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I stinking love A Tale of Two Cities.

Like most high school juniors, I was pretty skeptical when Mrs. Lindsey trotted it out and told us that we were in for four or five weeks of Dickens. We were warned that it was written in the 1800’s, which is a long time ago. We were also warned that it was British, which meant that it would be like Pride and Prejudice in that I wouldn’t understand it and girls would have to pretend to like it or else face ostracism from their faux-romantic peers.

But Mrs. Lindsey did us right. Instead of ramming it down our throats, she made every effort to engage my class in reading the book the way it was originally written: as a serial novel, published in weekly installments. She gave us handouts that filled in obscure historical details. She told us the history of the French Revolution, which I was sadly ignorant of up ’til that point. And she tried like mad to get us to connect all the cool literary dots in that book: themes and images like the myriad Jacques vs. the elite Monsignors, Madame Defarge’s mysterious knitting, the “golden thread” that represents Lucie and her connection to each of the major male characters in turn, and the parallel character arcs of Darnay and Carton.

I ended up loving it way more than I thought possible. Seeing the unity of the story, how plot threads dodged all over the map and finally got resolved and tied characters to each other in new and unexpected ways and made you feel super-bittersweet and pensive and introspective but ultimately all full inside when it finished… It got me from loving books to loving literature. It paved the way for me to be an English major. It set me up to devour modern hyper-plotted serials like Lost.

(None of the above sound particularly useful, I’ll admit.)

But the best part of the book I think is its dogged determination to advocate redemption. And that deeply affects me, because it bolsters and affirms my belief in redemption as a neccesary reality for humans. And it reflects the uber-truth of redemption that God is right now working in our race. The whole first act of the book is titled “Recalled to Life.” And the whole drama of human existence is the same, as God does that for our wildly flailing, ultimately needy souls.

Brownwood High was not worthy of Connie Lindsey.

Anyway, metaphor over.

My personal recalling to life, I think, finished yesterday.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

See, I got some good advice after my spiritual eulogy a couple weeks ago: God is probably trying to do some fine detail work in my soul, and I just need to stay still for Him and let Him chisel me and listen closely until I knew He had something to say to me for sure.

So I pretty much shut down whatever superfluous or personally-motivated thing I’ve been interested in for the past few months. I didn’t make contact with my PC host family. I put aside a personal creative project I’d been working on over the holiday break. I tried to concentrate on just being all in at the Forge, listening to and absorbing whatever came my way.

Last week was great progress for me toward spiritual vitality. Practicing God’s presence and beginning to love the Gospel again were invigorating.

But last night, I had a conversation with my host family dad, a PC guy named Phil, that snapped me back to full attention. He asked me how my skill was coming.

Now, the Forge requires us to work on and develop a skill that we didn’t previously possess when we came in the program. I like making pictures, but I don’t want to starve for a living. So I chose graphic design. I just haven’t reported in to the media guys to work on my project for a while.

So I confessed that to Phil. He then asked me what I was doing with his nephew.

Now his nephew… His nephew was one of my first campers ever. And he was the only one who I’ve managed to keep in contact with over the years. Only thing is, this young guy doesn’t have much of a positive male influence in his life outside of Phil. And Phil has five nuclear kids of his own to pour into. And a job. And etc etc.

But I have plenty of free time, AND a relationship with the kid, AND I’m in a freaking discipleship program. I’M supposed to be learning how to disciple while I GET discipled, right?

So Phil then asked for my help to pour into his nephew. And after we talked a little more about other stuff regarding my Forge experience and what I was learning, he said in the most non-threatening and positively motivating of terms,

“I am here for you. To be a resource, to be a refuge, whatever you need. But you can’t wait for me to come to you anymore. You have to come to me.”

And then it clicked. Phil is Pine Cove’s director of Marketing, and Pine Cove has a stellar media department under his supervision that I can be learning from. His wife oversees a homeschool collective, and I’m interested in becoming a teacher. His older daughter and I have started to become friends, but I haven’t made the effort to hang out with her recently. His nephew is hungry for mentorship, and I’ve got the time and the relationship background with him.

And most of all, I realized that as Phil was calling me out for essentially brushing off a host family that was EAGER to spend time with me and invest in me, he was doing so in this really weird way. I didn’t feel like I was getting downed on. I felt excited. Like Phil was saying, “I know you’re great, and you can be doing better than this. So what are you waiting for? God has called you to hang out with my family this year, so TAKE ADVANTAGE. Come!”

He was motivating me. And it was working. He wanted to invest in me. He wanted me to take the opportunity to spend time with his family. He was opening his life to me, and I realized I needed to stop holding back…

So as we parted, I drove home with ridiculous excitement banging around in my guts.

I spent all last semester getting my adult sense of identity settled. I spent the past two weeks trying to come back to spiritual life. And now, it’s like God’s inviting me through Phil’s family to exercise most of my major passions and to be invested in, but this time, for HIS glory.

That kind of stuff makes me feel alive again.

And that’s a far, far better thing than I’ve had before.

MY FRIEND MANDI AND I SHOWED UP at the mall the other day to share the Gospel. Neither of us really wanted to. For one, we were tired. We also, strangely, had both felt mediocre at the PC staff worship service earlier that afternoon. (Myself, I would have gladly rather napped than forced my mouth to sing; my mood was sour.) And we only had a little hour-and-a-half window of time before we had to be back at camp for some Forge event.

So not much rest, nor much happiness. And so Mandi suggested we pray, which we did, eyes open at our little food court table so we didn’t look weird to the rest of the self-respecting citizen shoppers at Broadway Square. And then we went to share Christ, after agreeing to meet back up at 5:30.

Mandi sat next to a nice lady waiting at a couch. I decided to wander off to strike up a conversation in the mall bookstore. Looking at the directory, I found that Tyler must hate culture and the arts, because they didn’t have one. (Well, that may have been due to the gi-normous Barnes and Noble directly across the parking lot. Maybe.)

So I did the next best thing and went to the CD/video shop. I figured I’d start looking at bands and CD’s I liked, and maybe I’d run into someone looking at similar stuff and we’d naturally branch a convo from there. It would be a great plan.

There was a guy at the Rap section when I walked in who I wanted to talk to, but then I figured owning a limited selection of Kanye West, plus one T.I. song, wasn’t enough background for me to fake mutual musical interest. So I swung into Pop/Rock territory. There, I encountered nary a soul, but did watch the evolution of Destiny’s Child over five album covers as I flipped through the racks. Did you know they started with four members? Beyonce was the head diva even back then, I think.

At that point, our friend Stephen showed up. He had agreed to meet us at the mall earlier, but apparently ran a little late. He and I then took off to the clothing stores, hoping for convo opportunities there. We found that we couldn’t tell if PacSun’s featured skinny pants were meant for boys or girls. This was not a good sign, being a little keen on skinnys myself.

Then we went to Journeys. I was disappointed to find that on the day I decide to trade up, a replacement pair of Chuck Taylors will be nearly fifty bucks. Stephen and I were elated, however, to see a sweet V-neck with the face of the Savior screened on the front. Twenty-five bucks.

As we left, I realized that we had been dorking around for forty-five minutes, with no sharing of the Gospel. And I wondered why that was so hard for us, to just strike up a conversation about Christ.

YOU SEE, LIKE I POSTED LAST WEEK, a relative stranger declared my spiritual death in front of the majority of my peers. Ruminating on his pronouncement, I realized that I was guilty of making Jesus important, but not exclusively important. I was cognizant of Him, seeking Him to a good degree, but in the sense that I would have devotional time, or read Scripture, then go off to operate on my own devices, hoping I was sticking by what He said in Scripture. I was not practicing His presence; I was not living or moving or having my being in Him.

So this past week, I’ve been trying to practice an awareness and sensitivity to God’s presence moment-by-moment. It’s helped. But I’ve also still felt pretty freaking heavy at times, like the Lord is incensed with me and won’t let off. It’s been pretty uncomfortable.

For whatever reason though, things finally snapped into place at that mall— the pieces shook loose and despite my grumpy and reticent attitude, I realized I am actually in God’s presence at all times. I’m not sure why it finally happened. All I know is that, pretty suddenly, it made sense.

All times.

I was pretty sure I could be at the Forge, or at home, or with the Baylor bros or at my old church. But even in front of the CD rack! Even looking at skinny jeans. Even while listening to Taylor Swift (I am confessing this in print and not hoping for absolution). His reality was and IS accessible and valid and just simply there–

And thus, sharing the Gospel didn’t have to be something I forced. If I was communing with God, He’d be faithful to move me wherever He was working, and a conversation about Him would naturally spring forth. I really didn’t need a tactic. I needed to be in touch with His spiritual reality in the middle of a very material one.

Eventually, all three of us at the mall got to talk with people about Jesus. Tyler being a Bible Belt town, we hit up more Christians than not, but reminding a Christian of the Gospel is just as necessary as introducing a spiritually dead person to it. I myself worked my broken Spanish into a Tarzan-like conversation with a man from Mexico by way of Longview. When asking what religion he followed (really, what religion he “was,” which is really bad grammar), he told me he was Catholic and wasn’t interested in changing. I told him I didn’t think he should, as long as he believed Jesus was God’s son and the savior for our sins. I’ll count that as Gospel.

Our time limit reached, Stephen, Mandi and I left in higher spirits. We totally didn’t feel it as we started, but as we went to be faithful, we saw God show up in our conversations. And realizing that not only was God always present and I could always be mindful of Him (even at the mall), but I then realized that I need to get my butt away from Pine Cove and into the presence of “sinful men” way more often. I’m being poured into a lot as it is.

And to be faithful and dependent and to pour back out?

That sounds like a good way to be real while in a “real world” that will pass away. Because His reality underlies and outlasts it all.

And He’s real and He’s present and He’s alive forever and ever andeveramen…

(Been a while since the last; this is a long one…)

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

So up til’ now, I had thought the Christianity I experienced at this stage in life was pretty good and broad and pleasing.

I grew up Baptist. I had charismatic and Church of Christ and Methodist friends in high school. At college, I fellowshipped with the likes of Reformed and Assemblies of God and Emergent Christians.  So far, I haven’t yet touched Catholic/Orthodox traditions, but I think it’s safe to say that if there’s a worship practice floating around a mainline Christian denomination of any significance, chances are I’ve experienced it and/or am comfortable with it.

So when someone approaches me and says they have, maybe, a word from the Lord for me? Like a prophetic/no-one-but-God-could-know-this kind of thing? I’m cool with that. I listen.

Twice now, this has happened to me. (I won’t tell you what those messages contained, though they were good and hopeful and encouraging, and I trust them. I think without one of them, I wouldn’t have elected to come to the Forge.)

But I will tell you that yesterday, I came in contact with a guy whom I had a great deal of spiritual respect for… and he gave me bad news.

I was bound to go to a funeral for a friend’s dad that afternoon, and we had some detail stuff to go through for the Forge later that night. The later half of the day would have some busy-ness. I thought my morning was going to go pretty smooth, however, when I found myself in this group with a couple of friends, and this man told us that he had been praying for us, and that he had some things to speak, if we’d let him. After making sure he wasn’t gonna spiritually bull-crap us (we tested him according to 1 John 4), we said yes.

He had some encouraging/exhorting/cool things to say to the first two or three of us. But when he got to me, he told me:

“I saw you, and you were dead. There is something in you that God wants to kill. You think you’re alive, but you’re really dead. You’re maybe putting on a front. What you let people see is not who you are.”

He then proceeded to tell me that, as he had prayed through the various members of this group I was with, he came back to me and wrote down “Big Deal!” As in, I wasn’t supposed to brush this off.

What ?

I didn’t question it, but dang it if I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. My body was alive (duh), but even knowing he was speaking from a spiritual standpoint, how was I dead? I had just been thinking the night before that I’d never felt better about how my walk was going. I mean… seriously?

…DEAD!?!

I only could mull it over for an hour or two before we set out for that funeral (which, if this was really God speaking, was a case of really interesting timing). And as you can imagine, after we got out, I felt like I really needed to talk to somebody.

So I processed it with my Forge director, a guy named Matt who’s pretty wise. And he gave me some good advice. And I ran it past a couple of the Forge guys during the day; like, “how AM I spiritually dead?” There, I got some encouragement.

But I wasn’t going to have much peace without talking to the guy who’d delivered the message in the first place. So I went back to him and asked for some more explanation.

He assured me that this sensation he’d got didn’t mean I was going to punt the bucket anytime soon. (Right. I wasn’t worried about that). But he said it was a spiritual deal, and that if I wasn’t careful, I was about to “get taken out of the game,” so to speak. My death wasn’t neccesarily right at the moment. But I was well on my way to being dead.

That friend’s dad’s funeral was dancing around my subconcious. The man we honored there had fought cancer for three years before passing on. The connection probably just couldn’t help but be made.

“So it’s like I’ve got this spiritual cancer that’s going to kill me, and God wants to kill THAT?” I asked.

Yes. That was it.

Later that night, I read the letter to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, thinking I might find some insight. And to the angel of the church in Sardis, it says:

      These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you. Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. He who overcomes will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out his name from the book of life, but will acknowledge his name before my Father and his angels. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

I think I’m guilty, friends, of letting Jesus Christ become A Very Important Thing among 3 or 4 other Very Important Things. Jesus matters a lot to me. So do the attendant lifestyle-behaviors of reading Scripture, loving my neighbor, praying, and seeking Him in my daily life.

But He isn’t The Only Thing to me, which He demands to be in His people’s lives from the outset.

The Israelites pray the Sh’ma prayer, which we’ve been learning here. It is also the Greatest Commandment, according to Jesus– “Hear, Oh Israel! Adonai your God… Adonai is (God) alone. Love Adonai your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and all your might.”

And I’ve been blind to that fact. The Lord alone.

I’d rather God have told me something cool, like I was dead to sin. But if my spiritual cancer is quickening, if I think I can balance Jesus’ Lordship and power with other things and that be cool…

… then I need to come back to life.

And the good news is, my God is in the business of ressurection.

Three weeks of disposable time, where I get to call the shots on my schedule!?! It’s beautiful.

I’ve already burned like two of them doing:

-a weekend of Christmas camp at Outback

-actual Christmas with the family

-home video watching to understand my past and freaking out at how awkward I was when I was a seventh grader

-photographer’s assistant work in Fredericksburg with my friend, Chris. He had to shoot a wedding and wanted a friend to keep company on the drive. I got to handle his Nikon and get a few shots in and, let me tell you, since I know what the Rule of Thirds is, I’m probably now on my way to photographic greatness.

Big for me, though: going to Fort Worth to see a friend get married. I’m beginning to understand why weddings are such a big deal. In my mind, it’s kind of been, “well, why not just go to the justice of the peace and then zip out to the honeymoon?” I mean, saves you hassle, plus you get to go straight into connubial bliss.

But weddings are supposed to be, I now realize, celebrations. And reunions. And that is neat.

Most of the guys who showed up to celebrate are good friends whom I haven’t seen since graduating Baylor a couple of months back. I’ve noted that my Forge house in Tyler is beginning to feel like Home in some ways, but sometimes it becomes easy for me to compare the closeness I feel with my Baylor friends to the relationship I have with my current roommates. And Baylor friends win on the closeness meter, hands-down.

Now, it’s not a fair contest. I had four years to build relationships with the guys. By contrast, I’m only running on four months with my current community.

And I still have four to go. Plenty of bromance to be developed.

But it was refreshing. Going from graduation to camp to Forge didn’t leave a lot of time to mourn/reminisce/reflect on the college community I was moving apart from. Being mostly reunited this weekend made me realize what a gift I’ve had– guys who love each other platonically and challenge each other spiritually and dork around consistently. I have to believe Christ is glorified in these things.

And leaving their company after celebrating New Years helped me see that A) they probably will be friends for a lifetime, B) I miss the convenience of constant proximity, and C) why the heck did no one tell me that you have to start all over after you graduate?

Fortunately, I’m going back to an environment where community is emphasized. And instead of being a replacement/threat to the bonds I’ve already built, I now realize it’s a chance to practice the biggest lesson I learned at Baylor:

Love Your Brothers.

And that too… that is neat.

As the semester here starts to end, and I get ready to trade my time in the piney woods of Tyler for the Brown ones of home, I want to tell you about my house.

It’s this old four-bedroom job they built twenty years ago or so for Pine Cove directors to live in. We stuff 10 dudes in there, have a dining room table and a plastic picnic table in our living  room so everyone gets a place to sit and eat, and we light bonfires in our backyard on a nightly basis. This latter portion leads to great amounts of fun and manhood. The first time we lit said fire, we tore down an old wooden playhouse in the backyard and used it as tinder. There were cinder blocks involved. It was wanton destruction. It was rad.

We live right by the entrance to the Ranch camp, so the surrounding environment is peculiar. The girl house, holding the 6 ladies who do the Forge with us, live to the left. Behind us is a thin part of the forest, through which we can sometimes glimpse the Timbers junior high camp, and usually acquire a great view of the evening sunset. In front of us are such fun sights as the camp horse pen, an outdoor sport court, and best of all, a skatepark. It has halfpipes and everything. If I wanted to relive every fantasy from Tony Hawk Pro Skater, all I have to do is walk over and unlock the shed (and throw on smelly junior-high boy knee pads). Sk8ing is harder than it looks, though. I’m almost tempted to use the dang board as a luge or something instead.

I’ve lived in a succession of places over the past five years, and I imagine I’ll switch abodes again come next year. But I think the best part about the place is that maybe, just maybe, I’ll kind of miss it when the break starts…

… which means it’s starting to feel sort of like my home.

It’s been a good three months since “Politik.” The election is decided. The economy is scary. Gas prices have cut themselves in half. Baylor actually beat A&M. And I’ve been off the interwebs. Why?

The lazy answer is that I’m 22 years old and a recent college graduate. It’s at this point that the proper genes unlock and Responsibility slowly begins to flood my veins and innundate my very being. At the same time, I still have to fight off that old college friend, Procrastination. It’s a weird battle. Apparently at some point, the Responsibility thing wins and I do stuff like get a job and pay taxes. Until then, I do things like completely forget I’ve established a blog to keep my old circles of community up to date on life.

Whatever. Let’s shoot straight: the better answer is that, for the past 3 months, I’ve been busy getting my spiritual butt in gear in Tyler, via the Pine Cove Forge program. And honestly, I haven’t cared to share a single whit of what I’ve learned.

Suffice it to say, I walked in thinking that my next job should have to do with cartooning and wondering how much I could grow in a community-based discipleship program without actually having to get involved with the community. A lot of rough conversations and teachable moments later, and now I’ve actually opened up to the 15 other people I spend most of my waking days with. And I’m wondering if cartooning should be the only vocation I try come next year.

My paradigm has shifted a little bit. But now I feel comfortable enough, resolving some of the cognitive dissonance I’ve been walking with for the past weeks, to let you in on my life at Pine Cove.

Starting tomorrow.

Or at least some point this week.

(This stuff doesn’t happen overnight).

I’ve never really loved the political process. In tenth grade, my social studies class took a self-assesment test on party allegiance. Our teacher even drew a grid on the whiteboard so that we could mark our standing in front of the class. Most of my friends came out fairly Republican… and to my surprise, I scored on the Democratic side. “I’m sorry,” one friend told me as she patted me on the shoulder. “I know,” I said.

I then started asking God to help me come back to His way of seeing things. Literally.

See, this is in my hometown, which, being in Texas but not being named “Austin”, is fairly conservative. And why not? Being rural, we value a good work ethic. No one in town really deserves a handout, and I am being serious. I have yet to meet someone impoverished or disadvantaged enough.

Also, we are fairly old-school Christian. That means most everyone with some social standing is associated with a church, and up until recently, this county was half-dry.

In short, we value an old-school, simple way of life, and we value Jesus. 

That made it easy for me to confuse conservatism for Christianity.

Shift to my university experience, where I start getting bombarded with names like Brian McClaren, Donald Miller, Jim Wallis, Shane Claiborne. One of my freshman small group leaders winds up being a Democrat. Homeless people hang out near the resturants across from campus and– AND– someone has the audacity to invite them to a church service at an overpass… right by the boys’ dorms.

All of a sudden, Jesus starts looking like he cares about social justice and being non-offensive with the Gospel. Like maybe, not talking about it even. And y’know, he did ride into Jerusalem on a donkey.

Which brings me to now. At this stage, I think I’m now merging the best of my teetotalling and emergent eras. My desires to both spread the Gospel (share it, disciple others) and demonstrate it (give to the needy, serve the outcast) are finally about matched. And with that comes a value system that I now think is pretty moderate. My shifting paradigm isn’t an exception to what the American church is experiencing, I’m pretty sure. Mark Driscoll became one voice of influence this past year (along with Rob Bell, ha) and he would call it being “theologically conservative and socially liberal.”

With that, I realize that politics will be politics, parties will be parties, and at the end of the day, the men who make policy will, like me, have to face the obstacle of sin. And they will be imperfect as they do so. The laws we make will be flawed.

I have family that believe we must vote hard against Barack Obama and his liberal agenda, because he will stop at nothing less than wholesale socialism and the abolition of moral values. I have friends and loved ones who dismiss the Republican party as full of old fogeys and old values who only want to help the rich and suck the marrow out of the environment. 

But I will take a page from Rick Warren. Sort of. Knowing that national interests are often in the hands of folks without the Spirit, I’ve resigned myself to not vote according to values. I will vote according to leadership capability and inherent wisdom, something both of our current presidential candidates seem to possess in spades. Maybe I’m just buying into rhetoric. I don’t know.

And instead, I will invest my values and my concerns in the church. If they truly spring from Christ, and not some distorted wiring or worldview, then I need to seek Him in return to enact the changes He cares about. The poor can recieve Welfare, or they can be discipled into a change of heart. The rich can get hit with fatty taxes, or they can be moved by the Spirit to go ahead and invest in the Kingdom like crazy. I dunno. But I won’t vote values.

I will live Christ.

Well, except maybe if it comes to gun control.

God made me Texan, and I like the feeling of packing heat.

Witness: a week back home. Super-exciting it is not. But restful?

Yes.

Good connections with my fam?

You bet.

I am missing busy-ness, surprisingly enough. Part of it is having free access to a TV whenever I want, and I am abusing the privilege. I tend to plop down and let it eat my brain so I can make up for a very broadcast-free summer. But have you ever watched “Greek?” Remarkably engaging, friends. Beats “My Super Sweet Sixteen Presents: Exiled.”

At the same time, I also have freedom to turn off all distractions and just enjoy the quiet. My family is back in the throes of school and work, and I have a whole week and a half until my world speeds up again. This is prime time to process, to practice a little be-stilling and know-ing. This is what I can improve on, I think… not my capability to work a DirectTV remote (which is trickier than you’d think.)

My rest should be… purposeful… I’m thinking. And maybe that’s what I’ve been missing the whole time anyway. Purpose. The sense thereof.

God help me. I think I’m actually becoming an adult.

Four hours on the road home flew by more quickly than I thought. Maybe that’s because I had a lot to reflect on.

Our Inner City Week was ridiculously great, by far my favorite week of the summer. The kids had a lot of fun, and it was a good injection of newness to get us to the summer’s end.

It certainly wasn’t the easiest though. Seemed like every time I turned around,  we had another set of campers needing discipline. I hope that doesn’t sound harsh. You simply can’t run a camp without some watertight rules, and if those rules get broken, there need to be consequences administered in love.

That’s why I loved watching Trey Hill. He runs a ministry called Mercy Street out of Dallas, and he brought up a majority of the kids we hosted last week. And the kids respect him, love him even.

For instance, on Monday night, a camper we’ll call “TD” got mad at another camper for giving him a hard time. So he punched him in the face. TD’s counselor, “Twist and Shout,” started to take him back to the dining hall (we saw the punch but not the taunt), where I joined them as we attempted to find out why TD decided to rear back and sock his friend.

“Stop it, man!” he said as he kept trying to walk away. “I tol’ you, he talk too much! Lemme go!”

We thought we got things resolved, then TD ran away. And we had to bring him back again. Then Trey came over. TD calmed right down as Trey looked him in the eyes and got him to spill the full story.

“You know that’s not the right way to do things,” he told TD. “Violence is not how we solve our problems; it’s a dead-end street. Especially in our neighborhood. You will actually wind up dead.”

(Trey can say “our neighborhood” because he actually lives in South Dallas, right near the public housing that his kids dwell in.)

Things got better with TD, but I asked Trey what to do if that situation rose up again. To keep TD from walking away, we were restraining him by his hands and so forth. He certainly wasn’t being hurt, but even while grasping his wrists I just thought, this looks bad.

“You do have to restrain them sometimes,” he said. “It’s the nature of the beast. But when I do it, I wrap them up like this–” and here he demonstrated a hugging-type posture.

“Then when they struggle against you and try to fight, you have room to tell them, ‘No. Stop it. I’m your friend; I love you. Why are you trying to fight the one you love?’ ”

So from then on, we rocked the hug posture with trouble campers. And forgive me for romanticizing a little, but it painted a beautiful picture. Here were kids who had probably never had guys– men– hold them to a strong set of expectations, even if those were just camp rules. Since most of our campers come from generational poverty in public housing, statistically most don’t have a father present in their day-to-day.

But when they’d act up, and guy counselors would hold them in this embrace, keeping the kids in a place where they could live up to their actions, I really saw a new reflection of Jesus. Here kids were struggling, cursing, trying to flee, and you had this person holding them and saying, no. I love you too much to let you go. I’m right here with you. I am not leaving, nor are you.

It helped me to see myself in that position. Not as the embracer, but the embraced. The one who struggles against strong love and discipline. It made me thankful for those times when I spiritually feel that embrace.

We had counselors crying as the kids left on Saturday, three big charter buses full. We fought to love those kids, and it was more rewarding, I think, than any given week with some little angels out of Suburbia. I don’t know. Again, maybe I’m romanticizing.

As for now, I’ve returned to be with the family for a few weeks before I start this thing called The Forge. It’s more Pine Cove– 8 months this time– but it’s a pretty sweet program designed to teach some leadership/ministerial skills. I’m actually pumped out of my mind about it, to be honest. But before that, I fully intend to relax for the first time since Finals kicked off. Camp finished strong; but I’m ready to do nothing for a bit.

Shalom