Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.” But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!” And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”
Luke 15:25-32
Enter the stage in my life that I like to call my “Providential Poverty” stage; I was broke, barely scraping by, and developing brilliant ways to spice up the daily meal of Ramen noodles and hot dogs. Due to a concoction of pride and stupidity, I managed to lose a couple of jobs, and finding a new job proved difficult when, for the last couple of years, the only long-term position I held was terminated because of my theft. This was the most shameful and humbling (read: humiliating) time in my life – with one hand I had slapped the world and God in the face and spat out, “I don’t need You!” and then had to extend the other hand and ask for alms.
In the height of my thieving, I was working about five nights a week and taking home around $400 every night, and at that time, I had roughly $300 worth of bills every month (when you split squalor with a few roommates, squalor becomes surprisingly affordable). So, if you do your math, working three nights paid for about four months worth of bills, and working two weeks covered my rent and utilities for a year. The rest was fun money – and I had a lot of “fun” with it. The next year, when the money was gone, as I was developing a taste for dry, crunchy spaghetti as a snack, there was a very sharp familiarity in having no fun money as there was when I walked with a couple dozen Benjamins in my wallet: I was just as lonely, just as dead, just as bitter, and just as broken.
An afternoon in early spring, not many weeks after that February night arguing with God, I was sitting in the cool sunlight outside my little apartment playing my guitar by myself when my neighbor came walking by with her dog. She was an older single woman whose grey hair seemed out of place with the rest of her bright face. She sat on the log bench across from me and asked what I was playing. Confessing that I only knew a handful of songs, each consisting of only four chords, and that they were simple worship songs, I admitted that though I didn’t have much skill, I got great joy from playing them. Pleasantly surprised, she asked to which church I belonged, and though I don’t remember much about that conversation, her last word broadsided me: I had no answer to give her – there was nowhere that I belonged.
Tired of having no place to belong, and even more tired of paying for movie rentals with change from my couch, I received and accepted a job offer to teach 5th graders for a steady paycheck. Now that I was employed by the State of Texas as an educator, it was “Goodbye, poverty! Hello, slightly-lighter degree of poverty!” Now that I was able to afford the essentials that a young man needs to live, like high-speed internet and Hot Pockets, God began teaching me a lesson that, in retrospect, didn’t take that long for it to “stick”: money, trinkets, toys, and the thrill that they bring are utterly, ultimately void. Whether my pockets were full, empty, or somewhere in between, the person looking back at me in the mirror was exactly the same. When I had money, I threw money around and was entertained and distracted; when I was broke, I was trying to get my hands on more and was busy and distracted. It was always at night by myself, with the sound of the rhythmic ricketing of a ceiling fan filling the room as random headlights flashed on my bedroom wall through the blinds that the emptiness in me was so loud and heavy that I seemed pinned to the bed. It was in the quiet dullness of the mornings that I avoided the mirror every bit that I could. A man deep in debt hates the sight of a checkbook, and when the bill collectors hound him, the sound of the phone ringing brings dread; this is how I felt at the thought of having to look at myself, of having to examine who I had become, because I knew that if I were tried I would be found terribly wanting. This followed me to the small town in which I had accepted a teaching job.
Now, closer to home, my dad began to beckon (though it felt like hounding) me to join my family on Sunday mornings, and I eventually relented. Sitting next to them, I found myself in the place and among the people that I had sworn off two years prior, and they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.
To be continued…again again…
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