NOT READY!

     Yesterday was a tough day for me. It was probably hard for my wife also, but I want to talk about my perspective and specifically what happened in my day. How my day went highlighted a problem that is at the core of what it means to be exceptional in our walk with God or just average. 

     The background is that I have traveled extensively for many years (well over a decade). It was not uncommon to be gone from home for 3 months at a time. On a few occasions I was gone for 6 to 8 months without a return trip home. Most people can’t imagine a life like this. For me it was unimaginable also and I made efforts to get out of it. It seemed like there was no way out. I applied for jobs regularly and would get no response. 

 

     One time my youngest son and I applied for the same job. The job required years of experience in my specialty. I hit every tick mark right down the line. My son, by comparison, had been trained by me but had only 6 months of experience. What happened was typical in my search for local employment. My son was interviewed and ultimately offered a job. For this one, they at least did me the favor of sending me a not-interested letter. Still, it was really disheartening to be hugely more qualified and be rejected for an interview while the “newbe” that I trained got interviewed and offered a job. 

After literally a half-decade of applying for jobs that would have kept me in the city and state that had been my home for almost 40 years I bit the bullet and succumbed to moving to get a position where I could stay home. My wife quit the job that she loved and moved away from her children, extended family, and friends just to be with me. 

     At first, it seemed like God really wanted this for us too. It was hectic, but every door opened and all the “must happens” clicked right when they needed to. Surely we were in the center of God’s will. What I mean is that not how were are trained to think. If the doors open and the insurmountable mountains are moved then it has to be God’s will and all will be well. 

     The move rapidly taught me to put ZERO stock in that being the case. We arrived in Florida and closed on our new home. My wife had driven a day ahead of me and I drove straight through (about an 8 ½ hour drive) starting at 3:00 am. I got there just in time for closing. The movers were scheduled to arrive the next day but we have packed essentials in both vehicles. We unpacked and I suggested we go to lunch. Going to lunch was the end of the idealistic God’s will idea and the beginning of a genuinely rotten year for us. We pulled out of our neighborhood and turned towards town. About 1/3 mile down the road was our very first Florida stop light as official residents of Florida. We stopped and then were almost immediately rear-ended by a man that had never touched his brakes due to being on his phone. The police officers at the scene estimated he was going about 60 mph. 

     

     The collision just bent my pick-up truck vertically in the middle destroying it. My wife, who had yet to start her nursing job, injured her back severely enough that she was out of work for the next 6 months. Subsequently, the offer of employment was retracted because they needed a nurse for the position and could not wait for her to heal. So, our plans for a 2-person income household quickly were switched to one income. The financial pressure was huge. 

     Without going into all the details of the entire year, once my wife became well enough to work, she simply could not find a job. It really seemed crazy. Registered Nurses are among the highest demanded positions in the USA, yet my very experienced and very skilled wife could not even get a whiff of an interview let alone an offer. Month by month we were slowly sliding behind. We simply had not planned for an event where suddenly one of us could not find employment at all. The final thing to do was for my wife to become a nurse traveler as no other doors were opening for us. It took about a month and sure enough, she was offered a position. 

     For the uninitiated, a nurse traveler is a contract nurse. Hospitals use these contract nurses to fill temporary vacancies while they look for new permanent staff or to fill cyclical increases in demand that will not warrant hiring a new permanent staff member. What this meant to us is that I stopped traveling to be at home with my wife, but we were split apart again. This time I would be home missing my wife while she was out on the road. 

     This leads to yesterday (Sunday, Nov 12). My wife packed an incredibly full car for her trip to go live in Georgia for 13 weeks. Both of us were (and are) upset by this development. For me I did my best to distract myself from this entire predicament. Inside I am struggling with a bit and frustration and anger. Our move to make things better has actually turned out to make everything worse. Not only are we split up again, we are hugely worse off financially for having done it and we have the added bonus of having no family and no friends around for support. The projects seemed to be the natural place to go without even thinking about it. Before I knew it I had a wall torn out of the house and was going after a plumbing problem that surfaced immediately after we moved in. Yep, another one of those open-door things looking more like a trap in hindsight than an opportunity. 

     The job had me making frequent walks back and forth between my shop building and the house to get tools and materials. On one of those trips I suddenly heard a young woman’s voice from behind me. “Sir? Excuse me Sir?”. I about jumped out of my skin. This woman was in my backyard. My fenced backyard! Actually, it was my neighbor’s fenced backyard, but right beside me where no one ever is. Especially someone who wants my attention and does not know who I am. 

     I turned and saw what I am quite accustomed to seeing in our town, especially in the fall. It was a young woman who had the typical appearance of most homeless people. She was on the very shady side of clean and pushing a bicycle. She also had one bag with some stuff in it. She told me she was looking for her grandmother’s house and thought the neighbor’s house was it. Because of this, she had pushed the bike around the back only to see the screened swimming pool and realizing her memory was totally faulty. 

     

     “Do you know where Wood Street is?, she asked. “My grandmother lived on Wood Street, but I have not been there since she died.” Now in the back of my head I am immediately wary. Remembering that our “will of God” house that we bought had turned out to be the biggest meth dealers house in the entire community made me think this girl just could not remember where her dealer’s house was. Perhaps, just like a homing pigeon, she was returning to the home coop. 

    Then next she said, “Sir I don’t know if you are a Christian or not. Please, it’s no matter if you are not, but could you take me to Wood Street and help me find my grandmother’s house?  I am so tired and I had a bad night last night. I fell and it just been one bad thing right after another”.   I told her that yes I could take her in the truck to help her. First I had to get my keys. Then I asked her if she would like a bottle of water and told her to come around to the truck and I would load her bike when I came back out.  

     I went inside and quickly went around and locked all the doors, grabbed my keys, and a can of Coke Zero (all I had in the fridge at the moment). When I got back outside she was standing by the truck with the bike. Going through my head is all the typical caution-type stuff because we are frequently deluged with stories of what desperate people will do. Will she do something like stab and rob me when she gets close enough? When I get her in the truck will she then try to claim I sexually assaulted her? As is true to life, however, none of that actually happened. 

     What I did notice is the bike was likely stolen. The reason I believe this is that the frame had been repainted by drizzling all sorts of paint all over it. By putting really heavy paint on it it covers up the make, the original color, etc. making it nonrecognizable to the previous owner should they see it. The next thing I noticed was how beat up and banged up this young woman was. She had little bangs and cuts all over. One foot had been completely skinned up. Then she had traces of meth addiction. Her teeth were not destroyed yet, but she had the little meth blisters on her face and neck. 

     Once in the truck, she apologized for coming into our yards by mistake. She thought it seemed like a nice quiet neighborhood. I asked why she would be looking for her grandmother’s house when she had passed away? Did the family live there? She indicated that family still lived there. She then told me her name (Amanda) and I told her mine.  I drove her down Wood Street and she eventually saw the house. I hopped out, keeping in mind to shut off the truck and take the keys. Then I got her bicycle out and after she thanked me I left her there. 

     Now I get to the title of this post, “Not Ready”. The Bible says in II Timothy 4:1-2 “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.” 

 Why did this pop in my head last night and why has it nagged me all morning? Because I was not ready and I was not instant when the person was presented to me. “Hey dude, you did way more than I would have done. I would have run the wacko out of my yard or called the cops!”. I could have certainly gone that route for sure. I could have said no and then just run her off, but what did I actually do? 

Why I was not ready. 

Exhibit A: God put a young woman in desperate need literally in my own back yard. 

Exhibit B: She literally asked me if I was a Christian. The door was wide open, and I said nothing. Why? To tell the truth, I feared her and what she might do. In addition, I was swamped in my woe-is-me feeling about my wife leaving just a little over an hour earlier. Who glaringly needs Jesus more than her? Instead, I thought of myself first. 

Exhibit C: Matthew: 25 36-40 says: I was naked, and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,[a] you did it to me.’ This young woman exhibited all these things. My actions were the bare minimum to get her out of my yard without being unkind. 

Exhibit D: This is circumstantial evidence at best, but in hindsight, I think I am correct about this, and it brings shame to think about this. This young woman was not going to where her grandmother’s house was. If any of her family still lived there, she would say it was an aunt, uncle, or cousin. She would not be looking for the house of her dead grandmother. If you have not been around people like this or never heard the lies they tell to cover their shame you won’t understand where I am going with this. What was really happening was that some old geezer who lives out in the neighborhood behind me had bought her online for sex. This is why she did not recognize the house. She had never actually been to the house before. This is why she took her bike out behind my neighbor’s house. SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO COME AROUND BACK PER INSTRUCTIONS SO THE NEIGHBOORS WOULD NOT SEE HER ENTER! 

      It was only when she saw that the neighbor’s house had a screened pool that she realized that she had the wrong house. In exhibit D, I see my failure as a man to protect a woman who certainly is not Godly and certainly has huge problems but is so young that I don’t really think she brought all of this on herself. In our society, we see more and more children who are the products of negligent parents who failed miserably at being diligent in the physical, emotional, and spiritual care of their children. This young woman is likely to have been doomed from the day of her birth. Not to say she could have had good parents, and she was a “bad egg” as they say, but the general truth is more common. 

     She was likely a poorly cared child who was already chemically in trouble by middle school. Then in high school, before she dropped out for good, she had a serious drug problem, and it was downhill from there. Now in her early 20’s, she is homeless, drug addicted, and selling herself to get food and more drugs. 

     

     All the evidence presented points to not being ready. Not being prepared to have an answer. Not knowing what to do with such a person. I bitterly think of our church. The pastor said rather matter of factly that we give the church donations to help the poor to a group named Love Inc. because we are not trained or prepared to help the people that arrive at our doorstep. We don’t know if they are scamming us as so many do or how to connect with them, so we give to Love Inc. and they handle it. What a completely damning thing to say about your own church! This becomes especially “thou art the man” type of damning when one finds out that the church gives money to this volunteer organization and not one person from the church serves in it. The reality is that not one person is doing anything at all in regard to the poor swamping our town.

The nagging thing in my heart that persists is that the church from the pastors on down to the members is increasingly full of fearful fakes. I write this now because I am disgusted with myself. The answer to this is always predictable because I have heard it all my life. My entire life. Literally, the answer is “Well, let’s not be rash, strident, or hasty.” Tacitly the answer is, “Yes we do nothing, but we have good reason to do nothing. We have homes, businesses, marriages, mortgages, and families to protect. We have a church budget.  These things require insurance!  There’s always more to this than meets the eye… hmm, hum, er, we must pray (which we don’t do, because the best we get is probably 8 people in a prayer meeting out of hundreds or thousands of members). "Everyone can’t serve like this, they have to work for a living you know. “ 

     It is the standard operating procedure down to a man in Christianity today to NEVER BE A RADICAL ABOUT ANYTHING EVER. We get all proud and puffed up if we step up and help a poor person buy a car while ROME burns around us. We live in abject fear of standing out. We live in mortal fear of losing our status or our wealth. Many in the church make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and spend most of it on themselves. Like the rich man with the widows mite, they go in and drop a little in the offering, and walk away thinking they have done a great thing. No zeal, no sacrifice, no eagerness, no holiness….Lost our first love… 

     Our Christian service is almost always safe. It is either safe in terms of commitment (a limited amount of time), risk (reputation, safety), and certainly limited in what we will spend money on. We sit in prayer meetings praying languid prayers that God will heal our church and heal our nation and then we sit idle waiting for some putrid miracle that saves us all the effort. 

     Where is the problem? The problem is in training. The problem is in our hearts that paralyzes us into being the old man and not the man born to the newness of life. All the good doctrinal training does little with practical life training (Evangelism). All of the practical life training is no good without the doctrinal training (Knowledge). Neither is much good without training in piety (religious & holy living). I blame myself and I blame my church(es) for the half-hearted half-baked training I have had.

 

      Teaching without a specific goal and plan is like throwing grass seed to the wind. It should be more like planting wheat for harvest. Wheat is not planted willy-nilly. The farmer has a very distinct plan. He tills and intentionally prepares the soil. He uses a driller to plant the wheat exactly where he wants it to grow. He is careful to not just plant any wheat but one to get specific results. He carefully applies fertilizer, weed control, and pesticides. Too much, too little or the wrong kinds can destroy a crop. In the end, he gets a huge harvest because he has a very specific plan. 

     It just more and more feels like church is a farm that just goes through the motions of farming, but has no real plan to maximize the harvest. Therefore, I am not ready. I don’t know what to do with the extremely needy. I was caught flat-footed. I was not ready to be caring. I was not ready with knowledge. I was not ready with the Gospel. I was not ready to lead a holy life. I have no plan of action in what to do as a Christian other than go play the Christian fiddle…show up at church on Sunday, 3 hymns, and out. I am in no different a situation than that woman in my yard other than I am sure she is very aware at how screwed up her life is and I have become unaware of how blind, naked , and wretched I truly am.