I typically listen to audiobooks on my way to and from work. This morning was no different, but I finished a chapter each for both my current "Improvement Reading" and "Entertainment Reading" books with plenty of time left in my commute. So I put my extremely non-specific "I like this" playlist on shuffle. As I sang along with an enthusiasm that seldom sticks around if others are present, a song popped up that I haven't listened to in a while: Oh, Bravo by Children 18:3, a Christian rock band whose name is a reference to:

Matthew 18:3 (ESV)
...and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

The song's lyrics tell of a young child that is waiting their turn to perform in a talent show. As each other child finishes their performance, they are greeted by loud cheers of, "Bravo!" and told how fantastic and talented they are.

But when the singer finishes and leaves the stage, they do so "with bitter tears of shame," overcome by the dread that they are nothing but a failure. As I sang along with the song, I rediscovered how powerful it was to me the first time I heard it. As the words of that verse left my mouth, my eyes filled with tears.

There's a part of me—a much larger part than I'd care to admit—that is very much still the little boy who watched other kids playing with their fathers and thought, "Why don't I get that? What's wrong with me that I don't deserve that?" It's the same little boy that tried his best to prove to everyone that he had a right to exist but that never seemed to measure up to the self-inflicted, ever-rising standards of exactly what that meant.

In the song, the child turns a corner and runs into their father. Instead of multiple loud voices, his version of the chorus is sung with a single, gentle voice:

Oh, bravo! You're the best; you're my only one.
Oh, bravo! That will always be enough.
Look at me: your song was beautiful. Beautiful!
And even if nobody ever knows, bravo!

Growing up, the voice of disapproval in my head was always my earthly father's. Without meaning to allow it to, his voice also became God's. I've healed a lot, but I still have trouble trusting that God could ever be pleased with me and my efforts.

But parents rarely go to a children's talent show expecting greatness. They go because they want to see their children use their gifts. Regardless of any fumbling, flat notes, or missteps, they are proud. Just like those parents, God's approval isn't based on the quality of our performance but on who He is and who we are to Him. He sees us try. He sees us succeed or fail. And he says, "Bravo!"

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Photo by Matthias Wagner on Unsplash

I was running late to somewhere I didn't want to go in the first place. The men of the church were having a campout party. I had heard about it plenty of times in the weeks prior but had never planned to go. I was so early in my twenties that I might as well have still been a teenager; I certainly felt like one. The idea of hanging out with adult men—men who worked construction, men who knew how the world worked, men who were the fathers of kids that I taught in my Sunday school class, men on whom I projected my own father's rejection—terrified me. They would too easily discover how much I lacked.

Then one of them called and asked if I was coming. I lied: "Oh, yeah, I'm running late because I lost track of the time. I'll be there soon."

That's how I ended up with my passenger-side light on while trying to read my hastily scrawled MapQuest directions and infuriating any car that approached me from behind. I was relieved when I started seeing signs that said, "Men's Hoot," with helpful arrows. That relief lasted right up until I realized that those signs were leading me quicker to anxiety overload.

As I pulled in, some of the boys in my Sunday school class directed me up a hill to where everyone else had parked. The hill had also become the impromptu hang-out spot for the tweens and younger, as they could play "King of the Hill." In this case, that was less pushing and physical dominance, more taking turns rolling down the hill and running back up to get in line for another go.

If I had my way, I would have stayed up on the hill all night. The Bible teaches that we are brothers and sisters in Christ, and I've always felt that deep in my soul. I love spending time with my little brothers and sisters. I left the hill for two primary reasons:

1. I knew it would be weird for me to not even go down to where the adults were, seeing as I was ostensibly one of them.
2. I was these boys' teacher and, in my own insecurity, assumed that they would feel like I was there to babysit them and resent me for it.

So, I smirked, told the boys not to hurt themselves too bad, and made my way down to the campfire with a pit in my stomach. It didn't last long, though. After about ten minutes, one of the fathers said to me, "Would you go up the hill and make sure everything's going alright? My son would be annoyed with me for checking on him, but he won't care if it's you doing it."

A few minutes earlier, I had been worried about the kids mistaking my presence as parental interference. Now, I was being told that it didn't matter: even if I was there precisely for that reason, they wouldn't care. Because it was me.

I ended up ping-ponging between the hill and the fire all night. I would go up on the hill, watch as the boys eagerly showed me some new way they had figured out to throw themselves down, talk to them for a few minutes, and report back. I was never down at the fire long before a different father asked me to check on his son. Almost all repeated the same sentiment as the first.

It was during one of these clandestine investigations that we noticed red and blue lights growing brighter and brighter. It was especially noticeable because our only other source of light was the distant campfire. A cop car was driving off the road and up the hill towards us. The hair on the back of my neck raised as it dawned on me that I was the only "adult" available where we were. I turned to one of the boys and said, "Go get your dad."

As an illustration of why kids are great, let me explain exactly how he went to get his dad. He took off running towards the fire but stopped as the hill began to slope down. After hesitating for a moment, he threw himself down the hill. Reaching the bottom, he was running as soon as the last tumble planted his feet back on the ground.

Two officers got out of the car, a man and a woman. The boys' excited whispering died down as both approached me. Not wanting to be rude, I forced a smile and asked, "How can we help you?"

The female cop spoke first, with a bit of a smirk, "We got a call about a drunken redneck party with a lot of explosions somewhere out this way. We were looking for it when we started seeing signs for a 'Men's Hoot.' We thought it was best to check that first."

All that I could think to say was, "This is a church party."

The male cop said, "So...not the drunken redneck party?"

One of the boys pretended to be drunk and said, "We're just drinkin' sweet tea and water!"

I tried to shoot him a glance that said, "Not the time!" It probably got lost in the darkness, though.

I can't remember what else we said, but the officers didn't stay much longer. The boy I sent off came back without his father: they had seen the police car start to leave before he had even started towards the hill.

Tumbling down the hill was over. Now all the boys wanted to do was talk about how cool the cop car and service pistols were. I know next to nothing about cars and even less about guns. I stood by and heard little snippets of five different conversations happening around me at once.

"Hey, hey," I said with a loud whisper. I waved my arms for them to gather around. "You guys should watch what you're saying. They may not have believed me that this isn't the party they were looking for. For all we know, they drove a little bit down the rode and snuck back through the bushes. They could be right over there, right now saying, 'Hey, what did that kid say about me?'" I brought my hand up to my mouth as if I was holding a blowgun and made a fwoomp sound. It should have been thwip; I accidentally defaulted to mimicking the sound of a grenade launcher from a bad James Bond game I had played years earlier.

The boys didn't care, though. They laughed a lot more than I thought they would. They then spent a large chunk of the rest of the night lifting their fists up to their mouths and mimicking the incorrect blowgun noise. When I left the party, about five of the boys fired upon me at once. I, of course, pretended to be horribly wounded and told them I hoped I got home safe before the poison took me, which elicited more laughs. I left the party thinking that perhaps I wasn't as colossal of a screw up as I thought.

That Sunday, I set up for my class like any other Sunday. As the kids started to arrive, I shifted to greeting and talking to them. I went to close the door when it was time to start the class. As I reached for the door, this little ginger kid named Noah hopped into the doorway from the hall, his fist up to his mouth. fwoomp

Some of the other boys who had been at the campout decided to "fire," as well. I again pretended to be gravely injured by their darts, slumping against the wall. It was only a couple days after the party, so it made sense for it to still be fresh in their minds. I assumed that would be the last of the blowguns.

The next Sunday, Noah popped up out of nowhere again. fwoomp The next week? fwoomp Every week, the first thing he would do was shoot me with an imaginary blowgun. One Sunday, I wasn't at the front when he came in. He went to the other place I could be: the sound booth in the back of the room. But by pure chance, I wasn't there. And I saw him. I quietly approached him from behind and tapped his shoulder. When he turned, my fist was already up to my mouth. fwoomp

His eyes grew wide and his jaw fell slack. After a moment, he squinted his eyes and said, "So, that's how it's gonna be?" And the game was afoot.

Every week, as I went about setting up for class, greeting and talking to the kids along with whatever else I needed to do, I remained on the lookout for my fellow-ginger assailant. Would he get the drop on me, or would the day be mine? At first, he got me the majority of the time because I would typically be distracted by one responsibility or another. Over time, though, other kids in the class figured out what we were doing and decided to act as lookouts. I would be in the middle of something and suddenly hear, "Michael, Noah's coming!" That evened the odds a bit.

Each iteration of our little game lasted less than a second, but it was an opening, a jumping-off point for different conversations. We would talk a bit before the service, and Noah would almost always hang back after it ended to talk with me until one of his parents came to pull him away.

When FaceTime released for the iPod Touch and iPhone, I could count on Noah calling me (or texting me to call him) at least once a week, sometimes more. When one of us decided to fwoomp the other via video call, we started devising ways to try to bait the other to be visible first in order to get the drop on him. That turned into texting each other pictures of blowguns or other vaguely threatening images:

That's a decorative light bulb, by the way.

We also took clandestine screenshots capturing less-than-flattering moments and facial expressions.

Eventually, we started hanging out more and more in person. Most of the time, this meant we were either playing games at his house or entertaining ourselves at nearby stores.

It wasn't that difficult.

The Thompsons would invite me over for fireworks on Independence Day, dinner on Thanksgiving, or sometimes just because. They were becoming my second family, and I will forever be thankful for how they have always welcomed me. Because of that (and, really, because we're both gingers), it made sense to Noah and I that we would often get mistaken for brothers. At first, we would laugh about it and correct the person. That developed into shrugging and saying, "Yeah, basically." Eventually, we both owned it. We were brothers.

To be fair, we sometimes did look very much related.

Noah's father, Vince, was one of a few powerful examples of what a good, godly father looks like. When I got engaged, it made sense to ask him to be my best man. They were there for my wedding:

Here Vince is helping to vandalize my car, as is (apparently) tradition. I still find pink and red heart-shaped confetti in my car.

Noah and I have been there for each other through major milestones of our lives. Previous drafts included more stories from our years of friendship and how it developed. Including them still didn't feel like it was doing the story justice. If I've learned anything from trying to type all of it out, it's that you can't really make anyone understand a friendship—especially one that spans more than a decade—when they weren't there for it. You can only give them the rough shape of it.

As time has gone on, we've seen less and less of each other. It happens. But every time we do see each other, it feels like no time has passed since the last. We pick right back up from where we left off.

So when Noah tweeted about getting a tattoo last year, this conversation happened:

We discussed both the blowgun and ginger flower ideas, eliminating the ginger root from the running. We had made plenty of ginger comments and jokes about ourselves throughout the years, but the blowgun went all the way back to the beginning. There are other gingers; the two of us kept the fwoomp...thing going for twelve years. The design was based on a blowgun I brought back for Noah from Iquitos, Peru when he was 12. It's now a permanent mark on both of us.

The tattoo artist (and a few others in the shop) were curious about our odd choice of body art. We told them the story of the cops and what I thought at the time was going to be a throwaway joke. Of a boy that didn't let the joke die. Of a friendship that never will, either.

Noah, Vince, and I preparing to leave for DragonCon 2018.

The 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently passed. On that incredible day, Neil Armstrong said the famous line, "That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." (There's been some debate over whether he said, "a man" or just "man.") Even though the first human foot landing on the moon was celebrated, the actual step onto the surface was one of many on the journey to get to that moment. Without the countless "small steps" of the many people involved, there would have been no "giant leap for mankind."

Our lives are filled with little decisions and choices that can have far-reaching effects on our future, even if they aren't anything near as momentous or iconic as the moon landing.

I went to CodeStock back in April. One of the many talks I sat in on was by David Neal, also known as ReverentGeek. He's the one that created these avatars for me:

His talk was all about using art to communicate and how anyone can do it. I have long been one of those people that summarized my artistic talent by saying, "I can barely draw a stick figure!" Yet his talk inspired me: he said that artistic ability has much more to do with practicing it as a skill than being born with it as a talent. He also claimed that you don't even have to practice all that much to communicate the basic point you are trying to make.

His assertions directly contradicted my trite disclaimer. The truth is that I had wanted to be an artist when I was a young kid, but I was discouraged by my lack of "natural talent." Had I given up because it hadn't come easy? Was there something to what David Neal claimed? He had shared his own story of going from "no talent" to being someone that was sought after for the style of avatars that I twice had printed as stickers and have now dispersed throughout Knoxville. As someone who also relies on personal stories as examples, would I be a hypocrite if I didn't at least test what he said?

Since that day, I have been drawing daily. Some days, that's only for a few minutes. Others, I've spent hours working on a project. During that time, I also bought a budget drawing tablet for digital art, which required me to start watching and reading tutorials about how to use it effectively. One of the tutorials argued that a stick figure is the perfect place to start: like the foundation of a house or the skeleton of a living creature, the stick figure lays out the very basics of the figure's position.

After witnessing a demonstration of that principle, I decided to tackle something I had been putting off. I had an idea for a talk to be delivered at next year's CodeStock, and I wanted to create a specific slide that would grab the attention of attendees. Part of that slide required a cartoony figure that I felt too unskilled to even attempt.

Still, how hard could making his stick figure be? With that done, how hard would it be to add a couple joints and a very rough outline of his head? Doing a rough sketch of the general shape of his body shouldn't be too hard now that I had the joints, right? Doing the line art is almost trivial with the rough sketching out of the way, isn't it? I'm not doing anything fancy with color, so I can do that in a few minutes. Now that I have his body, the proportions of his suit won't be too difficult. Well, all that's really left is to add some shadows for a bit of depth and...

I had my little cartoon figure of a reptile wearing a business suit. It wasn't anything close to the best cartoon character ever, but it was mine. I had made it with my supposedly non-existent artistic ability. I had a StickerMule order for square stickers that was awaiting art. I knew exactly what I was going to use it for.

I like stickers.

When the stickers arrived, I was excited. I posted on Instagram, which led to a few people saying that they definitely wanted one. A few went to my coworkers; one of them told me that his kids loved their stickers, both of them finding the design hilarious when lacking context. I gave ten to a friend to disperse to his coworkers because they all liked to joke about conspiracy theories such as the lizard Illuminati. (You don't need to click that link; it's exactly what it sounds like.)

Neither the design nor the execution are perfect, but I've made progress from that first day I sat down and decided to put David Neal's assertions to the test. I have a lot to improve on, but my inane, little lizard-man, even with his faults, brought at least a little bit of positivity into the world. If that's possible with the skill I have at this point, what will I be able to do as I continue to grow and improve as an artist? What might I have been capable of if I hadn't given up as a kid?

I'll never know the answer to that second question because I didn't go down that path, and I have no way to double back. The first though? I'm looking forward to seeing that answer develop over time. Because it will take time. And effort. And practice. No matter how much I wish or hope, I will never wake up one day magically able to draw.

No matter what it is—trying to draw, agreeing to teach for the first time, leading a small group just this once—sometimes the smallest steps are the beginning of our journey down a path we never knew was available, never knew we needed, never knew we longed for.

Photo by 小胖 车 on Unsplash

When I was a teenager, I went through a phase in which I had taken it upon myself to debunk "Christian Mythology." I still find that term helpful when referring to common beliefs that don't have a biblical backing, but my usage of it at the time was wholly derogatory. My obsession at the time was whether or not angels have wings. I found arguments for and against it, but I ultimately came to the conclusion that angelic wings were definitely in the "Christian Myth" category. In my zealousness, I once went so far as to call a local Christian radio station and argue with the commentators that nowhere in the Bible are seraphim or cherubim referred to as angels, so using them as evidence was ignorantly misleading at best and a vile lie of the devil at worst.

At some point in this idiotic season, a missionary came to my church. Somewhere in his message, he mentioned a time he had a vision of angels with swords held aloft in each of the corners of his sanctuary, which he took as God's way of showing him that he would be protected in his troubles. This intrigued me: here was a man that claimed to have seen angels, so he would surely know whether or not they have wings. When the crowd waiting to speak to him dissipated (so I could have his undivided attention for this very serious, very important matter), I made my inquiry.

He smiled at me and said something along the lines of, "God doesn't give us glimpses of the divine so we can write books about unimportant things, gain fame, or make money. He showed me what he did to make a point, and succeeded in doing so." But this answer did not satiate my ravenous curiosity; I was sure that the angels he saw mustn't have had wings, so I pressed the issue. Eventually, he flatly told me that I would not be getting what I wanted from him, and that was the moment I decided that he had made the whole thing up.

Looking back, I don't remember anything of what he said outside of the little anecdote I just related. What I do remember is that I had been enthralled with him until the moment I decided he was a charlatan. Because of my own stubborn "search for truth," anything of value from his message is lost to me.

I eventually came to the conclusion that no amount of studying would give me a concrete answer, so it was best to let it drop. Unfortunately, my obsessive habit simply switched to a different subject: hell. I began to scour every concordance, dictionary, etc. for as much information as humanly possible. Thankfully, this did not continue for long, as a question arose within me: do the nature, structure, and utility of hell have any significance before death? Separation, annihilation, torment — all of the possible theories shared at least one trait: they were entirely undesirable. No amount of speculation was going to reveal any aspect of hell more clearly than that. For that matter, none of my speculation on any other subject had uncovered anything more satisfying. I had wasted much too much time grasping at smoke and not nearly enough attempting to put out the fire that was causing it.

I take little comfort in the knowledge that I'm far from the first to fall into this self-righteous trap. Religionists of Jesus's time attempted to disregard the good that he did, instead focusing on the law as they understood it. It wasn't right for him to heal people on the Sabbath! (Matthew 12:9-14, Mark 3:1-6, John 9:13-16) It wasn't right that he kept company with sinners! (Matthew 9:10-11, Luke 15:1-2) It wasn't right that he "blasphemed"! (Luke 5:17-26) No matter what good Jesus did or the lives that he changed, they rejected it.

Jesus, on the other hand, called them out on their hyprocrisy. One example is the Parable of the Good Samaritan, with the point being that a Samaritan, despised among Jesus's audience and having disparate beliefs about the worship of God, did good by a Jew instead of the priest and Levite, his own people. Jesus concluded the story with a command to go and do likewise. (Luke 10:25-37)

The Samaritans used Mount Gerizim as their place of worship instead of the temple in Jerusalem. For the Jews of the New Testament, this meant they worshiped the wrong way and at the wrong place. During the Maccabean wars, Jews actually destroyed their temple on Mount Gerizim. Some time close to the birth of Jesus, a group of Samaratins vandalized the temple in Jerusalem by scattering bones. Jesus saw the marginalization of the Samaratins, saw the hatred on both sides, was familiar with the divergence of beliefs. Even so, he told this parable, showing people who spoke correctly, quoted scripture correctly, and were seen as moral pillars of their communities yet were utterly failing to do the work of God.

Is correct theology important? Does anything of worth arise from speculation and supposition? Of course, but I've seen otherwise reasonable believers exclude each other from God's service because of arguments about when and whether the rapture was going to take place. By all means, debate disagreements, but we shouldn't be disparaging each other and making divisions over issues that are not eternally significant, that don't impact the clear commands that God has given us, or that no one will have conclusive answers for until after we're dead.

Until then, let's be more focused on helping the beaten, bloody man on the road.

The world was small when I was five. It consisted entirely of my family's house, our road (and its immediate surroundings), our church, and my school. I knew many other places existed, but they may as well have been on the moon for all of my ability to get there.

I also knew the rule: if I wanted to leave the house, even to go into our own yard, I needed to ask for permission. In reality, I was rarely denied unless there was good reason (e.g. too much exposure to the sun). The primary purpose was so my location was known. I never really chafed against this rule for two reasons: I was desperate for everyone to be happy with me, and I wasn't particularly adventurous.

It had to have come as a shock to my mother, then, when she checked my room one day and discovered that I wasn't there. I wasn't anywhere in the house or our yard. She checked with the sweet, old couple across the street and called my friend PJ's house. There was nowhere else I would go. She took off down the street, hoping that me being naughty was all that she needed to be concerned about.

There was a large, empty field near our house. It took up about half of the block next to ours. The other, farther half of the block was a softball field. I hated sports, so I don't know why five-year-old me decided to go there, nor do I remember my journey to or retrieval from the place.

My memory of this episode begins when my mother and I stepped from the street onto the sidewalk leading back to our house. We were walking beside each other, holding hands. No tears ran down her cheeks; no tremors rippled through her. If she still felt the after-shocks from the terror of her son being missing, she didn't show it. She spoke in a calm, even voice. "I'm going to let you choose. Do you want to be punished, or do you want mercy?"

I had never heard the word "mercy" before, so my mind did what it always did and continues to do: it found the closest word I did know.

Yes, I realize that "Smurf" and "mercy" don't sound alike, at all. Five-year-olds tend to have limited vocabularies.

I knew my mother couldn't possibly be asking me if I would prefer to be punished or given a tiny, shirtless, blue person, so I asked, "What's 'mercy'?"

"It's when you deserve to be punished, but you aren't."

Well, that didn't require any though, at all! "I want mercy."

"Okay." My mother stopped on the sidewalk in front of our house, turned me to face her, and stooped down to my eye level. "But I want you to understand: if you ever do anything like this again, you will be punished. You will not get mercy."

In hindsight, the option to escape punishment probably had more to do with her exhaustion from the situation than teaching me an aspect of the nature of God, but it so happened to align with both:

• I never went on another clandestine adventure.
• When a Sunday School teacher asked if anyone knew what "mercy" meant, I was able to answer. Not only that, I had a deeper and more experiential understanding of what it meant for God to show us mercy for our sins.

I've used this story in various lessons over the years. Many kids have had their understanding of mercy helped the same way I did. All because a mother was tired and just wanted to relax in the knowledge that her son was safe instead of punishing him.

God uses the little things, and our actions, big and small, echo across time in unexpected ways. (Especially when you raise a hyperactive, animated storyteller.)

Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash

One of my previous jobs was in the internal call center for a national organization. The upper management treated us like peons but gave us more power to cause problems than I've ever wielded before or since. We could remotely access pretty much anything connected to the Internet at any of this company's many locations around the US. That included security cameras, back office computers, and credit card systems. This is not a power that you want a disgruntled employee to wield.

Employees vented about their frustrations and would joke about what they could do if they were so inclined. No one ever took that seriously, though. Part of the reason was that every time anyone remotely accessed anything, the system kept a log. Someone could definitely do a lot of damage, but it would be easy to trace it back to the culprit. We all knew that it was much more likely for someone to storm out and never return than to face jail time and lawsuits.

Because of that tracking, it was drilled into us that our computers were to be locked at all times if we were not currently sitting there. Failure to comply was not a defense if something was done under our accounts. Not coming up with a good enough password was not a defense, either. The security of our accounts was our responsibility and ours alone.

Then came the company-wide email that IT was going to do a massive update on the entire system. They wanted us to write our passwords on sticky notes and leave them at our desks so they could log on as us and do them. I asked my supervisor why they couldn't log in with an admin account. He said to do what the email said and that I wasn't paid to question the IT department.

Even still, it went against common sense, much less everything we had been warned (read: threatened) about for that position. I'm pretty sure the employee handbook had almost this exact situation as an example of something that we shouldn't obey!

So, I emailed the manager of the entire call center, CC'ing my supervisor and shift manager. I laid out my concerns, primarily that anyone could get my password from the note, log in as me, and do a lot of damage. I didn't write it in the email, but I was prepared to get fired for disobeying the order. Soon after she got in that morning, the manager sent me an email. It was another confirmation that I was to write my password on a sticky note and leave it at my desk. She also stated that I would not be held responsible for anything done with my account from the time I left to when I was able to change my password.

I forwarded the email to my personal account and confirmed with my phone that it went through. My butt sufficiently covered, I complied.

My password was similar to: IliwmlsIswIl1l! It meant something to me but looked like a mess when I wrote it out. I actually left notes on which characters were upper-case Is, lower-case Ls, etc. to try to make it easier on them. I almost ran out of space on the sticky note.

I returned to my desk at the beginning of my next shift. A different sticky note was on my screen: "We couldn't figure out your password, so we had to reset it. This is your new temporary password: whatever-it-was."

Wait...of course they could just reset everyone's passwords! Why was I only now thinking of that? Instead of doing it the simple way, they introduced the opportunity for horrible security breaches.

But I wasn't paid to question IT. So, I minded my own business and changed my password to something that looked equally as complicated. To this day, I like having passwords that I could tell someone without them actually being able to use it.

Also, the IT department never had us put our passwords on sticky notes again while I was there. I like to think that they didn't realize they could reset our passwords until they couldn't figure mine out, even when given copious notes.

Photo by Daniel Fazio on Unsplash.

During my early days at the University of Tennessee, I considered majoring in English with an emphasis on creative writing. I was not planning to teach English, so that would have basically meant seriously overpaying for writing classes. Nonetheless, I found myself in a class called Writing Fiction. (Saying that someone found themselves somewhere or doing something was my professor's pet peeve.)

For one of the assignments, I wrote a fictionalized account of a day from my childhood. The day Nita Jean (my mother's mother) and Dwayne (her current husband) had visited our apartment in 1998. Nightmares caused by Dwayne's abuse haunted me, but I had not yet admitted to myself that anything untoward had happened. At the time of the assignment, almost a decade later, I had only recently begun to open up about what he had done to me. Writing about my experiences has always helped me to process my thoughts and feelings. It seemed natural to choose that rather charged day as the backdrop of a story.

When I received my rough draft back, it came with a note to see the professor after class. What he had to say made me quite angry, at least at first.

"It isn't believable that both the boy's father and grandfather sexually abused him."

I explained that, although this was indeed a class on writing fiction, many parts of this story were true. His complaint was about one such part. To be honest, I don't think I responded with much tact or grace. The professor explained that many things that happen in the course of someone's life seem unbelievable in the context of a piece of fiction.

He summarized his explanation by saying, "God gets away with a lot that an author cannot."

In the last few days, his explanation popped back into my head and has stuck with me. There are many strange connections and coincidences in my story; if my life was told in a series of books, the readership would have fallen off long ago. It would make terrible fiction because it would strain belief too much.

But it's real, and I've lived it. The book I'm currently in — My Life as a Medical Enigma — feels overly long, but I trust that the author and finisher of my story knows what he's doing. He hasn't let me down yet.

Photo by MJ S on Unsplash

My mind is good at making connections. That comes in handy when assembling a story or trying to hunt down the cause of a bug in software, but it becomes a major hurdle when confronted with something that carries a lot of emotional baggage. The month of May is hard on me for that reason. I have so many bad memories during this month that hearing its name is liable to summon one of them. The anniversaries of these days are even harder.

My method of coping has almost entirely consisted of trying to keep myself distracted until the month blessedly comes to an end. When that fails, I might need to lock myself in a bathroom for a few minutes to compose myself. Some years, that's happened multiple times a day a few days in a row. I never tried to set these days up as anything special. Why would I purposely commemorate what I have long considered to be some of the worst days of my life?

Sometimes, not intending for something doesn't cut it. In this case, certainly, it wasn't enough. I have long waited and believed for May to not automatically carry copious amounts of pain with it. Year after year, I've braced myself and powered through. Over the past few days, I've been thinking that this might be a case of needing to be more active in taking certain thoughts captive instead of trying to ignore them, shoo them away, or otherwise attempt to avoid facing them head-on.

2 Corinthians 10:5 (ESV)
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ...

When I was younger and first making a real effort to serve God, I treated this more like a magic spell than a way of life. When I got angry, depressed, or experienced any other form of negative thought, I would say, "I command this thought to leave me in Jesus's name." I didn't care much whether the thought came from my own sinful subconscious or Satan himself whispered them in my ear: if the Bible told me to take the thought captive, that's what I was going to do.

If you caught a burglar in your house, you wouldn't throw them out onto your porch and expect them to walk away after getting a glimpse of the objects to be plundered. No, the thief will be back, most likely with new and more effective methods to avoid being noticed.

Likewise, consciously noticing and choosing to ignore these thoughts and memories is not the same as taking them captive. Like the burglar, they need to be taken into custody and removed from the premises.

Romans 12:9 (ESV)
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.

I'm going to take my thoughts about these dates captive by facing them head-on. I don't need to deny my bad memories. In fact, I don't believe for a second that doing so would be healthy. I can hate the evil that has come from them, but I need to look for the good and hold on for dear life.

Why do this publicly? Because I've learned that my thoughts, experiences, and reactions aren't nearly as strange as I once believed. That realization is at once comforting and disturbing. Maybe seeing me go through this process will help someone. Even the chance of that is worth opening a window into some of my immaturity and insecurity.

May 9, 1988

My oldest memory. I was crawling from our living room to the front entryway of the house. My mother and sisters were huddled together on the couch by the front door. They were all crying. I didn't understand why they were upset, but I was sad because they were sad. I crawled to my mom's feet. She picked me up and held me on her lap. We all cried together.

It was the day after mother's day. It was exactly a week before my second birthday. It was the day Joe, my father, was arrested for being a child molester.

On this day, my mind is flooded with memories of being branded as the son of a felon, as a child that was tainted and unclean. I came from trash and I would always be trash. People knew all they needed to know about me because they knew who my father was and, more importantly, what he had done.

My mother had lived with various forms of abuse that Joe had visited upon her, but she would not put up with anyone abusing her children. The day he was arrested made many things public, but some things need to be. Otherwise, they are like wounds left to fester and rot beneath bandages that are barely able to contain the puss.

We could have lived under his abuse for years to come, perhaps my entire childhood and beyond. Instead, he was taken to jail and later pled guilty.

May 9 is not a day to remember shame. It is a day to remember that my family was rescued from abuse. We bore the wounds and scars — perhaps more visibly than we would have liked — but no more would be inflicted.

May 16

My birthday. Don't get me wrong: I've always loved excuses to get presents. At the same time, I understood from a young age that many people — teachers, other kids, myself — would have preferred if I had never been born. They would have never had to deal with the annoying kid that tried too hard, and still failed, to be likable. I would have never been shackled with what I believed was my destiny: to grow up to be like Joe.

So when my birthday came around, I dreaded it. Why were people that ignored or rejected me all of a sudden wishing me a happy birthday? What, exactly, made it happy? I felt like I had to justify my existence. Until I had done that, any fondness shown to me on my birthday was somewhere between politeness and cruel irony.

As much as I don't want to admit it, I think that desire to prove my worth is still there, only buried much deeper. With it is the insecurity that a cheer of "Happy birthday!" might not be genuine, that I still don't — and may never — deserve the birth that is being celebrated.

To be blunt, what I "deserve" isn't a factor. I was born. I have lived. I have made mistakes. Many mistakes. But at the same time, I know that my paltry attempts to be obedient to God have been used to do his will in a number of situations.

God knew what he was doing when he created me, even if others — including me — have doubted that in the past. Why should I trust, "thank you for being there for my child," but doubt, "happy birthday," from the same person? What if I never hear specifics, only birthday wishes from someone that is genuinely happy that I was born and wishes me well? And what does it matter if it's "just" someone being polite? There are things much worse than simple politeness.

Partly just to type it and partly for when I read this in the future:

It was good for me to be born. Others know it. God knows it. I know it. I need to start believing it.

May 17, 2010

Joe died in December 2009. I found out the day after my 24th birthday. I've previously written about my ambivalence: initially feeling relieved, then guilty for feeling relieved, then confused about how to grieve him, etc. The anniversary of that day doesn't sting because it's a reminder of his death but because it reminds me of all the time he was absent when alive. His death was the period at the end of the statement, "My biological father was never there for me." It ended the story, at least on this side of eternity. But his death has also allowed me to move on without anxiously glancing over my shoulder, waiting for the day he shows up to hurt those I love.

Beyond my own peace of mind, it's possible that the day was joyous for him. Joe died of throat cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes and shoulder. I don't know what suffering he experienced at the end. If he finally did what he claimed so many times to have done — turn to God for forgiveness — his bodily death would have meant freedom from his suffering.

May 17, 2010 was also my 7th "Name Day," the day I celebrate the beginning of the surprisingly easy process to legally change my name from Joseph Edwin Wilkinson III to Michael Caleb Liam Garrett. The day I learned of my biological father's death fell on the same day I celebrate abandoning the identity he had given me and taking on a name I believe was placed in my heart by my heavenly father.

While my earthly father abused me, abandoned me, and branded me with a cursed name, my heavenly father healed me, adopted me, and gave me a new name and identity in him.

May probably isn't going to be my favorite month any time soon. Even still, facing these thoughts and emotions head on instead of trying to ignore them is a good and necessary step in the healing process. Many of the emotions tied up in these memories were nothing more than ghosts: the conscious thoughts and thought processes that led to them had long been put to rest.

I let these memories steal from me for so long because I was afraid of turning the lights on and facing them. Now that I've gotten a good look, saw them for what they are, I'll be ready for them if they return.

Related Material:

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• What's in a Name? - biblical name changes and identity

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

When we were younger, my sisters and I went to a summer camp in Vero Beach a couple years in a row. Kids under 8 could only participate in the day camp, so I was looking forward to going to the "big kid" overnight camp the year I was old enough. There were a couple problems with that I had not foreseen:

1. I had very rarely spent a single night away from home, much less a whole week.
2. For the particular week we were going, I was the only 8-year-old boy signed up for the overnight camp.

I was still put in the youngest boys' cabin...

...which was filled with 10- and 11-year-old boys...

...who were annoyed to find out that they were stuck in a cabin with a kid the same age as their younger siblings. The nice ones avoided me whenever possible. The others decided that it would be fun and exciting to torment me with insults about how I looked — my freckles and red hair, mainly — or by telling me stories about the kids that had gone missing in those woods and had probably been taken by escaped convicts.

The main counselor wasn't particularly thrilled to be stuck with a single boy years younger than the age group he had been assigned. His favorite answer to any of my complaints was that I needed to stop being a baby. The other boys were more than happy to parrot that at me, especially after he expressly encouraged it.

By the time chapel began each night, I was dead tired. It didn't help that it started right before my normal bed time. This led to me bobble-heading in the service — trying, and failing, to stay awake, only to jerk my head back up when it fell forward towards my lap. The counselor's solution to this problem was to flick the back of my neck or ears really hard. As the week progressed, the flicking turned more into smacks on the back of my head.

I was surrounded by other kids and at least one adult that were making it clear to me that I wasn't wanted. I decided the very first night that it would be in everyone's best interest for me to go home. In the cabin, I knocked on the wall beside the curtain that separated the counselors' bunk area from the rest of the cabin.

The main counselor slung the curtain open and, seeing it was me, sighed with obvious annoyance. "What?"

I had been holding myself back from crying pretty well until he startled me. I said, "I want to go home," much more shakily than I would have liked. To the relief of us both, the co-counselor volunteered to walk me to the camp office to call my mother.

I understood, to an extent, the sacrifices my mom had made to put herself through nursing school as a single mother. I knew how hard she worked to provide a good life for my sisters and me. I had seen how protective she became when someone threatened her kids — including her "I'm the momma bear, and you don't want to mess with my cubs" speech. There was no doubt in my mind that I would be going home as soon as I asked to. I wouldn't have to explain how I felt left out and like no one wanted me, how I was scared, or any other unboyly admission.

So, imagine my surprise when I heard my mom's voice on the other end of the line telling me that I couldn't go home that night or even the next morning. No, I had to stay until the end of the week as we originally planned. My sisters and I knew a specific code when it came to requesting things from my mom. We would typically get one of three answers:

1. Yes — if not immediately, eventually. If we continued to pester her about when, the answer became, "no."
2. Maybe — which really could go either way. If we asked again, the answer became, "no."
3. No — which was final. If we continued to ask, it might very well become, "no, and never again."

Regardless of this well-established system, I asked again. My mother refusing to come rescue me, to come protect me went against everything I knew about who she was. If that was different this time, maybe her rules about pestering were, as well. I ended up calling her every single night of camp, pleading to be allowed to come home. Every night she calmly explained that she knew it wasn't easy for me, but I had to stay for the rest of camp.

On Wednesday, I got something in the camp mail. I opened the small envelope they handed me and pulled out a yellow piece of paper. It was a letter from my mom.

Why was the letter addressed to "Joey"? I legally changed my name when I turned 18.

I was happy to get the letter, but it also confused me. If she really missed me and wanted to see me, she was the one that could fix that. It was her telling me that I had to stay. Why didn't she come get me instead of leaving me in this place that I hated surrounded by people who hated me?

At the end of the week, we were reunited, as my mother promised. When we got home, I jumped face-down onto my bed and woke up the next morning. I hadn't been particularly tired: I had intended it as an exaggerated expression of my relief to be back in my own room. After a week of feeling uneasy and, at times, outright scared, I was safe. I could relax. I guess my body went along with the gesture, putting me out immediately.

Over the years, that little, folded bit of yellow paper stayed safe and near me. Whenever I looked at it, I would mostly remember my mom's love and protection. A part of me, though, still wanted to know why that week was different. I got my answer when I was a teenager.

My mother had to have a major surgery but didn't want her children to worry. She scheduled it, and the recovery time it would require, on a week she could send us away to camp. Every night, I stood in the camp office, trying not to look at the director or my co-counselor as my begging was denied and tears welled up in my eyes. What I didn't see was my mother on the other end, tired and recovering, wishing she could bring her little boy home.

She meant every word of that letter, even though her actions didn't seem to line up. I felt like I had been abandoned, left to fend for myself, but I was only seeing my side of the situation when there was more to the story than I imagined. Instead of trusting my mother based on past experience, I allowed myself to doubt who I knew her to be.

The Israelites were worried. The Egyptians had been spotted in the distance. Pharaoh had rallied his army to chase after his former slaves. Even worse, the Israelites were on foot while the Egyptians had horses and chariots. There was no earthly way for the Israelites to escape their fate: the Red Sea lay before them as death approached from behind. With a likely mix of fear, frustration, and anger, some of the Israelites lashed out at Moses.

Exodus 14:11-12 (ESV)
They said to Moses, "Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: 'Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness."

All the Israelites had seen, or at least heard of, the plagues God had sent against Egypt. Ten miraculous signs had been given to Pharaoh to let him know that Moses wasn't playing around when he said that the God of Israel was commanding to let his people go. In spite of these supernatural affronts to the power of Pharaoh's gods and sovereignty, the Israelites worried that God would not continue to stand by them.

Exodus 14:13-14 (ESV)
And Moses said to the people, "Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent."

Moses had a more intimate relationship with God. He had a deeper understanding of and trust in his creator. God had not yet told him the plan, had not yet commanded him to lift up his staff to part the Red Sea. But Moses understood that the God that frees his people from captivity does not abandon them to die in the wilderness.

I sat in my chair at work, wondering why my stomach was so upset. I hadn't eaten anything that morning, so I thought that it might be that I was hungrier than usual. I took my lunch break to see if that would help. The pain only got worse. It started to feel like I had been stabbed, my phantom assailant leaving the knife sticking out of me. After about a minute, that intense, sharp pain faded, only to return somewhere else a few minutes later. I came to call these episodes "spikes." Inbetween, I was left with the dull soreness I had been experiencing all morning.

That was August 19, 2017. Over the last eight months, I have seen multiple doctors, taken countless pills of various shapes and colors, gone through tests that have been humiliating, painful, and sometimes both. Meanwhile, I was dealing with varying levels of constant pain, bouts of extreme fatigue, and seemingly random nausea.

At the beginning, the doctors thought the problem might be with my gallbladder. After multiple tests determined there wasn't anything wrong there, the doctors treated me differently.

Is he a pill-seeker? Is this a psych case? Is he making everything up for attention or to get out of work?

The doctors didn't accuse me directly, but I could hear it in the tone that they took. I wasn't believed. And, because of the history of mental illness on both sides of my family, I began to worry that it was all in my head, that my brain was misfiring and perceiving pain where there wasn't any.

When a CT scan showed that there was something very wrong with my liver, that I might have liver cancer, I was relieved. It feels strange to even type that, but it's true. I finally had evidence for myself, and the doctors that doubted me, that the problem wasn't all in my head. Then I remembered that I might have cancer. Thankfully, cancer has been eliminated as a possibility, as well as a bunch of other diseases I've been specifically tested for. Unfortunately, we don't have any promising leads on what it could be.

At times in this ordeal, I have given in to despair. I have begged God to end my suffering or at least show me what he plans to do with it. I have cried. I have screamed. I have raged.

It's been eight months. Not only am I not out of the woods, but I don't yet see a break in the tree line. I also didn't see what my mom was going through while I was at camp. The Israelites didn't see that God already had a plan to deliver them. Human sight is limited. Regardless of what I can or can't see, I know that my God is good.

I don't know the cause of my current troubles, and I may never. I don't yet see how he will work these circumstances for my ultimate good and his glory, but his word says he will. He's proved himself to me, through the good and the bad.

The father that stayed my hand when I planned to take my own life as a teenager, that already healed my body once, that renewed the mind of a hateful, hurtful child of wrath so he could be a loving, kind child of God is still with me to this day. He didn't free and restore me time and time again just to leave me to die alone in the wilderness.

That's not who he is.

Exodus 14:14 (ESV)
The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.

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In my late teens, I worked as a phone rep in the call center for a Christian television company. The Israelites had ten commandments, but we had two:

1. Thou shalt not shake the snack machine.
2. Thou shalt not grant a refund (or even imply that one might be possible) to a customer.

The first was due to to the snack machine being old and mostly broken down. It was not a matter of if it would steal your money but a matter of when. When that fateful day came, you were to report it. Your sustenance may be delayed until reimbursement, but make no mistake: you would be fired if you shook the vending machine. It perpetually had a post-it note taped with many layers of scotch tape to the front of it warning of your termination upon so much as tilting the machine. In fact, that seemed to be the only sure-fire way of getting fired.

The second was more nuanced. While it appears to be an utterly insane policy that refunds would never be given out, it makes a bit more sense in context. You see, this company provided programming from a satellite. Unfortunately, they did not have nearly enough money to launch their own satellite. What they did have was exclusive rights to a particular satellite position. They used that to leverage a deal with a very well-known satellite company with a name that is a bit too on the nose.

Satellite Company got to use the position in the sky for their own programming, while the company I worked for got to use a select spectrum of the satellite for their own programming. The catch was that we had to send a request through Satellite Company whenever we needed to activate a new customer's programming. That initial signal cost roughly the same as a three month subscription to our thirty-some-odd channels.

Because the company wasn't affiliated with any particular Christian denomination, the higher ups had no issue with providing a channel that was specifically Catholic, another specifically Baptist, etc. There were only a few, but those were enough.

This scenario played out way too often:

A customer would pay for a month of programming. While flipping through the channels, they would end up seeing something they disagreed with. Maybe they thought the Catholic church was the whore of Babylon and the Pope was the antichrist. Maybe they saw a woman preaching. Maybe they couldn't believe a so-called Christian music network would feature bands with drums and/or screaming. Regardless of the cause of their outrage, they would call up to cancel their subscription. Often, they would demand a refund.

The company was hemorrhaging money.

The chosen solution was to charge for three months in advance, all of which was non-refundable for any reason except if the customer was physically unable to get service due to something obstructing the signal from the satellite. On top of that, prepaying for a year was always incentivized. Pay for the year, you got a lower per-month rate and something extra thrown in. I was there when The Passion of the Christ was released, so we threw in a copy of that on DVD.

One night, a woman called in speaking with a pretty thick accent. Before I could get any information from her, she said that a woman named Barbara was talking to her the last time she called in, and Barbara told her to call back that night for her refund. Now, there was indeed a Barbara that worked in the call center. In fact, she was a supervisor and was more than capable of issuing a refund if she decided that the situation called for one. I knew something wasn't right about this situation immediately.

"I'll need a little information to pull up your account."

I didn't mention that we were required to leave notes on the account for every single call from a customer. When I was able to open her account, I immediately went to the notes. Sure enough, the last note was left by Barbara earlier that day.

The entirety of the note was:

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS THIS WOMAN TO GET A REFUND!

I cringed. I hated being the bearer of bad news, especially to someone that had made such an impression on the usually calm Barbara to cause her to leave a note in all caps.

"Well, I do see that you spoke with Barbara earlier regarding a refund. Unfortunately, the note left on your account says that we are not able to provide one."

There was a dread moment of silence on the line. I had no idea what was coming next, but I knew that it wouldn't be pleasant.

"You teef! You Satan!" After those two short sentences, the rest of what she was saying was unintelligible yelling, occasionally punctuated by a very clear curse word.

As a rule, we were not supposed to hang up on customers. However, the higher-ups also didn't want their employees to suffer abuse. If a customer was yelling, cursing, or otherwise being uncivil, we were allowed to give a warning that we would disconnect the call if the behavior continued.

I tried to wait for a break in the yelling, but this woman must've been a master of circular breathing because one never came.

I took a deep breath and loudly, calmly said, "Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to stop being abusive, or I will have to end this call."

Either she didn't hear me or she didn't care: the screaming continued. Confident that I had tried my best, I hung up and left a note on her account.

When I came into work the next evening, there was a post-it note on my monitor.

Sorry. -Barbara

I looked up the woman's account and saw that she had called in multiple times throughout the day, still trying to claim that Barbara told her she could have a refund and that the man she spoke to last night was very rude to her.

I never found out what caused her to want a refund in the first place. I believe Barbara told me something like that the customer had started off their conversation by saying that we were in league with the devil and that she was looking forward to Barbara's children rotting in hell.

From what some of my coworkers told me about their horror stories, this was relatively tame.

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In the late 1980s, my mother was putting herself through nursing school while raising three young kids by herself. Every dollar that came in had a job, and there wasn't much room for reassignment. One day, my middle sister, Kylei, told my mom that her shoelaces broke. Shoelaces are inexpensive, but to my mom this meant going through the thinly stretched budget to find where she could tug a little without it snapping.

She didn't want to burden her young daughter with the knowledge that our family's lack of financial leeway meant that the smallest bump might as well be an earthquake. She did need to prepare Kylei for the possibility of going without shoelaces for a little while, though. "Well, money is tight right now, but God can always provide for us." My mother led Kylei in a simple, short prayer asking that God would make a way for her to get new shoelaces.

There was a local barbecue place that had $2 kids' meals on Tuesday nights. Every week, we would head over and get three of them. My mother would eat whatever was left of mine. I was a toddler, so I was generally more interested in playing with whatever prize came with the meal than actually eating. That next Tuesday, after my mother and sister said the prayer, the prize for each meal was a pair of shoelaces. Kylei's came with two.

My mom was excited: they had prayed for God to provide a single pair of shoelaces and, almost immediately, he had provided four. She wanted to tell everyone about what he had done for us. Imagine her shock when people in our church told her that God didn't care about shoelaces. It was just a coincidence. She should get over it and stop being foolish.

But it didn't matter what other people said. My mom used this story as a lesson for her children in the coming years. No matter what our financial situation was, we were never allowed to say or imply that we were poor. How could we be poor when the creater of the universe was watching out for us? Nothing was too big or too small for him.

Even shoelaces.

I was sitting on the floor of my living room. I didn't know how long I had been sitting there. It had taken so much effort for me to get out of the car, open the front door, and get upstairs that I welcomed the ease of sitting motionless on the floor. Every step of every movement took distinct, conscious effort. My phone lay open on the floor next to me. The call with my mother had only ended because she had hung up to call my middle sister.

Kylei was still on the phone with my mother when she found me. I could hear a shakiness enter her voice when saw me sitting there. "Mom, he looks like the patients I worked with." She stooped down in front of me. "Michael, when did this start?"

"After," I said with much difficulty. With an equal measure, I finished the thought, "work."

She helped me up off the floor then down the stairs to her car. The world outside was a blur the entire way to the hospital: by the time my eyes began to focus on something, it was already a long way behind us.

Kylei checked me in at the ER. The nurses took my vitals and put me in a wheelchair. As they wheeled me back for some tests, one nurse said to the other, "He's only 19." It was a fairly unnerving thing to hear one health care professional loud-whisper to another. I tried to tell her that my ears still worked, but the words wouldn't form correctly. They drew blood, took scans of my brain, and a number of other procedures that I can't fully recall.

Eventually, Kylei was allowed back to sit next to my hospital bed. She told me that a lot of people from the church were praying for me. We passed the time waiting for results by watching bad TV because YouTube and Netflix weren't really a thing at that point.

Eventually, I figured out that Kylei was barely containing her anger. Hours had passed with only the occasional nurse poking her head in to say that the doctor should be there in just a few minutes. They couldn't or wouldn't give any information about what may be going on, what might have gone wrong with my brain or its connections to the rest of my body.

At about three in the morning, I was able to say a full, but short, sentence without pausing. For the next couple of hours, Kylei kept me talking while I tried to move my arms and legs without thinking literal, exact commands at them. It was morning by the time the doctor graced us with his presence, and I was whole. When he realized that I was fine, the grave look on his face fell away. He set aside his clipboard, had me say a few things and walk around a little, then discharged me.

In the car, Kylei was still angry. "That jerk was trying to say it was all in your head. I saw you. They all saw you." For Kylei, it was either real or I was the best actor any of them had ever seen.

"He couldn't exactly say that it was a miracle," I said, trying to lighten the mood.

My sister and those nurses knew what they saw. I knew what I had experienced. The doctor didn't know what to make of it. At nineteen, I had something resembling a stroke and walked away from the hospital without any long term effects.

John 9 tells of a man who was blind from birth. Even the disciples were looking for some way to blame the man or his parents. But Jesus looked at him with compassion. Jesus healed the man, allowing him to see for the first time in his life.

People were incredulous: some knew it was definitely the same man but couldn't reconcile that with his ability to see. Others saw his sight as evidence that the man was only a lookalike. The formerly blind man told anyone who would listen that he was the same man. When asked how he could see, he gave the barebones of the facts as he knew them.

John 9:11 (ESV)
He answered, "The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' So I went and washed and received my sight."

When asked by the religious leaders, he still kept it quite simple.

John 9:15 (ESV)
So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, "He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and I see."

This man who had been miraculously healed did not give an opinion of what happened until asked by the very religious leaders who were arguing in front of him.

John 9:17 (ESV)
So they said again to the blind man, "What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes?" He said, "He is a prophet."

The religious leaders did not like his answer, so they sought to discredit his testimony. They brought in the man's parents as witnesses, demanding to know if he had actually been born blind and, if so, how he had really come to be able to see. For his parents' part, they would only testify to what they had firsthand knowledge of: that their son had, in fact, been born blind. For the rest, the man's parents told them to ask their son.

John 9:24-25 (ESV)
So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, "Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner." He answered, "Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see."

A court room is supposed to be a place of order. The judge is tasked with keeping that order and making sure that the case proceeds according to the laws of that jurisdiction. In certain types of cases, a jury is responsible for rendering the verdict. The lawyers try to convince the jury that their side has presented more valid and believable evidence. In a criminal trial, the prosecuting attorney must prove the case against the defendant "beyond a reasonable doubt," while the defense attorney tries to prove that there are reasonable reasons to doubt the guilt of the defendant.

The lawyers don't just shout their opinions. They must present evidence. Some of this evidence comes in the form of physical objects, artifacts from the events in question. A murder weapon with the defendant's hair follicles, fingerprints, blood, and saliva on it would serve as a testament both to the defendant's guilt and his stupidity. Most cases are not so open-and-shut. I'd venture to say that it's rare for the physical evidence to be so strong that the prosecutor feels comfortable just playing show-and-tell.

Lawyers can also call witnesses to the stand, living testaments of the defendant's innocence or guilt. Eyewitnesses testify about what they saw, heard, felt during the events in question. Character witnesses testify about the morals they have seen the defendant display in the past. Expert witnesses testify about what they know about the case based on applying the knowledge and wisdom gained from being in their field.

Every kind of witness testifies about their experience out of their own understanding.

Acts 22:15 (ESV)
"...for you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard."

1 John 5:10-11 (ESV)
Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

Words like "witness" and "testimony" get thrown around so much in Christian circles that it is easy to lose sight of their original meanings. The man in John 9 learned quickly that they are sometimes used both ways at once: not only was his healing experience used as a testimony to others in public but he was also called to give his testimony in a sort of religious court.

Unfortunately, his examiners were not out to find the truth. They were interested in ways to discredit Jesus and annoyed by any arguments in his favor. If someone was giving evidence for Jesus, it had to mean that they were already his follower.

John 9:28-29 (ESV)
And they reviled him, saying, "You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from."

John 9:30-33 (ESV)
The man answered, "Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."

John 9:34 (ESV)
They answered him, "You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?" And they cast him out.

For this man, his reasoning was self-evident:

1. If God doesn't listen to sinners...
2. If no one has ever healed someone blind from birth...
3. If Jesus was able to open eyes blind from birth...
4. Then Jesus is not only not a sinner, but he's even greater than those who came before.

It's telling that those leaders did not outright disagree with the statements leading up to his conclusion. They had tried to discredit this man's testimony because they knew that it was damning to the case they were trying to build. When they couldn't discredit him, they decided to instead disregard him.

My question is this: was the formerly blind man's testimony a failure? Did he fulfill his role as a witness?

People in the church told my mother that God didn't care about shoelaces. That it wasn't providence, but coincidence, that had solved our dilemma. But my mother knew what she had experienced. The words and opinions of others could never take that away unless she bought into them. Instead of denying her experience, she continued to use it to teach her children and to encourage others when they were facing hard times.

She was once in need of shoelaces; now her need was met.

I had symptoms that led multiple health care professionals to believe that I had experienced a stroke. The doctor was condenscending and rude when my symptoms cleared up. I never saw what those tests and scans that he set aside said. But I knew what it felt like to be trapped inside my head, unable to properly move and speak as I had just hours earlier. I knew the fear from my own anxiety-driven visions of what my future had in store, what doors were no longer open to me, what the full scope of my limitations would be. I knew that others were praying. I knew that my symptoms left after medical investigation, but not remedy.

I was once locked inside my own head; now I was free.

That formerly blind beggar had never seen the faces of the people who gave to him. He had never seen the money for which he was begging. He had never seen the meager food it was able to buy. When Jesus healed him, an entirely unknown sense, a completely new way to experience the world was made available to him. The religious leaders of the time wanted answers, but he only really had one.

I was once blind; now I see.

In his understanding, that meant that this Jesus had to be from God. The religious leaders disagreed and tried to come up with explanations for why that wasn't true. They couldn't discount the facts of his testimony, they couldn't take his incredible experience from him. So they tried to reframe it.

That's what happens with witness testimony. It helps one side's argument and hurts the other. The lawyers take it and use it as yet another piece of evidence. Sometimes, it's handled in a way that the witness feels is unfair. Maybe the prosecutor twists it to disparage the witness's son who is on trial. Maybe the defense attorney argues that you lied for attention or your own gain.

No matter the testimony, no matter the audience, there will always be ways to reframe what you said. That's why it's so important to remember our calling. We are not called to be the jury or the judge. We are not called to be the prosecutor or defense attorney. We are called to be witnesses. Our duty is not to convict hearts but to give testimony of what we have experienced in our walk with God, how Jesus being our Lord has changed our lives, how the Holy Spirit is leading us as we walk in him.

The healed man was thrown out after giving his testimony. Even so, the reaction of his audience is not the scale by which his success or failure as a witness is measured. He was obedient. He spoke the truth he had experienced.

John 9:25 (ESV)
He answered, "Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see."

You know your experience. You know your testimony. You don't have all the answers, but you know what you once were and what you are now.

I was once angry; now I'm at peace.

I was once filled with hate; now I'm filled with love.

I was once an orphan; now I have been adopted as a child of the most high God.

I was once that, now I am this.

That is what God desires. That is what God asks. That is what is pleasing to our Father. We must trust him with the rest of the courtroom.

There were a few complications with my birth that caused me to have what was later diagnosed as mild cerebral palsy. To a casual observer, I would just look like clumsy kid that moved awkwardly. I was also born with polymorphous light eruptions, an allergy to the sun, in Florida, the Sunshine State. I've said it many times before, and I'll say it many times more: that's all the evidence I need that God has a sense of humor.

Between these two conditions, I was simply not cut out for physical activity. When I was younger, I wanted to fit in with the other kids who played sports. Unfortunately, no amount of practice was going to help me be anywhere near their skill level. Certainly not the amount I could fit in before my allergy became a concern.

When I was five, my father petitioned the court for a visitation. We went to a park; he wanted to play catch. The major problem we quickly ran into was that I could not catch the ball. After chasing it down, I tried to throw it back to him, but it plopped down a couple feet in front of me. This same routine played out for a few minutes before I told him, "I'm sorry. I'm just really not good at this stuff."

He cursed at me in a whisper so that the worker supervising the visitation wouldn't hear. My father saw my imperfections, or at least their effects, and he rejected me for them. He never sought another visitation.

When I was seventeen, a friend of mine was going to take a trip to a ministry out of state. He had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes when he was nine years old. To him, this ministry promised freedom and healing. To me, it sounded like a source of incredible disappointment. I didn't believe in healing, even after people very close to me had claimed that God healed an assortment of their ailments. My friend was going to head off to this ministry full of hope and return with nothing but despair. I did the only thing I could think to do: I said I wanted to be healed, also. When nothing happened, I would be there for moral support. So my friend, his mother, his aunt and I all drove up to Georgia.

The first night we were there, the ministry played a recording of the pastor giving an interview to a Christian TV show. The sanctuary only had one projector screen, but it was enormous. No matter where you were, it looked like that pastor was staring right at you. What surprised me was that the pastor was not talking about healing, what his ministry was primarily known for. Instead, he was talking about the Father's love.

I knew halfway through the recording that I was in trouble: there was a heaviness in my chest and stomach, a lump in my throat, tears in my eyes. I grew up in churches being told about how God was my Father, even if my earthly father was an abusive felon. I believed it in my head, but I was sick of hearing it, especially when people would pray that God would lift up "spiritual fathers" around me without even seeming to consider that maybe they were supposed to be one of them.

At the end of the interview, that pastor pointed right at the camera, making it look like he was pointing directly at me, and asked, "Do you remember your father ever saying, 'I love you?'"

That's when I lost it. The floodgates were opened. I wept openly and loudly for the next three hours, although it felt like no more than a few minutes. My answer was, "No." That didn't exactly surprise anyone. What surprised me was when I felt a question pressing insistently on my mind, "Do you want to be healed?"

The beginning of John 5 tells of Jesus' visit to the pool of Bethesda, meaning "house of mercy." The blind, lame, and paralyzed gathered there, hoping for healing. A belief formed that an angel would stir the waters, and the first one in the pool when that happened would be restored. While there, Jesus encountered a man that had been unable to walk for thirty-eight years.

John 5:6-7 (ESV)
When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?”
The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”

For a long time, I didn't understand why Jesus would ask such an absurd question. Why wouldn't the man want to be healed? Why would he be in a place of healing if he wanted to remain the same? It's telling that the man did not give a yes or no answer: instead, he explained his understanding of why he was not healed. In response, Jesus showed that he didn't need a magic pool to heal anyone.

John 5:8-9 (ESV)
Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.

Imagine that you haven't been able to walk for thirty-eight years. You've been seeking God and praying for your healing. Then, while at a place of healing, some random guy walks up and asks you if you actually want to be healed. How frustrated would you be? You explain that you've been doing everything you know to do. He tells you to get up and walk away. How offended would you be?

For thirty-eight years, this man had been an invalid. For thirty-eight years, he was considered less than. Everything in his experience, mind, and heart must have been screaming, "I would if I could!" Jesus was calling him to look beyond his experience, beyond what he knew about himself and his abilities. The man accepted that call.

At seventeen, I received the same question as that man: "Do you want to be healed?" The answer seemed so obvious, but I didn't give it. Instead, I thought of what healing would mean giving up. "I can't help with that, sorry. I'd be out in the sun too long." "Trust me, you don't want me to help move anything. I'm clumsy and weak; I'll just get in the way." I was comfortable in my physically useless nature. It was a part of who I was, an interwoven part of my experience and identity. I was comfortable with the easy excuses it gave me. I wasn't prepared to give any of that up, so my answer was, "No." I didn't really want to be healed.

Malachi 3:3
He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD.

Gold and silver don't come out of the ground in bars. They come out in chunks of ore, mixed together with other minerals. In order to get at the precious metals, you have to smelt the ore. You heat it up to intense temperatures that melt its components. Gold and silver are heavier metals, so they sink to the bottom of the crucible. That leaves the slag, the sludge of everything else, up at the top to be skimmed out.

Until you smelt the ore, it will often look like it is just a rock. You may be able to see that there's something valuable inside of it, but what good is that when there's all this other junk mixed together?

"Do you want to be healed?" Answering, "No," was saying that I wanted to remain that ore. I knew that being healed meant I would be able to do more for God, but in many ways, that's what I was afraid of. I had spent so much time cursing God for not protecting me from my ailments, but there I was holding on to what they had to offer. That's not the person I wanted to be. So, I gave my answer: "Yes."

I was healed that night. My brain was restored, although there's still some awkwardness to this day because of muscle memory. My skin no longer breaks out in tiny, chicken-pox-looking open sores when I'm in the sun.

(My friend was not healed, by the way. Thirteen years later, I still don't know why. All that I know is that God is good.)

From a young age, I was told that I needed to be strong for my family. I was the man of the house. I wasn't allowed to openly grieve being abandoned by my father, much less anything else. At a certain point, I had decided that if people wouldn't give me their pity, I would take it from them. Being healed removed my most effective tools for manipulation.

If you take the needles away from a heroine addict, they aren't going to suddenly lose the desire for the drug. I had said, "Yes," to the healing, but now I was in detox. My method of extracting pity from other people had been removed, but my craving for it was alive and well. Without a way to quiet it, it grew louder and louder until I couldn't ignore it anymore. But as I obeyed, as I lifted these desires to God, he worked his heavenly metallurgy on me, and I came out purer on the other side.

That wasn't the first time I was put through the fire, and it certainly wasn't the last. God dealt with my anger, my hatred, my self-pity, my manipulative ways, my lying, my laziness, my idolatry, and many, many other issues. I know that there's still more to come. Each time I was in the refiner's fire, all that I could see was the slag, the sludge that rises to the top. "Look at how filthy and worthless I am. Why does God even bother with me?" But God isn't a fool. He's not going to melt down worthless ore. He doesn't look at the slag: he knows the precious gold that is right beneath it.

I always find it incredible that I can read the Bible, even chapters and verses I've read countless times throughout my life, and still be amazed by the things that God will draw out of them. Things that I've missed, overlooked, or taken for granted for so long. It turns out that the same thing was happening with my testimony.

There was another question I was asked the night I was healed. Before, "Do you want to be healed?" was, "Do you remember your father ever saying, 'I love you?'" My earthly father saw my ailments, saw my shortcomings and rejected me because of them. But my heavenly Father healed me of them as a way to shout his love to me so loudly that it was unmistakable.

He stripped me of the identity I had: the fatherless, clumsy kid that had to prove his worth out of his own strength. He gave me a physical reminder that my new identity was a son of a Father that loved me completely, that would not abandon me.

He healed my brain, then he renewed my mind. He healed me of my allergy to the sun, then he put me through a fire that was brighter and hotter than the sun ever could be. Not as a punishment, not arbitrarily, not to make me feel guilt or shame. Like any good father, he wanted his son to become the man he knew he could be.

Christians aren't promised a comfortable life. Being purified in this way certainly isn't pleasant. If it was supposed to be, I think God would have used a metaphor that doesn't involve being liquefied. But as sons and daughters of the most high God, we should not cower when we feel his heat on us, when his light is shining on our impurities. He's pointing them out so we can lift them up to him, so we will not be corrupted by that slag any longer. Thank God that he takes us as he finds us. How wonderful that he loves us enough to not leave us there.

He made us. He knows our worth. He knows what he put in us. Let him remove everything else.

To the Buffalo Dream Center, specifically the Johns family:

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve the people of Buffalo last week. At times, it was physically and emotionally stressful. Even more, it was incredibly fulfilling to be welcomed to join in the harvest you have been sowing in to for so long.

There's still much for me to process and a lot more for me to say than the little I am here. For now, I will summarize my experience by typing out something I felt God speaking to me during the trip.

You were an abused child. That was your normal.
You were an anxious, self-hating, angry teenager. That was your normal.
I took your anger and made you gentle. That became your normal.

You were sick and incapable. That was your normal.
I healed you. That became your normal.

You were scared, shy and felt unworthy. That was your normal.
You stepped out in faith to teach. That became your normal.
I called you to speak to congregations. That is becoming your normal.

Step out in faith again. Step out of comfort again.
Step out of normal again. I will make it your normal again.