Would you trade your dad for a Mini Cooper?

Would you trade your dad for a Mini Cooper?

Before you answer I should say that I’m not talking about the base model Mini Cooper. I’m talking about the S-class. Probably a convertible. Definitely with a cooler built into the glove compartment for sandwiches and fruits of the forest. Given the choice, would you trade your dad for the car? Let’s say you got to use it during the weekdays but you didn’t get to see your dad. Then when he was home on the weekends and mildly connected to your life, you had to give back the Mini Cooper temporarily until another Monday rolled around. Pretend that you had a good dad if yours was a failure of a father. Would you make that trade?

I don’t think anyone I know would. I think any kid on the planet would choose their dad over any thing on the planet. But lots of dads disagree with me every Monday morning. They must, because so many dads choose there jobs over their families. Few people ever say that outloud. Rarely do you hear someone begin their work week by getting in the car and singing, “I love my job, I like my kids.” But this weekend in the July issue of a business magazine they actually had an interview with a CEO that admitted he knew the words to that song. Here is his quote about why missing family meals isn’t a huge problem for him:

“My real preference is that she and the kids eat because I don’t want the pressure of letting someone else down. This (his company) always take precedence over that. Sh*&^% thing to say, I know, but that’s me. I’m doing this so that they can have a lifestyle that they want. I have an obligation to all the shareholders who put, in this case, $46 million into this place. That obligation comes before anything else. They know that that’s priority. If that sounds really bad, because I’m here telling you I put work first and not family first, I’ve tried it the other way around. You cannot serve two masters. You can only serve one master well.

I try to compensate for that by being pretty protective of my weekends. First thing and last, I’m checking my Blackberry, but I’ll go to the park and play basketball with the kids or go bodysurfing. I try to keep the weekends for the family so they know that during the week I’m pretty much a nonentity.”

Wow. That is an amazingly unintentional description of how so many fathers think. But before you unpack what’s wrong about that logic, unpack what’s right … at least he’s honest. At least he’s being upfront about making his family at best a second or third tier priority. He’s not working 80 hours a week and thinking he’s still being a great father to his kids. He’s recognized that what he’s doing to his family is Sh*&^%. He’s recognized that it has consequences and he’s comfortable with them.

But there are a couple of key phrases in there that you can’t help but highlight:

“I have an obligation to all the shareholders …”

The biggest obligation he has, bigger than 46 million dollars, is that he helped create some kids. He’s obligated to grow them, nurture them, and show them how to do this thing called life. The shareholders in his company are faceless strangers with money that probably fund dozens of companies just like his. But it’s always easier to fulfill an easier obligation so meeting the financial needs of people you might never meet versus meeting the intimacy needs of kids under your own roof, is a simple choice to make.

“I’m doing this so that they can have a lifestyle that they want.”

I don’t know anyone that has deep “lifestyle wounds.” I’ve never met anyone who has said, “My dad gave me lots of love, but my lifestyle wasn’t as involved in my life as I would have wanted.” But I know plenty of people that grew up with amazing lifestyles and absent fathers. They never seem that happy. And when their dads retire and suddenly want to dive into their lives they are overwhelmed with the sense of “Where were you for the first 30 years of my life? What makes you think that being compassionate to your grandson is going to make things magically better?” And seriously, what four year old has ever said while her father was reading her a bedtime story, “Dad, I appreciate the stories, I do, but could you put in some more hours at the office? My lifestyle is starting to suffer.”

“Sh*&^% thing to say, I know, but that’s me.”

When they hand you a baby in the delivery room you should hand them back your right to use the phrase, “but that’s me.” Go ahead and retire it, because you’re no longer a “me,” you’re a “we.” And to become a we means that some degree of me needs to die. Not all of who you are, but you can’t be the same person after you’ve had a kid. Your time isn’t just yours. The decisions aren’t just about you. Everything changes. And note here that he’s flip-flopped from “I’m doing this for my kid’s lifestyle” to “that’s me.”

“You can only serve one master well.”

It’s true, and kudos to him for recognizing it. What does that really mean though? For me it means getting home from work at 4:30. That gives me on average 2.5 hours with the kids each weekday. If the CEO above only sees his kids 30 minutes a day then every week, I get 10 hours more with my children. That makes me better at being a dad. Not automatically a better father, because I have loads of faults and don’t know the CEO, but by hours alone I have to know more about my kids than he does about his. Think about it. If you and I were taking Karate and I practiced 10 hours more a week than you did, who would know more about Karate? If I spent 520 hours more a year practicing karate, which one of us would you say is more serious about becoming better? Why do we pretend that the same time principle doesn’t apply to raising kids?

“they know that during the week I’m pretty much a nonentity.”

The good thing about this statement is that whatever therapist works with this guy’s kids in 20 years isn’t going to have a difficult task. Have you ever learned anything from a nonentity? Have you ever felt loved by a nonentity? Have you ever had the deep questions about being a teenager answered by a nonentity? Has a nonentity ever taught you how to throw a baseball or intimidated your prom date before you went out? Nope, but that’s what this guy is telling his family he is 5 out of 7 days a week.

This whole piece feels kind of judgmental. Maybe this guy’s kids are really happy. Maybe his wife is glad he’s not around. I don’t know this guy at all. But I know me and when I lived like he was living, it sucked. I used to work 70+ hours a week. I became an uncle to my oldest daughter and a roommate to my wife. I made lots of money, but I was rarely home and when I was there physically, I certainly wasn’t there mentally. That my wife didn’t divorce me is miraculous. I guess I want to share the lessons from that season with you in the hope that you won’t experience it.

It’s just a job. Kids aren’t desperate for lifestyles. It’s not just you anymore. And the world is full of nonentities. Don’t be one.

You're lucky I don't have access to bears.

You’re lucky I don’t have access to bears.

Would it be wrong of me to pray that bears maul my seventh grade orthodontist? I know we’re called to love our enemy, but is there anyway that I could get maybe a handful of people I know attacked by bears in the name of God? These are the types of questions I was left with when I read about the bear attack in 2 Kings 2: 23-24. (I know what you’re thinking, I too would have read the Old Testament a lot sooner had I known there were chapters on “when bears attack.”)

Here’s the scene. Elijah has just been taken up to heaven. Elisha, his confusingly named replacement prophet, is just starting to shake things up. The first thing he does as God’s new prophet is heal some water. The second thing? Bear attack.

Check out the verses in question:

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

That story is crazy. Some teenagers called Elisha bald, which to me doesn’t seem like that big of an insult. I’ll probably be called worse things today. Instead of walking on by, he turns around and says, “Baldhead huh? Bears, attack!” And 42 youths are mauled.

Can you imagine if God still operated that way? If at any given point in my day I had access to bears? Man, oh man I would abuse that. I can just see myself getting frustrated by some teenager that is having a conversation on his cell phone in the middle of a movie. (Comedian Daniel Tosh came up with this scenario but used fire instead of bears. I'm sticking with bears. He's a PK too so I'm pretty sure he's cool with me using his concept.) Without asking him to keep quiet so I could enjoy the film, I’d mutter under my breath, “God, bears please.”

Suddenly said teenager would feel a tap on his shoulder from what he assumes is an usher. But oh know, he realizes upon turning around, it’s a bear!

How many bears would I launch on people during my commute home? Cut me off, here’s a bear. Rode all the way up the breakdown lane while I waited in line, how about a bear? Gave me the middle finger? Three bears.

I would be bearing people all day. Which is why God won’t give me access to them. He knows I’m a jerk a lot of days and would abuse the blessing of attack bears. So consider yourself lucky. Had you ever accidentally cut me off in traffic you probably would have found yourself with a bear riding shotgun.

The “I’m lying because I love you” lie.

The “I’m lying because I love you” lie.

I remember the last time I lied to my wife. It was about three months ago. We were planning a trip to a city I didn’t every really want to go back to. The last time I had visited this particular city I had done some really hurtful things to my wife. Just talking about going back with her stirred up a lot of shame I had not dealt with yet. I particularly didn’t want to see people that had been witness to my horrible behavior.

So when she asked me where I wanted to stay, I made up a really lame excuse of why I didn’t want to stay with some particular friends. (If you’re playing along at home, “lame excuse” is an attempt to drape a lie in nicer clothes than it deserves.) She bought the lie, or so I thought, and we went to bed.

Why did I tell her that? Why did I lie? Honestly because I love her. I thought that if I told her the real reason I didn’t want to see our friends it would force her to mentally relive that chapter of our lives. That if I were honest, it would bring back that unpleasant memory for her and she would experience more pain. So I lied to protect her. I lied out of love.

When you write it like that, it’s pretty simple to see the foolishness of that logic, but it’s so easy to do. Think about a time when you’ve not completely disclosed some financial truth to your husband or wife because you don’t want them to worry. “We’re a little over our budget this month, but I don’t want Pam to freak out so I won’t bother her with what’s going on.” Or you hide something from your spouse because you know they’re insecure about that particular area of their life. “My husband is insecure about his physical appearance so I won’t tell him I’m worried he’s making some unhealthy decisions with his diet because I don’t want to hurt him.” Or in my case, “I failed in the past and I don’t want my wife to think about that failure, so I’ll lie in the future.”

So dumb, but again, I really thought that I was lying to my wife because I didn’t want to hurt her. My small group leader always says, “It’s interesting that when you were messing up, when you were failing, you didn’t have a problem with hurting your wife by your actions.” He’s right, the truth is, that lying is always about protecting me, not someone else. In the example above, I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of my actions, so I tried to cover them up with the false nobility of protecting my wife.

But it never works, it always catches up with us. The next morning after I told that lie, I felt like God called me out on it in my quiet time. That night I confessed to my wife that I had lied. Her response? “I know. I know why you didn’t want to go back to see those friends, I just wanted to hear you say it.” The takeaway? Lying is never an act of love and people that are close to you usually know when you’re pushing them further away with a lie.

My daughters are wearing snowsuits as teenagers. Every day.

My daughters are wearing snowsuits as teenagers. Every day.

I know it will be hot considering that we live in Georgia, but that’s too bad. Unless modesty comes back into vogue, fingers crossed, then they’re going to be wearing snowsuits to high school. And not those skanky snowsuits that show your legs above your boots. I’m joking, sort of. But as a dad that understands how guys think and a writer that understands how marketers think, I’m not excited about them growing up. Today, a commercial for Kidz Bop 12 reminded me why.

Kidz Bop is a CD with popular top 40 songs sung by 10 year olds. I’m cool with the concept, my 3 year old daughter loves to sing in the car, but the songs they put on these albums are clearly not written for little kids. Take these lyrics from Hinder’s “Lips of an angel” found on Kidz Bop volume 11. It’s a heartwarming, childhood favorite about getting a phone call from an ex-lover while your current girl is in the other room:

Well, my girl’s in the next room. Sometimes I wish she was you. I guess we never really moved on. It’s really good to hear your voice saying my name. It sounds so sweet. Coming from the lips of an angel. Hearing those words it makes me weak. And I never wanna say goodbye. But girl you make it hard to be faithful, with the lips of an angel.

What 10-year old can’t relate to that song? What 11-year old hasn’t cheated on his girlfriend a time or two? You know how it is. You’re on one slide on the playground, your lady is playing hopscotch and an old flame winks from the swing set. What’s a kid to do? Thankfully Hinder and Kidz Bop have prepared you for this moment and upon taking a long, hard pull from a cold chocolate milk, you can stare off into the distance and wistfully say in a voice that hasn’t gone through puberty yet, “Girl you make it hard to be faithful with the lips of an angel.”

p.s. I hate you Kidz Bop.

The "you can't choose who you love" lie.

The “you can’t choose who you love” lie.

Recently in an article on CNN.com, a young man explained the relationship he was in by saying “You can’t choose who you love.” That’s not true. It’s pretty. It makes for good fodder in romance novels, but the reality is it really doesn’t make sense. Here are three simple reasons why:

1. Love is a horrible God.

If you buy into the idea that you can’t choose who you love, then you are ultimately saying that love controls you. It’s a power bigger than you, a force that guides your actions and your attitude. You turn love into a God and yourself into a slave. And what a horrible god it is. Always fleeting, always changing it’s mind. Never making it’s intentions clear. Always drunk on emotion. Raging like a storm one day and laying calm and cool the next.

2. Love fades.

If you’ve ever had children or been in a long-term relationship, you know that the mushy, romantic, high feeling of love fades away under the harsh glare of reality. Love, by itself, is not sufficient to sustain a relationship. There are many days that my wife does not wake up thinking, “Once again, I find myself intoxicated with love for Jon. I will shower him with my love.” On the contrary, she must choose to love, even in my foolishness and ugliness and mistakes. She has to be deliberate. Same with my two young daughters. When they’re trying to recreate some Ultimate Fighting Championship moment at the mall, it is not some deep pool of bubbling love I tap into to keep from transforming like David Banner into Angry Dad. It’s my decision that I am going to love them because they are mine. I am their father and I choose to love them.

3. Love is not an excuse.

In 1992, as justification for having a relationship with his adopted daughter, Woody Allen said, “The heart wants what the heart wants.” In one stroke, he made love his God and threw it under the bus as an excuse for his actions. But love isn’t an excuse. True love is just the opposite. It makes you responsible for someone else’s heart. It makes you intentional in the way you treat someone else. And it doesn’t offer you an excuse to explain why you are the way you are. It offers you the freedom to be who you are without fear of losing that person when they look behind the curtain of your life. You no longer need excuses. Love covers your flaws, it doesn’t try to justify them away.

The cocaine question.

The cocaine question.

A friend of mine cheated on his wife. She knows about one of the affairs but does not know the full scope of his unfaithfulness over the years. My friend has flirted with the idea of coming clean, but in the last few months he’s made a number of decisions that indicate he’s miles away from being true to his wife, true to himself and true to God.

A few weeks ago, when he came to our men’s group, the leader essentially told him to go home. He said if you’re not serious about working on your junk, why even waste your time here? I haven’t seen him since that happened and I thought about emailing him last night, but I didn’t know what to say.

I’m praying for you?
Are you going to come back to group anytime soon?
Is there anything I can do for you in this difficult time?
Have you thought about trying cocaine?

One of those questions is not like the others, but it’s the one I thought about the most. And this is not just me trying to write something inflammatory that I don’t believe in. I would have used meth as the drug if that were the case. This is me remembering one of the most powerful testimonies I’ve ever known.

My wife’s friend starts of her testimony saying that she is thankful for cocaine. This is not a phrase that regularly makes a cameo in church, but there is. And as she unpacks it, it began to make sense. You see, she was an alcoholic. She knew that she was facing a slow, 30-year death that would have stripped her of life, inch by inch. But then she met cocaine. Cocaine, she says, sped up her demise. It put her crash on hyper speed and did in a period of months, what would have taken alcohol years. And there, in the depths of her worst moment, a moment that came much faster than it should have, she found the Lord.

Now, years later, gently cradled in the hands of God she reflects back on cocaine with a heart of thankfulness, because ultimately it rushed her into God’s arms.

Maybe more than anything, what my friend needs is a cocaine moment. Maybe he needs a crash and burn. In the book “Boundaries on Marriage,” Dr. Cloud and Dr. Townsend say, “People in denial are deaf to words. They only understand pain and loss.” I’ve talked with my friend about his life. The leader of our men’s group has talked with my friend about his life. A thousand people could talk with my friend about his life. Ultimately, he might be deaf to words. Ultimately it might take the loss of his children, his wife, his job and everything he has to break him of the hurt and lies he’s defining his life with right now.

That feels counterintuitive to God’s call that we love our neighbor. Shouldn’t I love him and try to drag him back to the men’s group and force him to make healthy decisions? I don’t know, but that’s not what happens in one of my favorite parables in the Bible, the Prodigal Son.

In Luke 15, when the Prodigal Son says to his father, “Give me my share of the estate,” that’s exactly what he does. He divides up the property and gives his youngest son the money he wants. Now, do you think the father had any doubt what he was going to do with those funds?

After essentially telling his father he wants him dead, is the Prodigal Son going off into the world to start a homeless shelter? Is there any question that the money is going to be used for gross purposes like prostitutes and wild living?

Then why didn’t the father, or God if you will, withhold the money? Why did he help fund the downfall? Couldn’t he have said no, which would have meant the son didn’t have any money for prostitutes and would maybe have avoided ending up in the pigpen? Maybe, but that’s not what happens. The father puts money into the son’s hands, and with that money, his crash is put on hyper speed.

Is it possible, the father gave him the money because he wanted him to return faster? He didn’t want him out in the world struggling to sin over a 30-year period, dying by inches? I don’t know. Maybe it was just an expression of God’s gift of free will. The son had the freedom to spend that money in anyway he wanted to. And that he choose prostitutes was his doing, not something that God made financially possible.

I don’t know. It’s difficult to root for someone’s downfall, to cheer the arrival of cocaine. But in my own life, I am thankful for the things that combined in a perfect storm during the summer of 2005. The parade of hurts and mistakes that eventually became too overwhelming for me to run from anymore. They might not have come in the form of cocaine, but come they did. And I was broken.

Now, I can honestly look back on those things with thankfulness. I mourn the ways I hurt my wife, my family, my friends and myself. But, I would rather survive that storm with the Lord, then wake up at 60, with a wasted lifetime of not knowing myself, not knowing my wife and not knowing my God. Slow death is an option for all of us. For me. For my friend. For you.

I pray you’ll meet your cocaine long before that happens. I pray that like how my wife’s faith bloomed in childhood without a crash moment, your walk will be free of pigpens. I pray you’ll never have a demise, be it fast or slow. I’ll just pray and trust that God is the great storyteller and knows what each of our stories really needs.

Waiting for touchdowns.

Waiting for touchdowns.

For most of my life, I’ve been waiting for a football to land at my feet. When it does, I’ll hopefully be standing a few feet away from an NFL practice field. The offensive coordinator will see that the football has rolled near me and will yell out “hey kid, throw that back.”

I’ll reach down, pick it up and proceed to throw a perfect 90-yard spiral to a receiver running drills at the other end of the field. Practice will grind to a halt as they gather round to gaze at this diamond in the rough, this passerby that just might guide them all the way to the Super Bowl.

I’ve never played football. I played soccer growing up but despite David Beckham’s arrival to the US and the growing popularity of the sport, it still makes for a pretty weak metaphor. I don’t particularly want to play football, but I do want to be ready for the one defining moment in my life that will save me from being ordinary. The one touchdown event that will rescue me from, well me. So for years, I’ve had my head down looking for the football at my feet.

Relevant
This is not a particularly fun way to go through life. For starters, if you look hard enough and squint your eyes, just about anything can look like a defining moment.

A year ago, I tried to force one out of Relevant Magazine. I was three or four months into an intimate relationship with Christ. I was dealing with issues that I think a lot of guys struggle with and I wanted to share what I had learned. I became obsessed with writing a book.

I emailed Cameron Strang, the founder and editor of Relevant Magazine. Relevant is kind of like the Rolling Stone magazine of the Christian world. Their stuff is well written, getting better designed by the day and they deal with things most Christian media shy away from. It should be noted that directly emailing the founder of the publication is a classic football moment. Why didn’t I email my friends and ask them if they knew anyone in publishing? Why didn’t I self publish the book first? Or even start by emailing an associate editor or someone lower down the food chain at Relevant? Because all those options felt like short passes and I was looking for the touchdown or nothing at all.

I ended up getting a little of both.

In the email, which was absurdly written, I told Cameron that I was:

A son of a successful preacher who had climbed the ranks to the executive board of the Southern Baptist Convention. An award-winning copywriter whose greatest sell had been pretending to be a Christian.

I went on to say:
“regardless of whether it gets officially published or if I sell it out of my trunk like MC Hammer, if God wants me to tell millions and millions of people that he loves them, I’ve got to trust it will happen.”

There’s a lot more nonsense where that came from, but you get the point.

That night Cameron wrote me back:
“You have an amazing story and we’d love to hear more about your book idea.”

Touchdown right?

Not really. After a few back and forth emails with their editorial director I stopped talking with Relevant. I wanted to write the book. I’ve wanted to write a book since the third grade when Mrs. Harris published (also known as laminated) a collection of poems I wrote. Maybe it was fear of success or just the regular kind of fear, but I just couldn’t do it.

I felt like a football made of granite had landed at my feet. I could see it. It looked exactly how I thought it would look. But it weighed a thousand pounds and I couldn’t pick it up.

Definitions
It’s frustrating when these defining moments look like how we’ve always expected them to look, except for one detail. When we’re 90% sure that this is the right person to marry or the right job to take or the right time to publish a book. But that other 10% always seems to refuse to shut up.

I can try to minimize the 10% or maximize the 90% but I still end up trying to force a defining moment. And defining moments hate that. In the Relevant situation I simply wasn’t ready to write that book. I had basically carried around a backpack of lies and grossness for about 20 years.

Three months into my walk with God, at a point where I was at best beginning to recognize there even was a backpack, never mind emptying it, I demanded that God let me write the ultimate guide to getting rid of backpacks. It would be like writing a book on how to be a parent from the delivery room of my first child.

The other frustration is that by looking at for defining moments all the time I put incredible pressure on everyone that crosses my path. “Are you the person that’s going to radically change my life?” a quiet desperate voice inside me asks.

I am not exaggerating when I say everyone. Ask my 3-year old. When someone told me that being a father was a great way to understand God’s love for me, I starting expecting a life transforming lesson from my daughter L.E. For an entire weekend I was secretly mad at her because the things she was doing weren’t giving me a clear understanding of how God loved me.

If I told her out loud my expectation for the weekend on Friday night I would have realized how ridiculous it was: “L.E., I know you’re only 3, but I’m struggling right now with believing that God loves me. If you could somehow show me that or explain that to me this weekend, that would be great.”

She didn’t though. As hard as I tried to tie her refusal to eat a piece of chicken for dinner to my own rebellion and the hurt God must have felt when I rebelled against his love, she was just a 3 year old. And I was just a dad looking for a shortcut to a defining moment.

I also miss some really amazing things God is doing all around me when I laser focus on defining moments.

Before our honeymoon, my future wife told me a girl she worked with still stayed in touch with a couple she had met on her honeymoon. They had become lifelong friends while at a resort in St. Lucia and still got together regularly.

Deep inside, I got the idea that if my wife and I didn’t make lifelong friends during our weeklong honeymoon in Jamaica we’d be missing a defining moment and the whole thing would be a complete failure.

The first day we were at the Sandals Resort I started to get really anxious because other couples were pairing off together to go snorkeling or play two on two volleyball. Jenny and I weren’t getting invited or doing a very good job of laying the groundwork for life changing friendships. In fact, most of the time we spent alone with just each other! Even with all the new things that Christian couples get to enjoy on honeymoons, there was a part of me thinking “Maybe that guy I played ping pong with is going to be my next best friend.”

Pathetic, but true.

Connected
There are a lot of things I believe in my head or my mouth but deep down inside I doubt. I know that I don’t get to define my own defining moments. I know that I’ll never be able to come up with a better defining moment than God. There’s not a thing I am going to do on this planet that will leave him surprised up in heaven thinking “wow, Jon really pulled that one out. I gotta tell you, Samson, I did not see that one coming.”

But I still think I might know what a good defining moment can be, which is why I feel blessed when the fog clears just long enough for me to see one God has orchestrated and marvel at how connected his creativity is.

In 1971, it just so happens that my dad’s roommate during his freshman year at the University of North Carolina was a man named Al Andrews. Al is the funniest person I’ve ever met. He explores life with the kind of unabashed wonder of a little kid stuck in an adult-sized world, like Tom Hanks in the movie Big. I love Al.

After college, it just so happens that Al moved to Colorado to study counseling with Larry Crabb, whom he would later coauthor a book with. After he finished with the program, it just so happens he decides to stick around and teach.

Calendar jump to my life. I graduated from Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. In addition to writing church prayer devotionals for a living I was self destructing on ecstasy and raves. I called my dad for help. He called Al. Al says he had a student named Gordon in Colorado. It just so happens Gordon is in Alabama now.

I called Gordon. Despite starting his working life in the Merchant Marines, it just so happens he’s recently opened up a counseling office. It just so happens that office is one mile away from where I live in Birmingham.

Fast forward a few more years. I drove from Atlanta to Birmingham to see Gordon because life was coming unraveled. He refused to placate my funk with soft-pedaled “it will be alright” counseling and suggested I see someone regularly in Atlanta.

It just so happens he had a friend named Jeff that specializes in my particular brand of failure. It just so happens that his office is ten minutes from where I work (a miracle in and of itself because everything in Atlanta is 43 minutes away from each other.) Jeff just so happened to live next door to Gordon in Colorado, where it just so happens they were both taking classes from a man named Al.

A man that 34 years earlier had just so happened to knock on a door in a freshman dorm and say, “Hi, I’m your new roommate” to an 18-year old that would just so happen to be my dad someday.

I don’t know
I used the phrase “it just so happens” 12 times in those last few paragraphs, which just so happens is really bad writing. But that’s not the point. The point is that’s one of the places where God lives in our lives, in those small actions or events that in retrospect have tremendous impact.

All too often I miss them, even when I take the time to look back on the seemingly unexplainable chapters. Even worse, I steal God’s glory and instead credit these moments to coincidence or ownerless ideas like “it was just meant to be.”

When I paved the inexplicable connections from Al Andrews in 1971 to me in 2005 with the phrase “it just so happens”, I was able to see how ridiculous it was for me to doubt God is the master of arranging those moments. Try it sometime with the story of how you met your spouse or someone special to you. I promise that if you’re honest, each time you attempt to write away the hand of God with “it just so happens” it will get harder and harder to think happenstance is controlling your world.

I can’t logically explain how intricate connections over a three-decade period ended up saving my life and my marriage. I could try, with six degrees of connectivity and how we’re all tied to each other on a global scale now because of the Internet, but it still wouldn’t make sense. I would still come back to thinking that one of the reasons God introduced my dad to Al Andrews in 1971 was because he knew that I’d desperately need to be sitting in Jeff’s office in 2005.

Situations like that make me feel like God knows what he’s doing. More than that though, they teach me it’s OK if I don’t know.

I used to think being a Christian meant you had all the answers. I’ve never really shared my faith because I’ve always been afraid it would turn into one of the moments on the show Politically Correct with Bill Maher. It always seemed like he would invite two brilliant people that hated God and one back-country hillbilly that loved God into a round table discussion about faith. The guy with the PhD in atheism and the woman that won a Pulitzer Prize in evolution would just go to town on a church secretary from Table Top, Arkansas. And I didn’t want that to happen.

I also didn’t want to misinterpret something from the Bible. I know there’s Greek and Hebrew involved in the Bible and that other than not getting into a frat and the phrase Oy Vey, I have very little experience with either. I’ve always worried about saying “I really liked how Isaiah said in rest and repentance is your salvation” only to have a real Christian reply “Well the original Hebrew for “rest” means “don’t ever quote this verse” so by doing so you’re really revealing how much of a sinner you are Jon.”

But the more I learn about God, the more I realize how much I don’t know and I’m beginning to think that might be one of God’s favorite things to hear me say.

Saying “I don’t know” takes the strength and pressure of arranging my life out of my hands. When I say “I don’t know,” I’m acting out of authenticity, not apathy. I’m not saying I don’t care. I’m admitting I don’t have logic or knowledge or formulas that justify my faith. I have faith despite the absence of those things not because of their arrival.

In the book Addiction and Grace, Gerald May describe the spiritual growth process as one that involves “far more relinquishment than acquisition.” I think he’s right and that by being honest with the Lord and others, I relinquish my mask of perfect son, perfect employee, perfect Christian author, etc.

I also relinquish the future, which was never really mine to begin with, but still something I have to give up. Daily.

I don’t know if this book will ever get published.
I don’t know why God has me working at AutoTrader right now.
I don’t know what hardships or joys will tackle me next summer.
I don’t know if my daughters will be popular in high school or if I’ll have to explain to them why it’s OK that they didn’t get invited to the Prom.

And that’s OK, because I know who does know and it’s in His hands, which are bigger and more creative than mine.

Nothing deflates a forced defining moment faster than the phrase “I don’t know.” A few months ago I had the opportunity to brainstorm a sermon series with Andy Stanley. Andy is Charles Stanley’s son and in my mind he ranks up there with Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. He’s written countless books, built a church of 15,000 people and is definitely one of my heroes. When I got the email invitation I almost threw up out of excitement.

At the end of the meeting, I was talking with him and the woman that had invited me. He asked me a little about my thoughts for the church, my background as a pastor’s son and my family. Then he threw a football at my feet, a question that I longed to turn into a defining moment:

“What do you want to write?”

In my mind I instantly envisioned me giving Andy a perfect answer that made him exclaim “Dear Lord, this boy is brilliant. How would you like a 5-book deal and a speaking gig at church here?” I thought about all the ways he could connect me and help me get started. I thought about being on a book tour with Donald Miller and maybe playing Frisbee with John Piper. I thought about kissing goodbye every bit of less than exciting advertising copy I’d ever written in my life and starting my trajectory to the moon.

And then out of my mouth I heard the phrase “I don’t know.”

Pop went the football. Stop went the mile a minute manipulative thoughts running in my head.

“To be honest with you, I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out with God right now.” I finished the conversation and walked out of the office.