An Anthology of Madness Read online

  The walls of this house are ancient history, swelling and shifting in the rain, the hum of bodies and sweat and laughter coming and going throughout the day. It’s a family of artists here, and an open door to community. People coming and going like relatives home for Christmas. Cabinets full of Star Wars action figures from the ‘70’s. The artwork of her children instead of IKEA paintings as decor. A taxidermy and skull cleaning operation is set up in the basement, and that explains the piranha on the shelf, the cold cat on the bookcase, and the wolf downstairs.

  I was in need of prayer. I’d spent the last five hours in a coffee shop, distracted by Facebook and Twitter, not writing a thing, not knowing where I was going next. Two months have now passed since I’d left Los Angeles, and I wasn’t any smarter nor any closer to God. I’d just come from folding discarded and dirty children’s clothes (because dirty and discarded is better than no clothes at all) on the floor of the Philadelphia Access Center, distraught because I have an extra coat in my trunk for when it’s cold, blankets in case I have no place to sleep at night, and a laundry basket full of shirts I never wear.

  I arrived at the Access Center with a group of local twenty-somethings all with their own problems and struggles who wake up each morning and tend to the victims of crime and selfishness, the poor, the down-and-out, and the defeated just looking for the strength to throw one more punch.

  Mothers struggling to stay in the country with their kids.

  Children with holes in their clothes.

  Men without jobs.

  Without opportunity.

  Without hope.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked. “I don’t feel like I am going to change a thing out there on the streets.”

  “That change,” my new friends told me, “it has to start somewhere.”

  So I wake up Tuesday morning and join five strangers along with a stuffed wolf in prayer for a South Philly neighborhood. They want to clean it up, fix the streets and the gutters and the back alleys infested with garbage and bored high school students. They intend to lead a charge to create a safer community, telling neighbors to grab a shovel and dig through the rubble of the abandoned lot next door.

  “Because,” Faith says, “It must start in the cities before it can reach the nation. If we go for the nation first, we’ve missed the point entirely. It’s not about reaching as many people as possible at the same time. It’s about reaching them one at a time.”

  “What it’s about,” said Alison, the young woman in charge at the Access Center, “is the one humble enough to walk through these doors with her five-year-old and say, ‘I need help.’ It’s about stopping to say hello to the man you see every day on the street but whose name you do not know.”

  Change begins with hello, they say.

  Change begins with a handshake.

  Change begins with folding discarded baby clothes on the floor of an empty room so a mother has an easier time finding her child’s size.

  We must reach the cities before we reach the nations. We must reach the individual before we can reach the family. We must reach the family before we can change the neighborhood. And we must reach the neighborhood before we can get to the city.

  Enjoy The Nuts

  Sitting in what is quite possibly the coldest coffee shop on planet Starbucks, my stomach in ropes from the debilitating illness which left me spilling guts all over a strangers bathroom floor in Seattle the weekend before, I’m digging a new hole into my belt with a cheap camping knife from Target. Chilled to the bone and waiting for my new friend Nick to pick me up after finding myself caught in the rain this afternoon, trudging through the relatively calm blocks and quaint shops that make up downtown Spokane looking for…something. Looking for I-have-no-idea-what. Inspiration? God? Radical faith in unsafe places? The possibility to change a stranger’s day not for myself, but for them? Just a good cup of coffee?

  Before I found refuge from rain cold as ice in this coffee shop, I had ducked into a bus station to keep dry, sharing a bench with a man carved out of wood, his gloveless fingers looked as if they’d spent a lifetime crushing concrete and tearing down walls. I watching him rip into a package of almonds with his teeth. He balanced a pile of books and papers on his knee with unexpected daintiness. We exchanged glances, each seemingly relieved to be sitting and out of the rain, and smiled. A few nuts jumped from packaging and gathered around my feet.

  I crushed one beneath the heel of my boot. I asked how his day was going.

  A series of buses came and went. A sea of lifeless faces poured from their doors, drifting aimlessly into the cold.

  A bag of half-opened almonds dangling between his pearly-whites he said, “It was a good day. Hard work. Got a little dirty. Waiting for the 29 bus now…”

  Faces I didn’t recognize. Faces I’d never see again. Yet each one of them had a bold story to tell.

  A woman with scars down her checks, crawling over her chin. Who hurt you? I want to know. Who made you beautiful?

  The shy man clutching tight to his lunch box, counting and recounting change; compulsively checking his pockets. What made you so unsure?

  The smoking man with his track jacket and soaking wet cigarette smashed between his lips, making only inches of progress with a walker. Others moved miles in minutes around him. Why are your legs so weak?

  The food court employee.

  The young couple huddled close together beneath a roof to keep out of the rain.

  The mother.

  The son.

  All these people God made in his image. His beautiful image and likeness. So why then are all your faces so sad? Don’t you know you’re beautiful? Where are you going when you leave here? To see your children? Are you headed into the arms of an abusive lover, or is the graveyard shift only the beginning of your day?

  “Sometimes I like to just ride the bus and think instead of going home. Allows me to catch up on some reading…One time, I forgot to get off and rode it all the way to the Air Force Base…” He passed me a bag of nuts. We shared salt & vinegar and BBQ jalapeno almonds together.

  Has no one told you you’re appreciated today? Has no one said hello, called to check in? Has no one offered to share their umbrella, or give up their seat on the bus?

  Has no one offered you a simple bag of nuts?

  Where have you put your hope for happiness today? In someone who swore they’d always be there for you, but didn’t show up this morning?

  In a job that can’t quite pay the bills?

  In the man you believed was The One?

  “This is a good day to be alive. A good day for work. You seen these before?” My almond-eating friend held up a workbook full of sentence diagrams I hadn’t seen since the sixth grade. “I want my children to understand the English language. And I want to know the answers when they ask.” He looked at the notebook sitting between us on the bench. “You’re not a journalist, are you?”

  I wanted to interrupt the world of each stranger passing between us, shake them and tell them to wake up, to consider being disappointed a gift. We are anxious human beings, desperately seeking approval because we’ve invested our hope for happiness in things which will inevitably let us down. Your family. Your job. Sex. Pornography. School. It’s time for you to realize disappointment is God’s way of reminding you – his creation – that you’ve invested your life into something other than him. Things that will never live up to their expectations. He created you. He wants you all to himself.

  “When I get bored with studying these diagrams, I teach myself how to read this.” He handed me a wrinkled computer print-out. It was the Bible in Hebrew, broken down word for word, right to left.

  It’s so easy to forget we are loved when we experience disappointment. Is there anyone left to remind us someone cares? Does anyone still love us?

  M
aybe it’s our job to remind people of that.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  I raised an eyebrow, asked how he knew.

  “Well, for one thing, you’re talking to me. People around here don’t talk to each other. They mostly just keep their heads down and keep to themselves.”

  I laughed, told him he’d done all the talking. Not me. I’d barely said a word. I simply said hello when we sat down.

  The 29 arrived. My laboring, almond-eating friend stood with a well-earned tiredness, and without a word.

  “Hey,” he said with a shrug, turning back.

  “Yeah?”

  He tossed me an unopened bag of almonds. “You’re wrong. You did say something. You asked how my day was…Thank you. For that.” He glanced down, perhaps at his feet, most likely at nothing. Back at me he smiled, pointed. “Enjoy the nuts.”

  Bleed

  “How have you been not going to church?” Clint asked, sipping a margarita on the back patio.

  Matt leaned against the wall, taking quick, careless puffs on his cigar. The sunlight reflecting off his glasses, the cloud of smoking rising around him, he seemed more like an apparition than my friend. “I’ve hit a plateau. My relationship with Jesus isn’t any different, but it’s not any worse.”

  “It’s been what, a year now?”

  Matt nodded. “I don’t even think about church on Sunday. This is my community now. You guys right here. And I’m fine with that. Church is wherever I go. Wherever Jesus was standing, church was under his feet. I don’t see what the big deal is about being a Christian who doesn’t attend church regularly.”

  Clint sat back in his chair, setting the drink on the table. I watched the glass sweat beneath the sun as he spoke. “I wake up at five every morning. I spend an hour reading the Bible and praying. I eat breakfast, go to work, exercise, relax, pray, and do it all over again the next day. I don’t have any desire to go back to church right now. I’m sick of the vocabulary and the business.”

  Still puffing that cigar, Matt answered, “Any church is a business. It has to grow.”

  “But that’s why I want nothing to do with it.” Clint tugged at the hem of his shorts. They were pink and out of place at this barbecue. His shorts made me want to be at the beach playing volleyball or swimming in the ocean instead of eating burgers.

  “I used to go to a church that was not shy about asking for that. For money. For your time.” Eddy was standing in the corner, talking to his wife, one knee up on a chair, sunglasses on, and a beer bottle in his hand. He leaned forward on that knee with his elbows — leaning into her, his wife, like they’d just met and he was hoping to take her home. He turned to us and finished, “Look. I don’t want that. I think I want to go to a church with a lot of homeless people. There are a lot of homeless people in my neighborhood. I want to gather them together and read the Bible to them. Is that church?”

  The men looked at each other, shrugged, nodded. Eddy continued, “A homeless guy asked if I had any money the other day. I told him I didn’t, I never carry cash, but I would buy him lunch. I assumed, because it’s lunchtime, you’ve got to be hungry. Homeless people get up early, you know… They don’t have blinds…” he paused, waited for us to laugh. We didn’t. He continued, “And he hesitated to answer like he had better things to spend my money on. This guy was high. He agreed to lunch, and he knew exactly what he wanted. He got the food. I said, ‘God Bless you, man, let me know if you need anything else.’ And it’s noon. I’ve been yelled at for four hours now by some asshole on the thirtieth floor. And this guy here, this homeless guy, this adult male, is high. He is doing the Harlem Shake, laughing and smiling, getting his lunch paid for. And right then, I hate this guy. He’s high as hell on a Monday afternoon living well, and I hate him. And then he sends back his burrito because it wasn’t made exactly how he wanted it.

  “So I called my dad that night. My dad’s a pastor. I said, ‘Dad, what am I doing?’ And he proceeds to give me a two-hour sermon. He finishes by saying somewhere in Philippians it talks about derelicts in life. They need tough love. They need to get better. You need to enable people. Most importantly, you need to love them. That shit’s involved. It’s pretty easy to buy some dude lunch and hate him afterwards. ‘Here’s five dollars. I’m going to forget about you.’ The tough part is really helping people out with no strings attached. Expecting nothing in return. Not even a thank you. So my dad talked me down. ‘You’re never gonna end poverty, homelessness, or hunger,’ he said. ‘But when you see someone in need on the streets, it’s like being a doctor who is helping a patient that is bleeding. You solve the current problem.”

  I wondered later that night if that’s what the church was meant to be all along? Our streets have been hemorrhaging since the fall of man. Perhaps we got so caught up with our rules and tithes and sin when Jesus didn’t come back as soon as we thought he would, we unknowingly sacrificed an entirely different concept: a group of people gathering together in the name of Christ to stop the bleeding.

  And Then We Were Saved

  One of the first churches I visit outside of Los Angeles during my search for faith and God in America is in Portland. I will spend a few months in the Pacific Northwest during my travels, and make it a priority to attend this smaller, stripped down gathering as often as I can. But no matter how many times I go, there is one thing about this place I can’t seem to grasp. It’s not the lack of a projector, HD screens, electric guitars, and a pulpit which baffle me, and it takes a few weeks before I finally stop expecting someone to ask me to fill out a guest comment card or raise my hand if I’ve accepted Christ. It’s that as far as I can tell, no one ever tithes. No one even makes mention of an offering. When I introduce myself to the pastor, he invites me out for a cup of coffee. At the end of our conversation and lattes, I casually inquire about why he never asks for an offering. “Well, I used to,” he answers. “The buckets are still at the doors on the way out, but I don’t ask. People will give if their heart is right with Christ. Your personal relationship with Jesus makes you generous. Not any message I’m ever going to preach about generosity. I’d rather people not give at all instead of giving out of guilt.”

  While driving through the Midwest I encountered a woman unhappy with the way things were going at her church. She felt as if she was being used for nothing more than a resource. “I feel neglected,” she told me. “I’ve been serving here for almost seven years now, and people just joining the team are getting treated better than me. It’s like a private club I’ve been grandfathered into whether they like it or not.”

  I asked if she could bring this to the attention of her leaders. “It’s church!” I declared. “They are your friends. You should be able to express your concern.” She answered, “Well, I don’t want to cause dissension. I mean, I feel guilty. I’m just so grateful for the opportunity to be serving in God’s house. I mean I’m being a bit selfish for wanting more recognition for the work I put into this place. After all, I’m doing this for God.” I admired her heart, yet I couldn’t help but wonder if God’s yard was any less important? Or what about His street? His neighborhood? His city?

  This isn’t uncommon. My last church home made serving on Sunday such a coveted position they called themselves “The Dream Team.” And just to make sure it was clear who was and who wasn’t on the team, they wore bright colored shirts every service with exactly those words in big, bold letters across the front. Having a place on the platform is a glorified and coveted position of servitude to the Almighty: skinny jeans, great hair, and chiseled features preferred. Who wouldn’t want to be leading hundreds and thousands into prayer and worship with their Maker? I’ve never been up there, but I’m prone to wanting admiration. I can only imagine from up there, it’s easy to miss the mark.

  On the East Coast I spent some time at a church always “casting vision.” A select group of in
dividuals made up of the church staff along with an elite team of volunteers would gather on a specific night of the week or between services to hear the pastor speak about his vision for the church so everyone was on the same page. This afforded them the opportunity to get behind his vision for his church, which was also (obviously?) God’s vision for the church.

  “Do you believe God gives a different vision for every pastor?” I asked a man on the leadership team after one of these meetings had come to a close. He believed it depended upon the location of the church and whom they’re trying to reach. “A church in Africa or China is going to have a different vision and reach than a church in Nashville, Tennessee, obviously.”

  When it comes to pastors, it’s hard not to follow everything they say. They are leaders, after all. And God bless their called hearts. I pray every day for God not to give me that job. It took an entire year on the road to come to one very important realization: You are solely responsible for your relationship with God. I realized I could not deliver God in a perfect package that would fit wonderfully into someone else’s life. The way God reveals Himself to me might not be the way He chooses to reveal Himself to you.

  I did not want to be responsible for my relationship with God. What if I was wrong? What if I screwed it up? What if I’ve already missed the signs? I think the reason mega-churches swell, the reason we buy every book every pastor writes is because it’s so much easier to simply follow behind someone else, mimicking their lifestyle and trusting your relationship with God is good by their actions and how they live their lives. This is no one’s fault. We’re wired this way. I lived it for years. I put the opinions of others about God in place of God. I figured these leaders at my church in LA knew God better than I did because I was new to Christianity. I believed whatever they said about God must be true. It was a secondhand relationship. I got lazy. I only read whatever everyone else in the church was reading. I prayed when others said they were praying. I gave as others gave. I made no decisions for myself. I was simply an observer of everyone else’s relationship with God, and based my decisions as well as self-worth off what I saw happening in their lives.