This Beautiful Mess

I’m 31 years old and I still contemplating the question, what am I supposed to do with my life? I still don’t have a clue what I want to be when I grow up. As a kid, my brothers and I were always making up games and pretending to be our favourite characters. Most of the time, we would pretend to be our favourite athlete or a character from our favourite TV program. MacGyver was my personal favourite, he was amazing! Who else could make a bomb out of Coke and Pop Rocks candy? At one point, I remember wanting to be a trash man when I grew up. I would fill a bucket with crumbled up paper and dump it on my bed over and over. I was a strange kid. If I wasn’t playing ‘trash man’ I was probably somewhere in the corner of the room playing by myself (no, not with myself, that was later!) and daydreaming about saving the world with my G.I. Joe and his trusty sidekick, Leo the lion. There is no doubt, that this was an awkward part of my life. As you can imagine, I didn’t always fit in.

Eventually, I grew out of that daydreaming phase and became a man… but not really. When I was 18 years old and fresh out of school, I got a really cushy job with a promising future at the Coca Cola Company at their headquarters in Atlanta. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hack sitting at a desk, in front of a computer, underneath the mind dulling glow of the florescent lighting. So, after a couple years I decided to quit this very secure employment to wait tables in a restaurant instead. Yes, I quit a job with this global giant so I could serve pizza to overly picky customers. I guess I figured this would give me more flexibility with my life, and more time to daydream about saving the world. One dream I had was to travel as a missionary to a remote village, somewhere in a foreign country that needed Jesus.

Then something happened that I didn’t expect. I was surprised to find that the people I worked with at the restaurant were broken people (like me) who needed Jesus (like me) just as much as the remote village in the foreign country. They didn’t need church membership, or a ‘Four Spiritual Laws’ tract, or the ‘six steps to becoming a Christian’ program. They just needed genuine friendship with someone who would show them Jesus rather than just tell them about Him. So I befriended this ragtag group of homosexuals and pagans (I was one of the few who worked at the restaurant who wasn’t gay and I didn’t follow their religion of paganism) without any strings attached. I decided that I just wanted to know them. We spent many hours in conversation over meals before and after our shifts discussing life, love, family, religion, politics, etc. I loved those guys. They were incredible people who showed me a lot about genuine love and friendship. In the end, they showed me a bit of Jesus.

I was never taught this type of Christianity in Sunday school, yet I continue to see Jesus in the ‘world’ around me, and it looks completely different than the Jesus I see within the walls of the church. Contrary to what I was taught, I am realising that the kingdom of God is not something I am supposed to build, or advance, or ‘take’ to the world around me. The kingdom of God is alive and well. It's happening whether or not I like it, and I need to jump in and be a part of it on a daily basis. It’s really quite simple.

It’s interesting that in my lifetime I have seen more of Jesus outside the walls of church than inside. It’s a strange paradox, and I suppose this is the root of why I struggle with religion; that I have seen more of Jesus in the dirty, broken, unwanted places of the world than I have in the clean, ‘polished’ church that seems to have it all together.

I was thinking the other day about my childhood and realised that not much has changed since those days of playing ‘rubbish collector’ and daydreaming about saving the world. I still want to be with the dirty, broken, and unwanted, and I still dream about saving the world. G.I. Joe and MacGyver were both pretty freakin’ awesome, but unfortunately I buried them along with the 80’s. The good news is that Jesus is alive and kicking, but He’s not where my Sunday school teacher told me He was. If we look for Jesus in the overlooked, that’s where we’ll find him. That’s also where we begin to make sense of this beautiful mess we call life.

“I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was homeless and you gave me a room, I was shivering and you gave me clothes, I was sick and you stopped to visit, I was in prison and you came to me… I'm telling the solemn truth: Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me—you did it to me.” (Jesus, Matthew 25:35-40, The Message)