If you know me or have known me for very long at all you know that I live an odd life that is different than many of the people I know and admire. Sometimes my friends who know me best have suggested I write a book of some sort to tell my stories because frankly the craziness of the life I live does capture people’s attention. It’s interesting when I sit and tell my stories to someone who’s never heard them to watch their face contort in pain and I often imagine they are saddened by the foolishness of my decisions or maybe the hurt I’ve endured because of the choices I’ve made.
My writings are not some nutty narcissistic plea for attention, yet on the contrary they are my humble offering to relate to hurting folks who have made some of the foolish mistakes I have made myself and to offer some sense of a life that is hard and painful to many who’s cheese seems to have fallen off their cracker before it’s time. Since the time I got saved on July 24th 1988, to this day I have been on this insane walk of life that looks similarly like a reverse journey of sorts. I left a life of success and propriety to my current situation of what some would and honestly could describe as obscene madness at times. I’ve lost everything I ever owned, looked for life and hope in every type of dead end situation from money to the love of another and I wallowed in a muddy hole of undeserved shame and pain till it nearly brought me to the edge of madness. I’ve finally arrived at a place of understanding the calling I felt from my earliest days of my life is not the walk of a wealthy righteous standing man who is above reproach and of stainless integrity who attends a conservative church and wears dark grey suits with a comb over and a Jesus loves me pin for my lapel, but that of a Ragamuffin, a rough and tumble man scarred and bruised from a life of trying to fit his squarely called self into the round mold the rest of the world says a minister has to look like.
When you get into the meat of the message of the gospels, you learn Jesus was not a man who was from well known, rich people. He wasn’t a handsome man or someone we would have been attracted to because of how he looked, he was a guy who was raised among what the rest of the world would label “trash” and because of such he never had the dream or aspiration to minster to others from a level of accomplishment or pity. Which I find is exactly opposite of how most of the church looks when they appeal to help those “less fortunate” in the world. To him, the people who were hurting on the street were just people. People just like the folks he worked with everyday as a carpenter with his calloused hands and dirty apron. They hurt, they were sad, they were lonely, they were addicted, they made poor choices, they were ignoble slobs of the world whose entire presence caused the affluent to want to wipe their feet and walk away.
We all know people who espouse Christianity and sit on pews during Sunday service only to walk out and not give it another thought for 7 days. These same people are as intelligent about their Christian beliefs as anyone. It’s not a matter of ignorance for them as they know and understand what they say they believe. I have as much or more head knowledge than most of the folks I meet about what I believe or claim to believe. I studied in seminary for several years have tons of education and have read tons of books memorized verses of scripture and I often times think to myself… “to what end is all this madness”? Am I going to meet someone someday whose sole purpose in this life is the need to listen to some of my wisdom?
I don’t think so skippy…
Recently, unless you live in a hole, you have heard me squealing like a pig under a gate about my newest position. I have taken the job of a roughneck in the oilfield in Oklahoma/Texas area so I can provide for my family and everyday becomes an experience I can write some of my most fascinating stories about. I get ridiculous dirty every day. Everything where I work is covered with mud, diesel or oil base chemicals and my clothes get destroyed just from walking around on the site. I use my hands and strain muscles I didn’t know I had. We work in a place without pomp and circumstance. We don’t have music, photos on the wall or flowers that enhance the overall quality of our work place or give some extra sense of appreciation for being there. The work we do has lots of machinery and is very dangerous and at any given time something could break loose and fall or catch fire. A drilling rig is a working structure that is a cross between a building and a machine. Every part of this thing is made for a specific purpose and just looking at it conjures up images of the Millenium Falcon and Han Solo describing the speed at which she travels versus the beauty of its design. We drill a long deep hole in the earth for one single purpose, the discovery of oil/gas for the necessary means of production. Our company is contracted to an oil/gas exploration company who funds the operation and pays handsomely for us to reach the vital resources we use to power our cars and heat our homes.
In the oil field, as in other industries I am sure, the “F” word is used as a means of communication to form verbs, or nouns or prepositional phrases. If a tool is not working properly, the correct response is to assume the tool’s mother was not a properly married woman and address it accordingly. The speech is rough, the days are long and work is very dirty. The men I work with daily are hearty, and hardworking. Most of them it seems have no form of higher education than high school and are not concerned with impressing anyone with any accreditations they may have earned in their past. They are honest and do not profess to be anything other than willing to do something for a living most wouldn’t even consider. These are men who are made of muscle and bone and respond to adversity and emergency situations with a great haste. They are deliberate men who act quickly and responsively with purpose. There are no committees to draw up and think about things before a decision to act is made, they see a need? They fill that need. No one has a single job title that only that one guy can do for the most part. If there is something menial that needs to be done, everyone is willing to do it and usually responds without the thought of whose in charge and whether it’s “my job” to do it or not. I am amazed at the amount of respect they earn among the ranks and the way they respond to each other with kindness that you would see given by a worker at a day care. The driller’s family will call and I have seen him shift from hard nose boss to complete smiling kind father as his daughter has his ear on the cell phone. Everything I have ever been told about this line of work is wrong and deserving of my complete respect. These men all have wives and families and the discussion of perverted subjects of any nature or marital unfaithfulness are never brought up. The topics they love are how their children are fairing, and how their “old lady” got up at three to prepare a meal for them and sent extra to share with the others. I have never worked on a job where the workload was shared so equally and the comradery ran so deep. I was pondering this sort of thing as I walked about one day emptying trash. I was bemoaning my very existence and complaining to God fully about having to pick up someone else’s stinking trash and how only 12 months prior I working in a position where I had been placed in charge of a 50 million dollar project as the boss and today I am in charge of a 15 dollar trash can. The lack of esteem in what I was doing was overwhelming and I began to think to myself how when I was the boss in charge of the project, the workload of 95 other men was my responsibility to keep up with but today for the same actual pay and less time, I was responsible for whether a Sprite can fell out on the ground as I was dumping trash in a trailer. I was worried about a great and many meaningless things, and not necessarily the importance of what I was doing. I think it was on that day that God began to show me the basic character of my heart. He showed me how I was pissing and moaning about comfort and he was more worried about the condition of my heart towards others as opposed to my comfort and the emotional state of affairs about how much pain was coming from my feet due to my body weight because I have a total lack of self control when cream filled donuts were present. He wants me to see that no matter what he is in charge, he can provide when I use a pen OR a shovel but even more than that? I was missing the most important fact of why I was here. God wanted me to see that the men I was working with were exactly the kind of men he called from the fishing fleet to start his ministry and turned the world on its ear some two thousand years ago…
In the eyes of some of these guys I can see Simon Peter or James and John, the Son’s of Thunder… fiercely loyal and brash but quick to act and capable of leadership. Loyal men, sun hardened and strong, with character and quality and have integrity and take pride in the job they do everyday and are quick to fight to the death about what they believe. I found myself sick to my stomach at how many of my Christian friends came to me quietly telling me how they felt God had called me minister to my co-workers when they found I was taking this job. Oddly enough it has become quite clear that my mission is not to be the guy who is sent to convert anyone, but to be the guy who is converted by them. I have cried out for some sort of change in my position and I hate the physical challenge this job presents for a man of my age with the physical ailments with which I have been stricken. Others have vowed to pray for a new line of work for me and I would now laugh and tell them thank you for their kindness but not to waste their breath as God has a purpose for all of this madness and I finally know the purpose for my new found direction.
My higher learning is definitely “on the job training” these days and the wisdom I am obtaining is not to be found in a book or some seminary school. God desires change in our way of thinking and longs for people who will act and live out what they believe. He is looking for folks who are real and have nothing to hide. Who understand that his desire for them is not to worry about how things look but to be results oriented in their need to accomplish things for the kingdom. I have been weighing out MY thinking about people and how belonging to a certain church, wearing certain clothing or belonging to the correct social standing groups is such a waste of time. I know we all agree with these thoughts cranially but are we really willing to put them into practice. I am asking myself hard questions about what I believe about who I am. I have been one who makes fun of the way people dress when they shop at Wal-Mart, the less affluent and the frustrated folks who are shifting the weight of the bags of this life from hand to hand. Among those who are affluent and Godly? I am the very least.
I have had to take a very hard look at who I am lately and I have to say that the character of who I am is found lacking. I am knowledgeable but there is so much that needs to be found in me to become the man God has called me to be. People are hurting in our world. I don’t ever really recall thinking of myself as better than anyone or knowing my education had place me in a role of being better than anyone, but apparently the God of heaven and earth has decided I need to see how he took a band of men with calloused hands and big hearts and changed the world as opposed to men of higher learning and degrees. You see for all my big talk and my posts on Facebook and my grandiose thinking about who I am, I have found myself to be still be at the center of my world and for about 85 % of my day the thoughts in my brain are centered around the comfort of my stomach and when I can sit down next. I have longed to be the man I believe myself to be in my head but when I am real and honest I am no where near that zip code. God can take a few fishermen and a collector for the IRS and bring about healing to people who had no clue they needed it.
What I have written is a real story about my everyday life and how God is using my circumstances to mold my heart. I pray you see this is not a hobby of mine for the purpose of your entertainment nor do I need others approval to feel secure about myself. I am very transparent about my life in an attempt to present the gospel of Christ without preaching from the pulpit about things in which most can’t relate. My fingers ache from the use of a shovel from this past week as I type this out this morning and I pray you find the real purpose in the message the way I have in that God’s heart is to heal broken and hurting people and he can use common hard working vessels to accomplish his purpose without fancy clothes and religious ceremonies..
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