excruciatingly obvious and other times torturously hidden but always there. The key is to look for them.

Soon after the meeting, when I felt a shift in my spirit to take action, I received a message from Blake, a friend I haven’t talked to in quite a while. He lives in Texas. He said, “Brother, I just wanted you to know I love you. Someday soon, I’ll come hug your neck.” 

Proverbs 17:17 (ESV) says, “A friend loves at all times. And a brother is born for adversity.” I’m sure it was, for Blake, a simple reminder of friendship. But at that precise, perfect moment, it was a gift from the Lord, providing me not only the courage to move forward but also the deep knowledge that God is in the blessing business. His heart is to make sure we, his children, know that we are cherished and that he loves to remind us we can profoundly, eternally trust him. He will send blessings. Just look for them.

The world teaches that the Lord should bless in proportion to our circumstances. We get what we give. But in God’s economy, that particular axiom couldn’t be further from the truth. Most blessings, on the surface, would be sweet but not necessarily earth-bending. But strategically placed in time by the star-breathing Creator of the universe, they are perfect. No loose ends. No hanging chads. Finished. Pure expressions of acceptance from hands that were nailed to a cross and bled for us. Hands that applaud us and a voice that sings over us. 

So don’t fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am Your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

—Isaiah 41:10 NIV

Look for the blessing. It’s there. Sometimes you have to dig for it, but it’s there. The diamond is there. It might be a text, a phone call, a note, a falling red oak leaf, the smile of a grandbaby, a couple of dogs jumping all over you, or a great ribeye with melted butter (and a loaded baked potato—overloaded). Maybe it’s finding a ten-dollar bill on the church pew and feeling the Spirit’s prompt to hand it across the aisle to someone who is watching and might need it just as much as you. Maybe your profound, abiding blessing is in the delight of blessing someone else. 

Just look. 

Commit to listening to the prompting of the Spirit. He’s there to let us know when a word is correct or not. Above all, he is trustworthy.

May God give you heaven’s dew and earth’s richness—an abundance of grain and new wine. May nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed and those who bless you be blessed.

—Genesis 27:28 NIV

Now, that’s a blessing. The Lord told me!

One of the quirky perks about attending a small Christian college in a small southern town in the mid-1970s was that there were many unconventional, creative, and, yes, sometimes questionable ways to have fun. Following are some examples.

Chapel, which all students were required to attend daily, was held in the vast auditorium in the main administration building. On one occasion, dozens of hymnals, resting peacefully in racks nailed to the backs of dozens of seats, mysteriously disappeared. Days or maybe weeks later, the filched books were located. The culprits had crawled into the dark recesses of the ceiling and dropped the songbooks down fifty feet into a previously undiscovered space between the outside and inside walls, never to be recovered. As unbelievable as it may seem, I had nothing to do with that crime.

Another time, other innocent songbooks, which had also rested unassumingly in seat racks, were pilfered, collected into boxes, and relocated to the women’s restroom in the lobby, near the auditorium entrance. Somehow, those boxes allegedly managed to balance themselves atop toilet seats. At the same time, shoes were set at the foot of each commode. The perpetrators, from the inside, locked the stalls and then crawled under the doors. 

For the next two weeks, any janitors assigned bathroom cleaning glanced modestly under the stall doors and, seeing shoes, assumed the area was occupied and moved to the next empty stall. Eventually, one of the janitors figured out that several female students were either dead or simultaneously suffering from the most grievous case of digestive stress known to mankind. Again, I had nothing to do with that crime. 

But my time was coming.

The typical agenda for chapel remained relatively unchanged for years. Students poured into the auditorium and took their primitive wooden-and-metal assigned seats. The bell rang, followed by a prayer, a hymn, various announcements, a few more songs, and then a speaker or maybe a special event, usually a speaker.

I didn’t mind chapel. I can’t say I remember a single speaker, but occasionally, announcement time allowed memorable proof of the creative genius of the students.

The Cheerbillies, being the perfect illustration, were a lively group of button-pushing students who demonstrated time and again the originality we commoners could only aspire to emulate. Students actually chose to attend chapel if the Cheerbillies were rumored to be making an announcement for various groups or departments. 

When members of the Cheerbillies graduated, they carefully chose underclassmen to replace them. In my junior year, I got the invitation. Thrilled, I immediately began searching for a way to set myself a standard of button-pushing that would surprise even myself. I watched and waited. 

One Monday, after the final hymn, Ray Winters, one of the original Cheerbillies, walked to the lectern to introduce the speaker, an American studies speaker. 

In those days, an American studies speaker meant less than entertaining and nowhere near compelling. An immediate shroud of drowsiness fell across the auditorium like a wet blanket of week-old gravy. The boredom factor became almost palpable. Maybe it was a tiny bit audible. Students searched the stack of books in their laps for something—anything—to read or do. Reading newspapers, finishing nearly late homework, scratching initials into the armrests, mentally planning a hostile takeover of the student center—anything.

However, the students were not expecting that particular speaker. The Cheerbillies had prepared an announcement that, unbeknownst to them, became a call to solidarity, railing against the deplorable practice of American-studies-speaker-induced torture. 

Ray came onstage and gave a blatantly fake introduction for the speaker, touting his many varied accomplishments. Meanwhile, Cheerbilly Wayne Kinney, who should have been nominated for a Tony award, portrayed the fake oil magnate. He sat uncomfortably straight-backed in an even straighter-backed chair, with horn-rimmed glasses, a glossy brown briefcase on the floor by his side, hair oiled back, and legs crossed. His crossed pant leg, pulled slightly up, revealed a good swath of skin between the top of his black nylon sock and the bottom of his pant leg. The perfect representation of all things uninspiring.

With Ray’s intro finished, Wayne walked to the lectern and began spouting weird statistics and futures and stock stuff. He delivered the colorless data as though the info comprised the most fascinating and thought-provoking knowledge since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

Just when the lack of cohesiveness and impossible-to-understand facts reached a fever pitch, two Cheerbillies ran from opposite sides of the stage and hurled shaving-cream pies directly into Wayne’s face. 

The crowd went wild. 

The rest of the chapel service went without a hitch. The following week, unfortunately for him, an authentically monotonous, energy-sucking American studies speaker, an expert on China, was scheduled. Several of us rabble-rousers secretly gathered for a clandestine meeting to discuss. 

“Wouldn’t it be funny if …?” 

Perfect. Here was my chance. I volunteered myself and, by extension, my roommate, Rick Cook. Everyone agreed that once we all had approved and finalized our covert plans, Rick and I became, for all practical purposes, unknown special operatives. No other humans were aware of our existence or carried knowledge of the upcoming event. For some insane reason, I was cool with that. 

Friday arrived. Two identical chapel assemblies, one right after the other, afforded me the opportunity to scope out the situation. I managed to find an empty seat during first chapel to watch and ascertain the perfect moment for our bomb drop. No detail could be overlooked. 

After songs and announcements, the expert on China walked to the lectern. He began his talk with a couple of well-planned but nonetheless dreary jokes. Of course, no one laughed. In part, that particular audience was a challenge to impress, but more importantly, the jokes weren’t funny.

I knew immediately how the swiftly approaching adventure would play out. 

Between chapel assemblies, Rick and I met behind the administration building, which housed the auditorium. After entering an unused back door, we climbed the backstage stairs and moved with precision and masterful stealth across the dark, empty stage. Cautiously scrutinizing the immediate area for any perilous movement, such as intrusive student stage managers, we spied a small storage room fortuitously located on the far side of the stage. We bolted into the small empty closet and slammed the wooden door behind us. We listened, sitting in pitch black with two pie pans and a full can of shaving cream, as the clamor of incoming students filled the auditorium. 

More than likely, fear and adrenaline brought on the insane urge to laugh, and unfortunately, we couldn’t stop. Raucous laughter at that moment became our downfall. The closet door creaked open. Horrified, Rick and I caught our breath, as if that action alone would somehow render us invisible. Unfortunately, we recognized the silhouette of Mark Fisk, resident stage manager, with a confused, quizzical expression. He squinted into the dark room. 

To be transparent, I feel relatively certain that had I been in his position, I too would’ve registered the same expression of confusion if I’d walked across a barren stage, heard raucous laughter coming from a storage room, and opened the door to discover a couple of guys sitting in the dark while holding pie plates and a can of shaving cream. 

My response to the unfortunate intrusion only added to the discomfort: “Mark, just close the door, and walk away. You saw nothing.” He did.

The first hymn of the assembly began, announcing our cue to fill the pie plates. In the dark. We cracked the door open to let in what essentially resulted in almost no light at all. However, we hit the targets pretty much, filling the pie plates as high as we could manage while keeping wandering shaving cream from splattering all over the floor. I’m sure we left evidence behind but not much. 

Again, we couldn’t stop laughing. I informed Rick that the expert on China would tell two jokes. We would commit our expulsion-worthy infraction between the two. 

A red velvet curtain (known as the “grand drape” for those of you who aren’t part of the thespian community) covered the length of the massive stage. Still, it allowed enough space in front for the speaker, chairs, and other people associated with the program. The grand drape provided a barrier between the audience and the rest of the stage—vital for me and Rick to get into position. The curtain, made of two panels, opened from the center of the stage. Having observed the area during my first chapel stakeout, I knew the lectern was positioned directly in front of the point where the curtains joined. Rick and I would be able to pull the curtain apart just far enough for our arms to be in clear view of the entire audience without the rest of us being seen. 

Chapel continued with songs, a prayer, and announcements. The expert on China was introduced. Less-than-enthusiastic applause erupted. I might have heard a moan or two.

Showtime. 

The China expert told his first unfunny joke. No one laughed, of course. Three long seconds passed. With perfect precision, Rick and I pulled our designated side of the curtain apart with one arm. We each threw our other arm out, displaying a shaving cream pie on either side of the expert on China’s head. 

The guest to our campus never knew what was transpiring a mere foot behind him. He stood in front of a red velvet curtain, in front of a thousand students who desperately wanted lunch. Understandably shocked at the slow response to his dismal attempt at humor, he had no clue that shaving cream pies framed his noggin like a fluffy marshmallow cloud. 

The crowd went wild.

The expert on China waited a full minute for the whistles, howling laughter, and applause to subside before he observed, remembering the slight but uncomfortable three-second pause, “Does it always take you people that long to get a joke?” 

Unbridled hilarity ensued. The expert on China realized he had the students in the palm of his hand. Believing the assembly was responding to his pitiful jokes, he sadly—but, to his audience, hilariously—continued delivering them. Horrible, not even slightly funny jokes. He was on a roll. He was a certified hit. 

Rick and I never found out how the assembly ended. We withdrew our pies and flew out the back door, running faster than green grass through a goose. We threw the damning evidence into a nearby trash can and then miraculously, magically morphed into two ordinary, unassuming guys leisurely meandering toward the school cafeteria. 

Rick and I were heroes. Ace adventurers. Anonymous celebrities. 

Within an hour, the exhilaration of a game well played subsided, only to be replaced by an increasingly apprehensive sense of panic. We were covert superstars. I couldn’t understand where the gnawing sense of dread was coming from, but it was definitely there. Real. A dark cloud of nagging doom hovered heavy in the air, and I couldn’t shake it. 

Later that afternoon, our dorm room phone rang. 

The weekend was a greasy fog for me. I honestly don’t remember the caller on the other end of the line. It didn’t matter. My first cognizant recollection occurred the following Monday as Rick and I walked across campus to the vice president’s office with five equally guilt-ridden guys, condemned to whatever godless suffering Billy Ray Cox chose to inflict on us. Justice would most certainly be exacted. Administration—with thorough, exhaustive investigation as their superpower—had determined, more than likely through agonizing torture, waterboarding, or perhaps the terror of calling someone’s mother, who exactly had perpetrated the despicable, contemptible chapel desecration. 

Upon dismally slinking into Dr. Billy Ray Cox’s office, we sank into surprisingly comfortable chairs and valiantly attempted to feign grievous sorrow and remorse for our infantile behavior. Disastrously for me, at that moment, the deranged, uncontrollable compulsion to laugh unnaturally reared its grotesque mug again. My fatal flaw. A couple of mutant synapses deeply entombed in a never-before-discovered neuromuscular junction took their opportunity and came alive, soaring through my stunned nerve endings. Why couldn’t it have been a sneeze? Even a belch would have been more appropriate. I’m not sure how well my feeble attempt at converting the clearly noticeable snort into a reasonable facsimile of a cough worked. 

Apparently, we were waiting for Ted Altman, dean of students, to join the party. Dr. Cox attempted small talk to fill the space between as he segued between Christian fellowship and impending annihilation. 

Billy Ray’s telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and said, “Hello? Oh, hi, Ted. Yes, everyone is here. We’re just waiting for you. Oh, you are? Okay. That’s not a problem. I’ll take care of it. Yes, everyone is here. Well, Ray Winters, Wayne Reed, Rick Cook, Tim Holder, Wayne K—yes, Tim Holder. Can you believe it?”

Snort. I fearlessly clenched every muscle in my jaw to keep the imminent chortle from erupting.

Dr. Cox ended the phone conversation with a sad nod. “Yes, Ted, after all the times Tim has been on the Harding stage. After all Harding has done for Tim.”

The tears streaming down my cheeks and the quivering chin were an outright lie.

“Okay, no problem. Thanks for calling.” Billy Ray ended the phone conversation and relayed Dr. Altman’s message: because of a longer-than-scheduled meeting, Ted wouldn’t be attending our punishment by guillotine. Dr. Cox placed his hands on the edge of his desk. Burgundy leather groaned as he leaned back in his overstuffed reclining armchair. He reached up and rubbed his temples in a circle with his index fingers. 

After berating our repugnant, juvenile behavior for a respectable amount of time, Dr. Cox summarily made quick work of our immediate future. We were to write apology letters to the expert on China, the college president, and the Bison newspaper. He then looked at each of us in turn as he made the last pronouncement: “And one of you will need to make a public apology in both chapels.” Somehow, his last word lingered in the air as his eyes clamped on mine. Then he smiled.

As much as I desperately wanted to inspect my belly button, I couldn’t look away. After a few seconds of near-catatonic fear, I glanced to my left and found the other guys staring at me just as intently. I’m sure they were attempting to mentally convey that my freakish fit of uncontrollable chortling would be way out of line right then. 

I slowly raised my hand, my white flag, indicating my surrender. “I’d be happy to make that announcement.”

The next morning, I made my way to the front of the auditorium before first chapel and nabbed a seat close to the steps leading up to the stage. Students and faculty streamed slowly into the building and took their appointed places. The bell rang, signaling time for the program to begin. Adding insult to injury, President Ganus himself climbed the steps to the stage, apparently planning to preside over my funereal ceremony. 

At the appointed time, Dr. Ganus announced, “Tim Holder would like to address the assembly.”

Suddenly, there was dead silence. As I climbed, I heard every creak in every single step echo throughout the auditorium. I stood behind the lectern and read my prepared apology. Nobody moved. Nobody coughed. Nobody shifted in the obnoxiously loud seats, which notoriously echoed off every wall in the building. I apologized for embarrassing the faculty and students, Dr. Ganus and Billy Ray Cox, and the expert on China and for shaming everyone’s parents who were working tirelessly to pay tuitions, the founding fathers of our great institution, the glorious saints who’d gone on before us, all creatures great and small, and, of course, God. 

Then I said, “Thank you.” 

I felt it necessary to exit the stage in great haste from the fear that I might at any moment bust out in an abnormal, irreverent round of belly laughing. 

But as I reached the bottom step, I looked up and realized everyone in the assembly was on his or her feet, screaming, shouting, and applauding. They offered their own standard of vindication. 

I squelched the irrational urge to climb back up the steps with fists pounding the air to do the Rocky-on-the-steps-of-the-Philadelphia-Museum-of-Art dance. I stood stoically at my seat while Dr. Ganus waited patiently for everyone to regain composure and return to his or her seat. 

Dr. Ganus generously thanked all of us involved for having the courage to own our mistake and acknowledge that it had been an unwise action. A half hour later, I, by then emboldened, met the same reception during second chapel. 

Back then, I became known for being the rogue perpetrator of dastardly antics. Even now as I type, this particular flashback gives me an odd sense of accomplishment. A small circle of adventure seekers attained a semblance of triumph, a priceless endeavor, a unique grandeur that has become a favorite memory for many who sat in those hallowed, time-worn, arthritic wooden chairs. 

It was worth it.

By the way, if you think Billy Ray Cox didn’t have a sense of humor, you are wrong. The afternoon of our meeting, he ate lunch at my mom and dad’s small restaurant just off campus. Later that night, Mom informed me that Billy Ray had told her the whole story. He’d admitted he thought it a great stunt and funny. But consequences had to be exacted.

Years later, I ran into Billy Ray unexpectedly at a restaurant in Dallas. After we visited for a bit, he reminded me of the pies in chapel. I was warmed when he told me that stunt had gone down as one of his favorite Harding memories. 

I’m not sure what the moral to this tale should be. So make one up. For me, the most imperative is this: never give me information that’s the slightest bit serious. More than likely, it won’t be channeled in an empathetic display of shared anguish or heartache. But rest assured, as is the case in most experiences, it will one day make for a great story.

And if you ever see me walking through the church lobby with a pie plate and a can of shaving cream, it would probably be advisable to contact security. 

I have traveled to New Zealand four times for work. I paid for nothing while I was there (yes, please feel free to experience a scintilla of jealousy right about now!). Two coworkers and I decided to take an escorted Jeep trip down a canyon trail. We would savor a relaxed lunch at the bottom, hang out, enjoy nature, and then travel back to the top. It sounded rugged and almost expedition-like—an adventure for us city folk. 

We started at a sustainable amount of excitement. The gently used utility vehicle sported no doors, had a canvas roof, and sat ten people—very safari-like. Of course, I landed in one of the seats near a gap where a closed door should’ve been—so close that if I moved my foot a few inches to the left, it would drag along the dirt road. 

We all joked about being early pioneers in a new, undiscovered land. I didn’t realize at that moment how close we would come to being the skeletons of primitive cave dwellers. 

As we continued the forty-five-minute descent along the side of the canyon, the jovial conversation slowly ground to a terrified halt as the road became more and more narrow. We also noted that as the width of the path became more restricted, the speed of the dented dirt-brown vehicle did not. Although we probably never traveled faster than twenty miles an hour, we were going down the sheer side of a cliff with unlimited, anfractuous, blind turns and twists. I unwisely looked out the open space where a closed door should have been and saw that for the most part, we were never more than a foot from the edge of the precipice. I could actually see the drop of several hundred feet and birds flying below us. Flying below us! I’m sure they were vultures.

Although the driver and escort appeared totally at peace with the vehicle careening down the hill at what seemed to the rest of us like NASCAR speed, everything in me screamed, “For the love of all things holy, slow down!”

But for some reason, there was a catch in my throat, and I couldn’t get the words out. We’ve all felt those moments before, when our emotions can rise only so high, keeping us safe from exploding or imploding. At that particular moment, I realized no one was yelling. I glanced around to see everyone else with the same pasty-white, no-blood-to-the-brain, mouths-agape-in-a-silent-scream, terror-filled, frozen expression, likely wondering, Did I tell everyone I love them before I left? 

Everyone in the duct-taped jalopy was desperately peering at me. In retrospect, I assume they were looking at me because I was closest to the open space where a door should’ve been but wasn’t and, therefore, should’ve been the one to activate an inflatable slide in the event of an emergency landing. I frantically prayed I would pass out before we hit the bottom of the canyon. I also prayed we didn’t have a homicidal maniac as a tour guide. 

Then it started to rain. Just a small drizzle, really, but those drops of water might as well have been a monsoon to those of us in mortal jeopardy. 

Amazingly and miraculously, the rain stopped as quickly as it had begun. The tour guide, driving with one hand and holding a microphone with his other, gleefully told us something about something—maybe the history of the flora in the area. I don’t know. I defy any person in that group to remember or care the slightest bit about what he was saying. Like telling a skydiver whose parachute failed to open that a bird had just pooped on his head.

Just as all hope for survival was lost, we rounded a bend, and I heard an audible gasp from every person in that doom-clunker. 

The canyon opened up onto the most incredible view I had ever seen. A lush, verdant green vista spread out before us in every direction. Still well above the tree line, we saw nothing human-made for miles. Rising from one end of the horizon, blazing across the azure sky, and nestling on the other end of the horizon, framing the life-filled valley, was a dazzling, perfect double rainbow. The view was vast and breathtaking; we experienced the pure beginning of the bands of color from one end of the valley to the perfectly pristine other end. The spectrum of colors was immaculate. No fuzzy lines. A finished prism of light. 

Only one sound irritated the moment: the grinding of tires over gravel as we continued down the compressed path. I can’t remember how long I held my breath, but I recognized the holiness of the moment. I understood that catch in my chest, where the emotional impact seemed to settle and then move into tears. I couldn’t physically fully express my unadulterated emotion at that moment. I had no choice in the presence of such a miracle. I slid off the seat I’d been holding with a death grip just thirty seconds before and silently lifted my praise and thankfulness to the Lord. He’d created that spectacular display of power, and I marveled at his creative genius. I thanked him for reminding me in that reverent moment that he was still on his throne, and he was still in control.

When I got back into my seat, I noticed that once again, the other passengers were all staring at me. But this time, I didn’t care. 

There are countless other times I’ve experienced the catch. Moments and snapshots of the Holy Spirit nudging me forward when it might have been painful at first. 

One night, at the prison where I lead Celebrate Recovery step-studies, I was talking to an inmate. He believed in Jesus, but he had yet to become a follower. He knew everything he needed to know to become a Christian, but he couldn’t make the leap for some reason. 

As we talked, I asked Brad about his family. He paused and then said, “I’ve never told anyone this. But my father beat me. When I was a kid, I wasn’t afraid or ashamed to cry or show emotion or hug. My father said it was a sign of weakness. So he was going to, in his words, force me to be a man. He would then proceed to beat me and tell me he was going to keep hitting me until I stopped crying.” 

My heart leaped into my throat. The anger, betrayal, and abandonment Brad must have experienced tugged at me until my own tears came. “Brad, that’s why you have such a hard time trusting the Lord. You’re scared to death he will hurt you if you trust him.” 

Brad looked intently at me. But he didn’t cry. The bar for his catch had been set extremely high. I had total faith it would happen. He would surrender. I never pushed him. But I told him he needed to hurry up and give his heart to Jesus. I needed to move him from the accept-Jesus column on my prayer list over to the plans-for-Brad’s-life column. 

Another time, my friend Jack and I were exchanging catch experiences. He described a messy event that preceded a catch moment that stemmed from an agonizing encounter. Thanks to a stressful job, Jack usually left work every day anxious and frustrated, as did most of the other employees. He needed to know if it was the management or his attitude that was way off. Jack asked the Lord to help him understand where the problems originated. 

Jack attended a business networking lunch along with the owner of the establishment he worked for—the person he felt was causing a great deal of grief and discord. As part of the networking for the business, Jack attended weekly meetings with that particular group. The secretary for the crowd had been away on vacation for a couple of weeks. Because Jack was not yet a member, his contact information hadn’t been entered into their computer system as quickly as the owner thought it should have been. 

After the meeting, the owner walked up to the secretary. He began to verbally annihilate her because she’d failed to get Jack’s email set up for correspondence. The man was a churchgoing self-proclaimed follower of Jesus. 

Once she was close to tears, the owner berated her for poor math skills. She’d announced in the meeting that 90 ninety of the group members had attended—twenty-five of thirty. He made sure she understood that twenty-five was not 90 percent of thirty and wondered why she would make such a statement.

The president of the chapter heard the aggression and moved over, as did the incoming president, to intervene. Within a matter of minutes, the temperature in the room became intense. 

Jack stood back, dumbfounded that a follower of Jesus Christ would ever treat someone so horribly. He deliberately positioned himself behind the owner and mouthed, “I am so sorry,” to the secretary.

She said, “It’s okay.” Then she left the room. 

Jack wanted to explode. The catch was there. It stopped him for once. But I’m confident it was only because of Jack’s need of job security. 

Then, in the car on the way back to work, the owner announced that at the prior week’s meeting, one of the guys—a member of XYZ church—had made an off-color remark. Apparently, the statement was supposed to justify the owner’s reckless display of rage. At least he didn’t say anything “off-color.”

Jack’s heart grieved for the rest of the day. He held himself together for the last three hours of work, but the minute he sat down in his car, he began to shake. He tried to come up with any possible scenario in which the action in the meeting could have been justified. There wasn’t one. Jack kept thinking of the poor lady trying to defend herself against someone who was, in every respect, a bully. 

My eyes brimmed with tears as Jack detailed how the Lord healed his heart that afternoon.

It rained that day. It seemed another narrow, twisting, winding, anfractuous path lay in front of Jack. The heartache and bitterness were getting to a specific point and pausing just there, a nebulous area he was unable to navigate. He prayed, Okay, Holy Spirit, interpret my groaning. Just as he reached the top of the hill, about a mile from his house, Jack glanced to his right, and there it was—the catch.

The sun was setting. A brilliant display of bright yellow, dusty orange, burgundy, and bluish purple—a God-sent eye feast. Seriously, who besides God could put orange and purple together and make it look good? It never even worked for Howard Johnson. 

God was right there. Jack pulled into his driveway, turned the car around, and sat in the silence. He felt the glory of Psalm 65:8 (MSG) as the tears began to flow: “Far and wide they’ll come to a stop, they’ll stare in awe, in wonder. Dawn and dusk take turns calling, ‘Come and worship.’” So Jack did. 

The next day, he sent an email to the secretary and apologized.

I’m so sorry for the bullying you had to face yesterday. I don’t believe you were treated with integrity. Nor do I believe you were shown much respect. I need you to know that I am a follower of Jesus Christ. And I don’t believe that when we face eternity, God will care one bit about when you set up my email or what percentage of enrolled members attended the meeting. What he will remember is if or how we shared the glory of his precious Son, Jesus.

All we can do in these bodies is throw our arms up in praise and worship; wonder and awe; and even pain, grief, and fear, because we’re incapable of fully expressing the depth of love, joy, and need we feel. 

But there is soon coming a time when the catch will no longer be part of our makeup. The quick intake of breath, that gasp of wonder and amazement because our senses are accosted with something breathtakingly magnificent, will be normal and will finally be our home. 

There will come a time when these frail, time-sensitive bodies will be different. I believe God has placed the catch in us as a taste of what’s to come to keep us yearning for our future home. Graveclothes dropped and veil lifted, we will see Jesus face-to-face. We will finally know the beauty that he alone saw in us at Calvary. Our bodies will be metamorphosed and made responsive to an entirely new, fresh atmosphere. We will be fully released to express the limitless, eternal, inexhaustible thankfulness we have always desired to lay at his feet. 

Psalm 56:8 (NLT) says, “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.” 

It’s a balm to me, a comfort, to know it’s okay to have days when I want my praise to rise higher. When the worship I want to express is not as full, complete, loud, or finished as my heart longs for it to be and can only be expressed in grateful tears. One day Jesus will show me a bottle in which he’s saved every catch, every tear he has caught, I’ll know just how cherished and precious they are to him.

Finally, unrestrained and unfettered by earthly barriers, I will proclaim and shout from without what he has made me from within: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

June 1977. Annie won a Tony for best musical. Stevie Wonder sang “Sir Duke,” and KC and the Sunshine Band released “I’m Your Boogie Man.” Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo and For the Love of Benji beat out MacArthur at the box office. Friends in college and I spent most of our time quoting almost every line from Young Frankenstein, which had hit theaters a couple of years earlier. I was in a college traveling musical group called Belles and Beaux. 

We were about to begin our cross-country summer tour, going through Texas and west to California, swinging around through Colorado, and making our way back to beautiful downtown Searcy, Arkansas.

I loved traveling with that group. It was a kind of recruiting group for the university. We would go to churches, auditoriums, and all sorts of different venues, wearing our bumblebee-yellow costumes, and do a concert of popular tunes of the day. I usually ended up with a Barry Manilow ballad or a song like Neal Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” We stayed with church families along the way, who fed us well and often gave us food for our trip. Homemade cookies and cupcakes were particularly popular.

Before we left on the first morning of our two-week adventure, Cliff Ganus, the director, and I went to pick up a U-Haul trailer, which connected to the back of the van by a hitch and two chains and carried our costumes, musical instruments, and sound equipment. I talked with Cliff about our options. Could we put everything in the van and forget the U-Haul? We decided to use the two-wheeler anyway, to give ourselves more legroom in the van. We hooked the chains and the hitch to the back of the van, loaded up, and headed out on our adventure.

The van, which was an off brand called Superior, had been donated to us from an old department store chain called Gibson’s Discount Center. It was supposed to have an exceptionally sturdy frame. It was covered—floor, walls, and ceiling—with red carpet. Two separate seats were at the front of the van: one for the driver and one passenger seat, separated by a console. When you opened the back door on the right side, there was a labeled quickie step that was, theoretically, supposed to mechanically appear from under the van and jut out and downward so you could step up comfortably onto the van. It never worked. So even for six-foot-three me, it was like stepping onto a moving train, jumping what seemed like two feet to get aboard.

When you were finally able to get into the van, to your left, you would see three rows of seats that could hold maybe seven or eight people. Well, not seats exactly—more like cushioned pews, so we could lie down to sleep if we wanted to. If you turned right, you would see two benches facing each other, attached to opposite sides of the van, with an aisle between them. We all claimed our spots for the trip and took off. 

About midday, my friend Barbara Wright complained that her eyes were burning. I had natural, soothing eye drops made of rose petals. I didn’t think to tell Barbara the drops were made from a flowering shrub since in that decade, we had no idea of the healing properties of essential oils. We put a couple of drops in each of her eyes, and she settled down for a nap. Evidently, unbeknownst to us, Barbara was allergic to roses. When she woke up, she looked at me, and I stifled a startled gasp, as if the Elephant Man had just crossed my path. “How do your eyes feel?” I choked out.

“Oh, wow. They feel so much better.” 

In truth, she looked uncannily like Marty Feldman. I felt as if I were watching a tree frog startled into bug-eyed awareness that a hoot owl was diving down to devour it. I spent the rest of the day keeping her away from anything remotely resembling a mirror. 

The second day out, we were driving through Texas, about forty-five minutes from Seguin. The temperature could have melted metal, which melts in the neighborhood of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Barbara, her eyes back to normal, sat in the driver’s seat with Cliff beside her up front. I stretched out on the floor in the aisle between the two pews facing each other, sobbing while reading the last two pages of Where the Red Fern Grows. Being a true Arkansan, I was barefoot. 

Barbara, driving the van, was trying to open her window to shoo an annoying fly. The window wouldn’t budge. She wrestled with the clasp. Meanwhile, the van began to drift. It drifted more. It headed for the columns under an overpass. Cliff’s wife, Debbie, sitting somewhere above me, said, “We’re going to do something.” I closed my book and laid it on my chest, oddly annoyed that I was only one page from the end. 

Suddenly, the road was gone, and we were careening through a field. Cliff yelled, “Turn the wheels to the right! Turn them to the right!” 

Then the weirdest thing happened. There was no noise. No sound. The van’s wheels left the gravel and scalding dirt of a Texas flatland. The van rolled with a thud onto its side and then over again, settling on the roof. Everyone and everything was thrown around as if we were in a clothes dryer. My first memory after we landed was that I was still holding my book. 

The silence continued for a few seconds. 

We all began to stir around, obviously in shock. I had seen none of the wreck; one minute, I’d been on the floor, looking at the ceiling, and the next, I’d face-planted into the same ceiling. I jumped up and heard someone yelling out to see if Chuck was okay. Chuck, one of our group, sometimes had trouble walking. I realized he could have been hurt most, and I too yelled out for him. As fate had it, he’d landed at my feet, and he yelled that he was okay. So I stepped on him and plowed toward the door. 

I threw the door open once I figured out where the handle was in its new upside-down position. My senses were firing on all cylinders, and I noticed several things simultaneously. One, when I opened the door, the quickie step magically began to operate and slid into place, up toward the sky. To this day, I still think it was just waiting for the right time to show its abnormal, unhealthy sense of humor. 

The second thing I noticed was that the U-Haul had not become unattached. Somehow, it had detached from the hitch, but the chains had kept it from running away or flipping over with the van. 

At that moment, an unbearable stench met intense heat emitting from the sandy terrain. Shoeless, I jumped from the van, and my feet sank into something that recently had died in the very spot where we’d flipped the van. To be honest, to this day, the emotional trauma of that singular event eclipses the entire wreck experience. I am relatively certain it was a roadkill chupacabra.

Someone still in the bowels of the doomed vehicle behind me screamed, “Could this thing explode?” 

Instantaneously, a herd of humanity piled out of the van into the blistering heat. 

Miraculously, no one was severely hurt. We had only bumps and cuts. However, when keyboardist Jan stepped out, her face was covered with tiny white flecks of skin. It was apparent she had slid face-first on the carpet-lined wall up onto the carpet-lined ceiling. She wasn’t reacting to the fact that she looked like an extra in Night of the Living Dead. I stood transfixed, waiting for her to start shrieking when her brain finally registered pain.

Then I noticed the same particles of skin on the front of her shirt. I chose not to think about it. It was too much to process. Besides, I just kept thinking, I stepped in something really bad. 

Semis and cars pulled off the road, and their occupants ran to check on us. Nobody had cell phones back then, so one of the truck drivers got on his Convoy CB and called for a tow. 

The van was eventually turned right side up again. The tow truck showed up. We all climbed aboard, which seemed more than a little dangerous, and were hauled to a cantina on the outskirts of a small town. 

I looked around at our stuff scattered across the floor, wondering where my shoes had ended up. I noticed a cardboard box that once had been filled with white-frosted cupcakes, which now had what could well have been a face print in them. I glanced back at flake-covered Jan and burst into hysterical laughter.

“What?” She seemed unreasonably offended that I was laughing at her since no one had informed her she was covered in cupcake icing. At the same time, I was bizarrely upset that all those heavenly cupcakes were ruined. 

Half an hour later, while the others tried to relax at tables in the tiny cantina, talking about the experience, I headed straight to the bathroom. I had my foot hanging precariously over the sink, trying to wash off the dead chupacabra, when one of the other guys walked in and leaned against the wall in the corner, glancing sheepishly at me, apparently channeling Boo Radley. Finally, he leaned toward me and said, “That was really scary, wasn’t it?” I raised my eyebrows and nodded. He leaned really close to me and almost whispered, “Tim, did you have an accident?” 

It took a few seconds for me to wrap my brain around his concerned expression. Finally, with my foot in the sink, I hollered, “No! I stepped in something really bad!” 

When we got back to the tables, I sat down in just enough time to hear Debbie say, “It’s a good thing we had a Superior body.”

I thought, Wow, yeah. I didn’t even stop to consider how we were protected. It is only by the mercy of God that we’re all sitting here okay. We all solemnly nodded. I think I actually clasped my hands together in an attitude of reflective, grateful prayer.

Debbie continued. “’Cause if we’d been in a Winnebago, we’d all be dead right now.”

I casually unfolded my hands and began playing with the salt and pepper shakers. 

We all made collect calls from the pay phone to let our families know we were alive. 

Then we joined in a group discussion and decided to be strong and resilient, rent a van, and continue our tour. The new van was decidedly better appointed than the old one. The new rig had beds for napping and even a bathroom. We chained the U-Haul to the van and forged ahead. 

It’s my personal opinion that the U-Haul somehow felt it was not being afforded the due attention it deserved after the accident. It, after all, never had lost its footing and had kept our clothes, speakers, and microphones safe.

About halfway into our two-week tour, Mr. U-Haul decided to have a flat tire. I can’t remember if we changed it, if someone came and changed it, or even if there was a spare tire; I just remember having to unload the trailer on the side of the highway so it could be jacked up and then reloaded after the new tire was installed. 

A few more days passed, when the same tire blew out again. Nobody was happy about having to unload the trailer, change the tire, and reload again, which added to the anxiety of rushing to get to the next venue. 

But somewhere in Colorado, probably close to Castle Rock, while lounging on one of the beds, looking out the window as the sun set in breathtaking, dazzling fashion over the mountains, I thought how the drive was finally serene and peaceful. 

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something yellow rolling at breakneck speed across the field to my left, toward the purple mountain majesties. On further eye-squinting investigation, I realized it was Mr. U-Haul, seemingly still upset over being snubbed at the wreckage site. In his nomadic escape, blatantly snapping the chains that confined him, he appeared to say, “I can’t take it anymore.”

I watched in fascination, waiting for him to make his last effort for recognition by finally rolling over. But it never happened. I watched him, farther in the distance behind us now, do a half turn in the dust and settle back, as if pointing his trailer-hitch nose to the sky in a defiant “So there” attitude, before I turned my head toward the front of the van and calmly said, “Uh, Cliff?”

I remember a line from Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts’s character says, “The bad stuff is so much easier to believe.” It makes sense that Satan would use the bad stuff about us to keep us feeling less than what the Lord has planned for us to be. The Enemy has done a masterful job of convincing us through media that we are not, and can never be, the ideals that our culture has set up as symbols of success. 

We read Bible verses that tell us we can give God thanks because we are fearfully and wonderfully made, we are the light of the world, we are a city on a hill that cannot be hidden, and we will shine like stars in the sky. We can read the blessings from the best book ever written. We can even believe them for others. But sometimes it’s hard to conceive that these verses were meant for us. Why? Maybe because we tend to see ourselves through eyes of betrayal, hurt, and rejection, which forces us to believe that striving for approval and perfection is the answer.

A while back, I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen in a few years. We talked for a few minutes, and he said, “You know what I remember most about you?”

My mind began to race. What had I said to this guy that was rude or unkind? 

He said, “Once, you asked me if I would run the media program for the lyrics at church. I was scared to do it. And instead of forcing me to do it by insisting I was capable and could do it, you said, ‘Ya know, you do have permission to say no.’ That has freed me up on many occasions to not be bound by my need to always say yes.”

What a small, insignificant thing I’d said. It had become a blessing for that man. 

We have no idea how one small word of affirmation can change a life permanently. Interestingly, in an unrelated incident, a worship pastor said I’d once told him the same thing. It set him free to not feel responsible to say yes to everything. 

Blessings are obviously a big deal in the Bible. When Jacob wrestled with God, he refused to let God go until God blessed him. 

Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.

—1 Peter 3:9 NIV

I wonder if there is neutral ground between curse and blessing or if everything is either a blessing or a curse in varying degrees of power.

I may be walking down a street and see children clutching their parents’ hands and feel a prompting from the Holy Spirit to pray for those children. I quickly, quietly pray the Lord will bless them and place them in places where they will rise up to be world-changers for his glory. I may pass an acre of ground and pray the Lord will bless that place and consecrate it for his glory. Sometimes we may give a blessing to someone that is a direct word from God that will set that person’s life on a path straight into a relationship with the Lord.

I serve as a volunteer mentor at a prison. One of my guys there is Mark. He’s in prison for murder. Although the death was an accident, he was strung out on drugs and alcohol during his interrogation. His lies and deceit after the accident sealed his conviction. Mark wrote out his inventory when he went through a Celebrate Recovery step-study several years ago. It was 320 pages long. He gave me permission to write his story in novel form. One of the chapters is hard. I believe the Lord spoke directly to what Mark needed to hear the most.

It’s all still pretty surreal to me, looking back. Within my first week in county jail, I was placed in isolation for observation because of my history of suicide attempts. This was all too much for me to withstand. I made another attempt at taking my own life.

This is the one that changed my life forever. Why would you ever put someone on suicide watch and provide the means necessary to kill himself? 

When I was locked down, I was provided with all the amenities that the standard inmate is provided upon intake. This included a towel, a mat, a blanket, and a uniform. An inmate on suicide watch is provided none of those things. The suicide smock and a hard concrete bed are as good as it gets. 

I was on my third day of lockdown. I decided that I honestly couldn’t take the horror my life had become. I previously told you about two other serious attempts on my own life, which were by hanging. And both failed miserably. I’m not sure why I chose hanging. Maybe it was all I could think of besides blowing my brains out. 

By the time I made my first attempt on my own life, I had lost my pistols due to incidents like running into people’s houses and brandishing a weapon like some sort of cowboy. Plus, have you ever seen an attempted suicide by gunshot go wrong? I have. And Lord knows that’s no way to live. 

Maybe on some subconscious level, I felt an overwhelming kinship to Judas Iscariot. No loyalties to anyone except myself. And that in itself became too much to withstand. My literary style might lead you to believe that I am making a joke of the situation. Granted, some of the predicaments I have been in are worthy of being made a laughingstock. However, suicide attempts are taboo. 

Without this particular incident, though, I’m not sure I would have come to recognize God’s actual existence. I am like doubting Thomas. I thought I believed at one point in my life. Those days were long behind me. It was going to take me seeing God face-to-face before I truly believed. 

And that is just what God had in store for me. 

I don’t remember a lot about the incident. Just tying the knot in the blanket. The guards left the food slot on the door open. I tied off one end of the blanket through the food slot to the handle on the outside of my cell door. I tied the other end of the blanket around my neck and sat down on the floor.

Strangulation is an unpleasant way to go. But once unconsciousness comes and darkness slips over you, it is peaceful. It’s the period up to the blacking out that is unpleasant. The knowledge you are choking, that your body is starved for oxygen. That’s the hard part. I almost made it. I slipped off into that long good night, that beautiful darkness, only to come to, surrounded by two deputies performing first aid. 

The next thing I really remember is the ambulance pulling into the ER and being rolled through the front door on a stretcher. My reality started truly caving in on me when I realized that the ER technicians were putting me in the exact same room where I faced my crime ten days earlier. The same room. Even the same bed.

That’s when the collapse of all things temporal happened. I lost my bearings and began to sob hysterically at my recognition of this place. It felt like some sick joke being played on me. Honestly, it felt like I had entered the first circle of hell. The one Dante forgot to mention. Hell on earth. 

In my panic attack, I came to notice several nurses walking in and out of the room. The other patient in the room with me was moved to another location. My police escort and I were the only ones left in this room. All these nurses I noticed were huddled up outside the nurses’ station, which was right outside my room, all talking and pointing in my direction. 

Of course, they knew who I was. For a week, I was front-page headlines, every local news broadcast. The fact is, in a small town, news spreads like wildfire. And it burns out slowly. My crisis of faith began, my deus ex machina. 

A short, portly man walked into the room, and it was obvious he was the doctor. You can always pick a doctor out from a crowd of nurses. They display a certain take-charge demeanor that gives them away. 

This doctor had a very unpleasant look on his face. It was not a look of anger or even resentment. I couldn’t place the emotion, but it was obvious discomfort. I believe it was a form of fear. The fear of facing a monster. The fear Ananias had when God instructed him to go to the apostle Paul and heal his blindness. Even with God on his side, Ananias was afraid of a blind, helpless Paul because his reputation had obviously preceded him. 

Such was the case with me. I lay handcuffed to this bed under the supervision of an armed police escort. This doctor knew there was something definitely not right. But he proceeded anyway. 

What he said to me changed my life forever.

Now, listen closely. I’m not going to get all “I had a revelation from God” or whatever. But that night, I had myself a good old-fashioned come-to-Jesus meeting in its purest form.

I laugh at Old Testament stories and the misconceptions that movies like The Ten Commandments make about God’s voice. It’s not some booming voice that comes over the intercom like an elementary school principal reading your daily lunch menu and saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. Not saying he can’t or he won’t go that route. But I have come to understand, for me, God prefers more subtle ways of communicating, because that is the most effective. 

I believe God sends messages through people just like you and just like me. 

So this doctor calmly walked up to my bed and looked down on me. He said, “Look, son. I know who you are. And I need you to understand: it’s not your time to go yet. God is not ready for you yet. He has some sort of plan for you. I don’t know what this plan entails. But it’s obvious it does not consist of your dying yet.”

He also informed me that he went to church with the victim’s family and that more people than I could conceive were praying for me specifically. To me, that was as good as showing me the holes in Jesus’s hands and the wound in His side. 

I know you probably expected some tunnel with bright lights and a booming James Earl Jones–type voice. And if you were, I’m sorry my encounter with my God has let you down. It was not Wizard of Oz theatrics.

I believe in my heart’s depths that my personal Savior knew precisely what I needed for me to believe. It was Him.

Mark is now a senior counselor for the substance abuse program at the prison and basically the leader over four barracks of inmates. He has completed eight Celebrate Recovery step-studies since I’ve known him and has never, in those eight years, missed one single class. 

His dream is to finish college, even in prison, and then pursue his master’s in substance abuse. 

I don’t know why the bad stuff is so much easier to believe. It’s not from God. It’s not what he feels about us, and it’s not the truth. If we believe his Word, then we have to arrive in a place of healing. He makes no mistakes. We are created with a purpose, with specific gifts. No one can uniquely do for God what he has planned for us to do. No one!