Man of Fate

When I was about 20, which was only a couple of years ago, I was lifting weights at the YMCA when I saw a man in his 40s doing curls. Because of the mirror, I could see both the front and the back of this stranger. I could see that his arms were huge. He was curling what I was bench pressing. He had blond hair and blue eyes. He was my height and my body type. He looked like me plus 20 years of age and 50 pounds of muscle. I wondered, Is that me, from the future? I studied him to determine if this was the case. He never even glanced at me. That’s how I finally determined that it wasn’t me. If it was me--from the future--I wouldn’t be able to stop from stealing a glance at the me from the past, whom I had probably gone back 20 years just to see (why else would I go to the past and work out at my old gym?) at the risk of destroying the space-time continuum. I think I was reading a lot of Philip K. Dick at the time.

Time, for anyone who pauses to think about it, is fascinating. Fate, time travel, changing history, time zones, daylight savings--the list could go on. My favorite thing about time, though, is that God invented it. And, the coolest thing about God’s understanding of time, is that He knows everything that will ever happen. In fact, before He created the heavens and the earth, He knew everything about me. He knew when and where I would be born and when and where I will die. He knew that I would see somebody at the gym and wonder if it was me from the future. Do you think He smiles about that or rolls His eyes?

The Bible tells us that the steps of the righteous are ordered by God. If you put that together with His omniscient understanding of time, you’ve got a rock solid plan. And if you went a little off-track, off-plan, for a spell, you don’t have to sweat it: God knew that you would do that. He built in an allowance for that. He doesn’t just know the number of hairs on your head, He knew the numbers of hairs on your head for every second of your life before He created Adam. God’s plan is so good, we can’t mess it up.

P.S. If I disappear in my 40s, check the Pat Jones YMCA’s records from 1999. 

The Steps of a Writeous Man

I have always wanted to be a writer. When we went around the room confessing our dreams for the future in my high school Sunday School class, I said, “I want to write a hilarious novel.” I was working on a hilarious novel at the time. I never finished it, although I did get over a hundred pages into it. And it was hilarious. It didn’t make any sense, but it was hilarious.

I once had an interview to be a copy writer for a company that sells vacation packages. Before the interview, I got pretty excited about this opportunity. I already had a wife and three kids, a degree in English, most of a Master's degree in writing and a job. But no one was paying me to write, and I wanted to be a writer.

I think the man interviewing candidates was the manager of the branch. He was definitely in charge of all the people in the building. It was a small company. He could have been the founder of it. He was in his late 30s and wore a suit like a small dog wears a sweater--unnaturally. He had a double chin hanging over his collar. His tie was crooked and it was tied crookedly. His pants were too baggy in the legs and too tight in the buttocks. He called out “Eric Broswell” in the antechamber (lobby) and brought me into his office without even looking at me. His office had magazines lying on the desk, on a chair, on a coffee table, and on a sofa in the back of the office. At least nine dead and stuffed animals were placed haphazardly around the room--on top of tables, magazines, chairs and the sofa. His office wore work like he wore a suit. He gave me a rubber fish handshake and told me to sit down on the only un-cluttered chair. He plopped down in the chair behind his desk, stuck a pen in his mouth, leaned back and crossed his legs. He still hadn’t looked at me; he didn’t look me in the eye once during the entire interview. Instead, he continuously flipped through my resume and asked me questions that could have been answered by looking at my resume. Questions like, “Where did you go to college? Oh. (Sour face) Evangel.” And, “Did you even graduate from college?” He asked me--with his pen in his mouth--why I would leave the good company I was working for (and still work for) to work for his company. I told him that I would do so because I wanted to be a writer. He acted as if this were the wrong answer. He wrapped up the interview and told me they would get back to me after the writers he already had on staff had a chance to look at my writing sample.

I knew immediately that he was not going to call me. And, if he ever had called me, I knew that I had to turn that job down. I was disappointed. I had thought that this was going to be my chance to become a real writer. Instead, I had wasted an afternoon. An afternoon-and-a-half if you count the hair cut the day before. Throughout that interview, I could hear God telling me that this was not the place for me.

Now it is several years later, and I still don’t have a full-time writing job, but I know that I am working where I am working because God’s plan is better than mine. God’s path is not a shortcut, but it isn’t a long-cut, either.

Don’t Bury Your Talent

We recently had a talent show at our church. I did not attend. I was at work. My wife and children went, and were so impressed that they showed me the highlights on YouTube. This particular talent show was the final week after a series of talent shows in competition for a $10,000 scholarship to the college of the winner’s choice. I was impressed by what I saw. And a little heartbroken. Why? Because these kids can sing, write music, play instruments, etc., and I’m afraid that they are going to go to college and become accountants or something.

Don’t go to college and ditch your dreams for a more practical profession. Sure, someone has to be a doctor. And there are those who dream of being a doctor. They don’t dream of having prestige, an M.D. stuck to the end of their names and a large paycheck. They actually love the idea of being a doctor. They would want to be a doctor even if “doctor” had no more prestige or money attached to it than “mechanic.” There are people who love working on cars, and dream of becoming mechanics. If that’s your dream, do it. On the other hand, lots of kids dream to be actors, directors, writers, singers and musicians. These are the kind of dreams that are abandoned as impractical. More people struggle every day to become an actor, a musician or a writer than there are slots available. So someone is going to be disappointed. But these jobs are more important than most people realize.

What impacts culture the most and the fastest? Music, movies and television. If more Christians were part of the mainstream media, the culture would be pushed toward a more Christ-centered culture. Too many of us have an Amish view of life: “Let the heathens enjoy their music and we will enjoy our music without any electricity (I threw that part about electricity in just to make the metaphor work). We need to start loving Jesus in public, and I’m not sure how public having our own subculture is. I wonder how many people were introduced to Jesus through POD versus how many were introduced to Him through dcTalk. And I’m not talking about altar calls at their concerts. That’s just a step in the evangelistic process. I’m talking about planting the seed in as many minds/hearts as possible. I’m talking about affecting an entire culture. The actors, writers, directors, singers and musicians are the people who affect our culture.

Christian kids need to fill these positions. Let the non-Christians be the disappointed ones. If you have an unrealistic dream and you don’t have any dependents, you can chase that unrealistic dream. Start early. Work hard. The best at any job are never the lazy ones. And the less likely you are to break into that profession, the harder you have to work at it. Take what talent and desires God has given you, and don’t let anything push those away from you. There will be a point at which you will have to settle for a job to support your family, but that is not as soon as most people think it is. It is not right out of high school, or even right out of college. Spend some time trying to do the remarkable thing before you settle into the regular world, filled with cubicles and stain-resistant rugs.

My wife asked me why I was crying when I was watching the video with the winner of that talent show and when I told her, she scoffed at me delicately. She is probably correct to scoff. Just because the winner of the talent show is going to college doesn't mean she is not going to use her talent. She could still become a worship leader or a professional recording artist. And it could even be God’s plan for her to become an accountant. And if she loves accounting as much as she loves to sing, it probably is. I just hope that she never buries her talents in the dirt to settle for something practical.

Brave

I have been brave. I'm brave all the time. For example, I interview musicians for ONCOURSE Magazine. I have been doing this for two years now, and I am terrified every time. I can't sleep the night before I do an interview. I can't eat the day I do the interview. All I can manage to do within two hours of an interview is pace like a caged animal. But I always do the interview.

Doing an interview over the phone is a pretty low-risk scenario. I'm sure there are those of you who cannot believe that anyone could be afraid of talking to a stranger on the telephone. I was thinking today about something that a couple of kids in the Bible did that would have terrified even the boldest of us.

The virgin Mary had a baby boy, and she and Joseph named him Jesus.

We tend to think of Mary in supernatural terms, but she wasn't supernatural. She wasn't an angel, and she wasn't perfect. She was probably 14, and she probably prayed a lot, but otherwise she was just a plain old kid. Think of the terrible things girls in your high school go through when one of them gets pregnant. Mary potentially had it even worse. She could have been stoned to death.

Joseph was still a teenager himself, and when he found out Mary was pregnant, he decided to dump her. He knew it wasn't his kid. He hadn't touched her, and he didn't want anybody thinking he had. But the angel came and told him to marry her. So, Joseph obeyed. What did people--Mary and Joseph's parents and friends and neighbors--think? That Mary was still a virgin and had become pregnant with God's child through a miracle? That Joseph was not the father? Not likely. No matter what they told no matter how many people, everyone was going to believe that Joseph got a little too close to Mary a little too soon. Now they could both be stoned to death.

The trip to Bethlehem on a donkey doesn't sound too bad. But remember how old these young adults are? If they were to make the pilgrimage to Bethlehem today, they still would be riding on donkeys; they would've been too young to get driver's licenses. And they would be more likely to meet a highway robber on the road than a highway patrolman. 

They got to Bethlehem and had to deliver the child in a manger. The Bible doesn't mention any doctors or midwives. Joseph was the one telling Mary to push. A teenage boy delivering a baby in a cave is the kind of heroic news on "Good Morning America" these days.

And then, after a couple of years in Bethlehem, the wise men came. That night, Joseph, still a teenager, was told by an angel to flee from Bethlehem to Egypt. Now the teens were immigrants. It's starting to sound like a show on the WB. 

Mary and Joseph were brave. They were teenagers being used by God to change the whole world. Even the history of the whole world. They were changing not only the future, but the past. Everything the Old Testament said about the Passover lamb or the son of David was going to be understood in a whole new way. They didn't exactly understand the rewards, and they knew they were risking death, but they continued to trust God every step of the way. They were brave, godly teenagers. And they raised God's son.

Becoming an Expert

I used to write a lot of poetry. I wrote so much poetry, I even started to read poetry. As far as I can tell, that’s the main audience for a poet: other poets. I started writing poetry in high school. I probably wrote a lot of “Roses are Red,” poems even in junior high. Poems like:

Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Your shirt has polka dots
So does your face.

I was really into the twist at the end: the surprising insult combined with the surprising non-rhyme really tickled my funny bone.

My junior and senior years of high school I really amped it up. I wish I had an example of one of those poems to share, to make my point a little more dramatic, but I think I threw them out in a fit of embarrassment a few years ago. Those high school poems were really, really terrible. I didn’t realize how bad I was at writing poetry at the time. I knew they weren’t the greatest poems, but I hadn’t yet realized they were actually the worst. So, in college, I kept writing poems. All the way through college, I wrote poems. Here’s a poem I wrote after staying up all night as a college freshman:

Ink on Nose

When I write on my nose, I wonder whether the ink grows over a pimple.
Pimple, dimple, hemple, stemple,
nose grows
ink knows
pimple flows to my toes.

Not good. Not only was I writing bad poetry, I was also still fighting acne. It was a cry for help.

By the time I graduated from college, though, I was a really good poet. I got the prime reader’s slot at poetry gatherings. I won a poetry contest. I even briefly considered becoming a professional poet (but, then again, there aren’t many professions I haven’t briefly but seriously considered).

Between the first batch of poems I wrote in high school and the last poem I wrote while I was still in college, I wrote hundreds of poems. I spent thousands of hours explaining to the poetry-reading public (other poets) how much I wanted a girlfriend. I got better at writing poetry because I wrote a lot of poetry. The same principal applies to every endeavor we have on this earth. And we know it. It’s not a surprise. If you want to be good at anything, you have to practice. There’s a popular book that I have heard quoted dozens of times, while I have not even bothered to learn the title, that says that it takes 10,000 hours of doing an activity to become an expert at it. Professional athletes, comedians and writers talk about this all the time, and I try to write for at least a couple of hours everyday because I want to be an expert at writing.

Until today, I never considered becoming an expert in prayer. I have wanted to pray. I have wanted to talk to God and to hear from God, but it never occurred to me that I might get better at those things, that I could become an expert in prayer. Prayer is not something you produce, like a poem, and it is not something you can perform, like a pass in a football game. It feels a little irreverent to say that we should practice at prayer, but, like writing, practicing the act is the same as performing it. The only way to get better at writing is to write, and the only way to get better at praying is to pray. There are no drills. But if God created us so that it takes practice and commitment and determination to become good at writing poetry and shooting baskets and even talking to girls, then it makes sense that it takes practice to become a prayer expert. It takes time. It might even take 10,000 hours. It will be the best-spent 10,000 hours of my life.

I Tried to Give Blood

I tried to give blood, once. I went to the donor center, and stepped right up and sat in the chair and they looked at my arm and said, “You’ve got good veins.” I knew I had good veins. I had pride in my veins back then. My daily habit at that time was to lift weights for about an hour-and-a-half a day, then use the elliptical for 30 minutes a day and then swim for 45 minutes a day. It was an insane work out, and if I had known how muscles work I would not have done it that way. My muscles weren’t getting much bigger because they never got to rest. But my veins were sticking out more because I was running out of body fat--and water.

I’ve been reading the book of Job this week. Job’s three “friends” were actually sinning while telling him how sinful he must be because they were quite proud of how sinless they were. Anyway, I was no Job: I was proud of my veins.

The nurse told me I had nice veins, stuck the needle in my arm and told me to let her know if I had any dizziness or light-headedness. I told her almost immediately that I had these issues. She told me to count down from 100 or say the alphabet backwards--I guess to keep my mind focused on something--and then I started hearing static. I told her I was hearing static, and then I passed out. When I came to she was putting a blanket over me. I had only been unconscious for a couple of seconds, but it was long enough for me to pee my pants.

That’s right. I peed my pants. Right there in front of everybody. She didn’t put the blanket over me because she thought I might be chilly; she put the blanket over me to hide the pee spot. They gave me a gigantic pair of scrub pants to wear, and I put them on and sat there eating cookies and drinking kool-aid for a couple of hours, trying to recuperate enough to drive home.

And I peed on myself for nothing. They threw the bit of blood they had taken from me in the trash. But I’m no Job. I didn’t return the pants for about eight years.

I wonder sometimes if I have anything to add to the world at large because I haven’t encountered much personal tragedy. (I am aware that the story of when I peed my adult pants is comic, not tragic.) Struggles create character, just like exercise builds muscles. We may need a rest time between struggles in order to allow our character to fully heal between bouts, but without hard times we become soft people. That, perhaps, is part of the reason that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is to put a camel through the eye of a needle. And, perhaps, it’s why so many Americans have trouble believing in anything; most people in the middle and upper classes have never really struggled. We’ve never had to believe in anything. We’ve got our beds and our food and our iPhones. We even have extra blood. Who needs God?

Rough times can sharpen a person into a useful tool for God. Why did bad stuff happen to Job? For the glory of God. No matter what happens, I am convinced that everything will ultimately bring glory to God. Even peeing my pants.

Fear

I am afraid of snakes. I have always been afraid of snakes. Just a few weeks ago, my wife and children witnessed a pair of garter snakes mating in our backyard. One of my children ran into my room and excitedly told me what they had discovered. I said, "Oh no," and then I put my feet up on the bed, away from the ground. I did not go outside. Last Sunday, they found a turtle in the backyard. I got up and looked at the turtle. Turtles are cute. Snakes are gross.

I am also afraid of God. Such fear, David the psalmist-king says, is the beginning of wisdom. What does he mean by that? I have heard many times that all is meant is “respect.” I think it is much more than that. Reading through the Bible, you will find that when people encountered God--whether they were holy men or not--they freaked out. Some examples: When Moses encountered God on the mountain, the entire crowd of Israelites thought they were going to die. They begged Moses to tell God not to do that again. When Daniel saw God, he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel touched him and told him to get up. When Ezekiel saw God, he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel touched him and told him to get up. When Isaiah saw God, he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel told him to get up. (Do you see a pattern?) When Jesus stood on the mountain and Moses and Elijah stood on it with him, Peter and James and John couldn’t believe their eyes, and then God the Father showed up, too, and the three disciples fainted, and didn’t regain consciousness until it was all over. John the Revelator, on the Isle of Patmos, saw God, and he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel came and touched him and told him to get up.

Falling on their faces was not an act of respect, or of reverence, it was their reaction to something terrifying. My favorite story like this is about Jesus Himself. The guards and priests’ servants and the rest of the mob that accompanied Judas to arrest Jesus did not have any respect for Him. They did not revere Him. 

Check out John 18:2-6: 

Now Judas, who betrayed him, knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with his disciples. So Judas came to the garden, guiding a detachment of soldiers and some officials from the chief priests and the Pharisees. They were carrying torches, lanterns and weapons. 
Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and asked them, "Who is it you want?"
"Jesus of Nazareth," they replied.
"I am he," Jesus said. (And Judas the traitor was standing there with them.) When Jesus said, "I am he," they drew back and fell to the ground.”

“I am,” of course, is the name God gave Moses when Moses saw the burning bush. Jesus told them that He was God, and they were terrified. Did you ever wonder why the only person that got hurt when this mob came to arrest Jesus was the servant that Peter attacked? Even after Peter attacked him, nobody got stabbed or beaten down with a club. Jesus had already disarmed them. They were afraid.

Next time you have some time alone with the Lord, think about how awesome and holy our God is, that His very presence would knock you on the floor with your teeth chattering. That thought will give you a holy fear, and it will help in your worship of our awesome God.