AM I VISIBLE? A busy Hollywood street corner. Rush hour traffic going nowhere fast. I catch glimpses of him through passers-by. Students hurrying home. Women in high heels and pencil skirts. Fathers with daughters on their shoulders. Children helping mothers carry bags filled with pumpkin pies, cranberries, and Thanksgiving turkeys.

No one stops. No one notices.

AM I VISIBLE?

“Yes,” I say, holding out a few extra dollars toward him. “You are.”

His eyes open. He smiles. “You read my sign.”

“I did.”

“For me?” He asks, nodding at the cash in my hand.

“For you.”

He takes the money. “I wrote visible instead of invisible. Did you realize that?”

I hadn’t.

“People see right through you out here. They make eye contact, and look away. Like they just saw something they weren’t supposed to see. They go to their phones. They look at the sky. They run across the street. Anything to forget they saw me. I’ll tell you, that’s worse than being invisible.”

I’m looking at everything but him, trying not to think of the ten other homeless men I passed before I finally stopped here. The much too small white puppy sleeping next to him, she can’t be more than twelve weeks old. Her precious white and curly fur is going gray and dirty. She sleeps on her side in a bed he’s created from torn clothes and a pillow from his socks, tucked in so perfect and delicate, I resist the urge to poke and see if she’s real.

“My sign used to say that.”

“Say what?” I fear I’ve missed something he’s said, my thoughts frantic about the dog.

“Invisible. My sign used to say invisible because I was mad. Now it just says visible.”

“Does your dog need any food?”

He laughs. He’s missing the left front tooth and the three that are supposed to be there next to it. “When people stop, if they stop, the only thing they ask: ‘Is the dog okay?’” He pats the black gym bag on his right. “I’ve got more dog food than I know what to do with. I really appreciate you asking, but sometimes I’ve got to say no.

He laughs again at what you might guess is the idea of a homeless man saying no to anything.

AM I VISIBLE?

“People care more about this damn puppy than they do me. Got to make sure the puppy has food.” He pats her tiny head, holds up the cash I just gave him for me to see. Like I’d forgotten about it. “God bless you.”

“I’m headed into the store. Is there anything else you need?” I’m clumsy with my words, trying to recover from being just another nameless face asking after the dog and forgetting the owner is homeless too.

“Muffins.”

“Yeah? Anything else?” There’s no way he wants just muffins.

“Just muffins. Those multi-berry kind.”

“Multi-berry.”

“Yup.”

“You got it.”

AM I VISIBLE? I’m thankful that I am. I’m thankful that I don’t have to sit on a street corner, hungry and ignored. I am thankful my words don’t fall on deaf ears when I speak. I am thankful for the ability to see. To truly see what’s around me. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I pretend I don’t see them. The homeless. They look right at me, and I look the other way. I look down at my phone. It’s too inconvenient to stop. Maybe I don’t have any extra cash on me. Just plastic. That’s always my excuse. I pretend they are invisible.

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction…” James 1:27

I like when this verse refers to the fatherless as orphans. I used to think of orphans as something that only existed in Africa. But there are orphans all around us. The fatherless are everywhere. Visible. Right before our eyes.

I emerge from the store, four fresh-baked, multi-berry muffins in tow. I cross the street. His eyes are closed again. I hold the muffins out. “Here you are, my friend.”

“Wow. Thank you.” He takes the package, cracks it open, and bites into a muffin the way you’d imagine Eve bit into that apple. But I doubt the consequences will be as dire.

I’m halfway home when I realize I never got his name. I try to forgive myself for not engaging further. I take comfort in picturing him laying down to rest, for he can go to sleep tonight knowing full well that he is, indeed, visible.

Copyright © November 2012, Make It MAD

I promised a Part II about what I learned about the church while seeking God outside of it, but writing as a conclusion about the churches I thought were doing it right actually seemed wrong. Why? Because a church I feel is “missing the mark” today is also the same church where I died and was born again.

Allow me keep this final observation on the church simple.

We’ve been gathering on Sunday to celebrate as far back as 40 A.D. because Sunday is the day the Christ conquered the grave. The price of our misguided hearts was paid by someone else. We were saved, and that someone else is still slated to return, as He promised He would, and worthy of celebration. But when He didn’t return as soon as we anticipated, perhaps we had to make some changes regarding where and how we gathered because more and more of us kept showing up to celebrate, and we didn’t know what to do with them all. Have you ever played the game Telephone? Put twelve people in a room and they are guaranteed to screw it up. Now put twelve thousand in that same room… Twelve million…

I think in 40 A.D. we showed up on Sundays for one reason: to celebrate the fact that everything was going to be okay.

We were built for it. Unfortunately, when we show up today, it’s not always what we find. The guilt I found in all the churches I’ve attended, I believe it creeps its way in to our hearts when the celebration fades out. When we stop believing everything is going to be okay.

What did I learn about the church while seeking God outside of it?

That people are still showing up to celebrate after all these years even though the church is flawed and broken and beautiful and has a shameful, ugly side to it that I’ll bet it wishes it didn’t have and repeatedly tries to hide. Just like me. Just like you. Just like always.

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I remember the moment I believed I’d finally become a mature, God-honoring Christian. I was in a multi-million dollar, cushioned-seat, air-conditioned sanctuary, where the pastor had just invited another member of his leadership team to the stage to give a ten minute sermon about tithing before the actual sermon began. It was right after the rock band performance (they were excellent, by the way) where the worship leader said in the middle of his power ballad cover of a David Crowder song, “Close your eyes and put your hands in the air. It’s just you and God here,” even though his face was plastered in true 1080 high definition on two 15 foot screens hanging above the platform. “God?” I asked, looking up at him. “I can see your pores.”

When the brief message about the importance of tithing began, I was informed if I wasn’t tithing ten percent, I was, in fact, “…robbing God. All He asks is for 10 percent and you can keep 90.” He concluded with, “That’s a pretty fair deal, if you ask me.” He then quoted Malachi, God opening the windows of Heaven and such and such, raining down riches and money and a new car upon your head.

Today I wonder if the underground churches in China, and the missionaries in Africa are preaching about tithing. I figure they mustn’t be since they’re underground and whatnot. Probably a direct result of robbing God.

Needing a new car and not wanting to steal from The King of Kings who halts the waves and knows the name of every star, the very God who could snuff me out of existence, and rules all of Heaven, Earth and Hell; the God who created the very Destroyer who wreaks havoc, the blacksmith who forges against me – that God – I didn’t want to rob Him of what was already His. He deserved His ten percent of my paycheck. A tip for keeping up the good work. Just like tipping my barista for a latte well made.

I make tithing a regularity in my life out of fear, guilt, and the desire to show the church I am on board with wherever their ship is sailing.

One of the first churches I attended outside of Los Angeles was in Portland. I ended up spending a few months in the Pacific Northwest during my travels, and made it a priority to attend this smaller, stripped down gathering of individuals seeking Christ as often as I could. But there was one particular thing about this church gathering I couldn’t quite grasp at the time. No one tithed. And no one even made mention of an offering. When I introduced myself to the pastor, he invited me out for a cup of coffee. At the end of our conversation and lattes,I casually inquired about why he never asked for an offering. “Well, I used to,” he answered. “The buckets are still at the doors on the way out, but I don’t ask. People will give if their heart is right with Christ. Your personal relationship with Jesus makes you generous. Not any message I’m ever going to preach about generosity. I’d rather people not give at all instead of giving out of guilt.”

It’s been months since I have returned to church. I didn’t take time away to stage an insurrection, start a petition, or try to fix a thing. I simply eliminated the Sunday Morning Routine from my life, and continued on in my relationships with Jesus, my wife, and my fellow Christian and non-Christian friends alike. It wasn’t planned or caused by pent-up aggression. I stopped going because I grew tired of looking for a church I felt I could call home. I spent the entirety of 2011 making the streets and the people I found inhabiting them my church. It would be fair to say that after such an experience, it’s been difficult getting back into the normal Christian swing of things. But to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I want to.

My last Sunday at church, I went recommendation of a friend who thought it would be exactly what my wife and I have been looking for. At the beginning of the service someone got up to say a few words about his pending trip to Haiti. I can’t recall what compelled him to go, but I think it had something to do with the following statement he made: “Christ calls us to be the salt of the earth. But what happens to salt when you keep it in a container? It starts to stick together and becomes a useless clump. This is what happens in too many of our churches. We clump together as Christians, only serving each other and our building, instead of spreading ourselves out as we were meant. We are the salt of the earth. Not the salt of this particular block.”

I had lunch this week with a friend named Bob. I told him about the salt clumping together. He had this to say: “Back when the church first started, it was lead by Apostles. And Apostles, what they did was build an army of believers to take out into the world. Today’s churches are lead by pastors. And pastors, they often build congregations to bring inside.”

While driving through the Midwest, I encountered a woman unhappy with the way things were going at her church. She felt as if she was being used for nothing more than a resource. “I feel neglected,” she told me. “I’ve been serving here for almost seven years now, and people just joining the team are getting treated better than me. It’s like a private club I’ve been grandfathered into whether they like it or not.”

I asked if she could bring this to the attention of her leaders. “It’s church!” I declared. “They are your friends. You should be able to express your concern.” She answered, “Well, I don’t want to cause dissension. I mean, I feel guilty. I’m just so grateful for the opportunity to be serving in God’s house. I mean, I’m being a bit selfish for wanting more recognition for the work I put into this place. After all, I’m doing this for God.” I admired her heart, yet I could’t help but wonder if God’s yard was any less important? Or what about His street? His neighborhood? His city…

Why did this woman believe serving within her local church was better than serving anywhere else? Don’t get me wrong, I love serving the local church. But God’s streets need just as much attention as His house. In fact, I would argue His streets could use a bit more attention these days.

This isn’t uncommon. Serving the church, particularly having a place on the platform, is a glorified and coveted position of servitude to the Almighty: skinny jeans, great hair, and chiseled features preferred. Who wouldn’t want to be up there leading hundreds and thousands into prayer and worship with their Maker? I’ve never been up there, but I’m prone to wanting admiration. I can only image from up there, it’s easy to miss the mark.

On the East Coast I spent some time at a church always “casting vision.” A select group of individuals made up of the church staff, and an elite team of volunteers would gather on a specific night or between services to hear the pastor speak about his vision for the church so everyone was on the same page, affording them the opportunity to get behind his vision for his church, which was also (obviously?) God’s vision for the church.

Does God really give a different vision to every pastor? Church is church. Church is the people. Not the building. That’s nothing new. You’ve heard it before. Wherever two or more people are gathered in His name, He is there. Which means church can happen anywhere, anytime. Maybe we could cut the church a little more slack for its screw-ups if we didn’t rely so heavily on Sunday mornings to get our fill.

When it comes to pastors, it’s hard not to follow everything they say. They are leaders, after all. And God bless their called hearts. I pray every day for God not give me that job. It took an entire year on the road to come to one very important realization: You are solely responsible for your relationship with God. People don’t like to hear this sort of thing. I wrote about it in a post called Your God Experience. I realized I could not deliver God in a perfect package that would fit wonderfully into your life. The way God reveals Himself to me might not be the way He chooses to reveal Himself to you.

We don’t want to be responsible for our relationship with God because what if we’re wrong? What if we screw it up? What if we’ve already missed the signs? I think the reason mega-churches swell, the reason we buy every book every pastor writes, is because it’s so much easier to simply follow behind someone else, mimicking their lifestyle and trusting your relationship with God is good by their actions, and how they live their lives. This is no one’s fault. We’re wired this way.

I lived it for years. I put the opinion’s of others about God in place of God. I figured these leaders at my church knew God better than I did because I was so new to Christianity. I believed whatever they said about God must have be true. It was a second hand relationship. I got lazy. I only read whatever everyone else in the church was reading. I prayed when others said they were praying. I gave as others gave. I made no decisions for myself. I was simply an observer of everyone else’s relationship with God, and based my decisions and self-worth off what I saw happening in their lives.

Community groups, connect groups, bible study groups. Whatever you want to call them, they’re all the same, and every church does it. I’ve never been to a church without them. And I think they are wonderful. I love community. In fact, I believe we will perish without it. But too often these groups last for only a few weeks.

I don’t like this concept, and I met another young man who didn’t like it either. He didn’t like having a curriculum, but he saw past that. What he couldn’t see past was spending twelve weeks with a group of people, and being expected to bond with them on some deep emotional level. “I don’t want to constantly rearrange and shuffle through friends,” he said. “I want to go through my life with the same group all year round.” It reminded me of what John Eldredge wrote in Walking With God: “You can’t just throw a random group of people together for a twelve-week study of some kind and expect them to be intimate allies.”

This young man had started his own Bible study. He decided instead of bitching about the state of church connect groups, he’d try to offer change to those around him who felt the same. A group where he wouldn’t have to take attendance, no signing up or following a curriculum, and anyone could come. That meant even people who didn’t go to his church. But he feared telling anyone at his church about it. He’d been going there for over three years when we met, and he was volunteering so much, falling into such a prominent position of leadership, he feared he’d be confronted and told that it might look like the church was encouraging its members to start their own “unapproved” groups.

“I remember thinking, if anyone here tells me I can’t do this, I’m gone. And then I thought, What kind of environment am I in that I’m actually afraid to let people know I have a Bible study outside of church curriculum?”

He started out with just 6 guys. And in 8 months there were 22 regular attenders. They prayed together, ate together, and some of them lived together. They talked about whatever happened to them that week, and where God was in it all. They were honest with each other about their addictions and their sins and their doubt. They pulled their money together to help whoever was in need on any particular month. “I trusted that every single guy in that group would have my back in battle if I needed him,” he told me. “And for those 8 months, I never felt more free or safe.”

I think the church is doing a lot of things right. I grew up in the church, Vacation Bible School, youth group, weekend retreats, all of it. I found some of my best friends in the church. The reason I believed in God and realized he loved me was because a large church in the heart of Hollywood opened their doors to me. They had lights and sounds and electric guitars. They wrecked everything I thought I knew about the church, and I decided to attend regularly. I am where I am today because of them. I love the church and all her flaws. It’s beautiful because it’s not perfect, and it never will be. But guilt has no place within the church, and that’s the most common thread I have found within church exploration. Guilt for not tithing. Guilt for not serving enough. Guilt for starting your own Bible study. Guilt for struggling with sex and pornography. And guilt for finally leaving.

I don’t know how to make church right or better. I certainly don’t want to start a church. God has not given me a “vision.” The last thing LA needs is another church with a young radical pastor where a bunch of young radical hipsters can show up in hopes of meeting other young radical hipsters of the opposite sex they can eventually marry and make babies with whose feet they can put tiny TOMS made of hemp on.

I get the sense a lot of young people are going to church these days in hopes of meeting that special Christian someone. And I hope it happens for them. That’s why I was at church. Sure, God renewed my spirit, I believed in the resurrection and Christ’s offer of sins forgiven, but I didn’t serve a day of my life for Him. I didn’t volunteer to please God. I served for the church because they made it look glamourous. I served the church to meet girls because as one pretty young lady once told me, “You looked so hot today while you worshipped with your hands in the air.”

We broke up, of course. And when we broke up, members of the church staff intervened whenever they saw us hanging out together afterwards. “Do you really think that’s healthy?”

“This is what happens when you date without the intention of marriage. You make it awkward for everyone else.”

“But we’re doing life together. I’m supposed to know everything about you.”

My church validated me. My relationship with God was entirely performance-based.

After my first year at church, I was an all-star volunteer. I served seven days a week, and was two paychecks a month short of being on staff. During that time, I took a girl out on a date, and we took things pretty far physically. Afterwards, I found myself in the shower at 2 am getting drunk trying to “wash the sin off” because we’d made out, and touched each other all over. Worse, she wasn’t even a Christian. How unholy. I want to grab that Max from 3 years ago, pull his naked, skinny ass out of the shower, dump his beer in the toilet and smack him across the face. I want to tell him he is pathetic. I want to tell him he is embarrassing himself. I want to tell him, “These things happen! This is life. And that is guilt and it is NOT of God.”

I knew if the church was aware of how badly I struggled sexually, I’d never be allowed to serve. I still hold out hope today that I was wrong about that. But I’ve heard too many church stories from too many friends who were asked to “step down” until they got things under control. I want to tell that Max if there is no place at church for the broken to serve visibly, then the church has completely missed the mark.

I went on to brutally abuse that poor girl’s heart because I wanted her so badly, but I was so consumed with guilt after talking to her because she wasn’t a Christian, I would go weeks without eating.

I eventually sought help for my sexual addiction to women and pornography, and consumed the New and Old Testaments as if they were the source of life itself. It was while reading these scriptures, particularly the books of Job, Isaiah, Matthew, and Luke, that I began to desire more than my church had to offer. The God of the Bible was not the God I was hearing about each Sunday. And because I couldn’t find Him in church, I set out across the country to find Him instead.

So this here, this is my relationship with God. All I can ever do is tell you about it and show it to you, and hope that it inspires you to one day have your own personal relationship with Him too. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I don’t have the answers. Everything I have written above is merely an observation. I don’t know what is right here and what is wrong. Unfortunately, it’s so much easier to write about all the hurt I saw in the church. But I’ve seen so much good there too. My hope for what I have written here today is not to put in question everything your church is doing, but to make you look deeper into your relationship with the One who loves you most. Deeper than you’ve ever dared to go before.

No longer will one man teach another, ‘this is how to know the Lord.’ – Jeremiah 31:33-34

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I cannot define grace. I once wrote that grace is the most magnificent force on the planet for it must smother us and completely drown us before it’s capable of rescuing us.

When I think of grace, I think of depth. And when I think of depth, my mind goes to the ocean. Because just as I can’t quite comprehend grace, I can’t handle the size of the ocean either. Specifically where James Cameron traveled down to the The Mariana Trench. A flat, desert landscape fifty times greater than the Grand Canyon sitting seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Imagine the creatures Cameron must have seen! Was he the first to set his sights upon alien lifeforms lurking in the murky depths of God’s good ocean beyond anything we’d ever witnessed in Avatar? No. He saw nothing of the sort. Only, “tiny, free-swimming, shrimp-like anthropoids,” drifted by his window. At first, I was devastated by the news as Cameron reported the trench was, “a flat, desolate landscape.” Why would God create a place so deep which man could obviously reach, and not put something there that could glorify Him? Then I thought about what it’s like to wake up and see sunlight first thing in the morning. It’s painful after only eight hours of dark. What about a lifetime of dark? Cameron introduced the concept of light to this very spot for the first time in the history of the world. So I have created this helpful illustration below to show you what I presume really happened when Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench:

Just look at everything that might be down there! The creatures God so intricately designed. What’s the deal with that faceless, bald mer-man? We’ll never know! Granted there might not be any ghost mermaids or giant ocean slugs, but it gets me thinking that if God put creatures like the octopus, the giant squid, and the anglerfish down there, just think about space and how infinitely deeper it is.

Why would God create all that space and fill it with nothing but big gassy stars, and planets with an average temperature of -300 degrees Celsius? The Universe and its ever-expanding ways is one of the unexplainable miracles that made me believe in a God even though science often tries to point us to the contrary.

Christian as I may be, I like to believe in Aliens. (Disclaimer: I also believe in Bigfoot, the theory that tithing is not directly associated with our annual income, and “vision casting” makes me uneasy, so I’m no expert.) There’s a one-panel comic I once saw somewhere that made me both sad and extremely grateful for grace: an imagine of an astronaut on another planet talking to two little green men in tinfoil hats. The astronaut had brought up the subject of Christ, and the aliens respond with: “Jesus? Yeah, we know him. He stops by here once a week. We give him chocolates. Why? What’d you guys do when you met him?”

Before the Devil ever became El Diablo, he was Lucifer. One of God’s most beautiful Angels and a worship leader in heaven. He was also the first angel to truly exercise choice. Let’s imagine here that just as God created humans capable of free will, certainly God made His angels the same way. We were not designed by a God who forces any of His creations to do anything other than live. You could argue (and I believe) we’ve been created to glorify God in all we do, but that’s still our choice to do so. While Lucifer was leading worship and being beautiful, God was creating life. Lucifer, believing he was just as capable, challenged God for the throne, and God casts him out. He is the fallen star. He is the Devil. He is the Father of Lies. Could it be that Lucifer thought he could create a better world than God, and God said, “Okay, you can have this one. Go ahead and finish what I started.” ?

But God, being the jealous God that He is for us, had just lost His main worship leader and half the choir. He wasn’t about to lose some of His creation either. He knew casting Lucifer out would drastically change the course of the human race. Thankfully, he had a contingency plan: embarking on the greatest clandestine operation ever by going undercover into enemy territory disguised as an infant to make sure His precious creation isn’t lost.

What is most fascinating about this story is the end. It is written that Satan will be cast into a lake of fire for a thousand years when Heaven meets Earth. But at the end of that thousand years, he will be released and allowed to roam the Earth for a while longer, deceiving all he can. Why would God agree to such a thing? Could it be that He still believes in His fallen Lucifer? Does He still hold out hope for the Father of Lies to recognize his ways? Is grace so magnificent that it extends toward even the Devil himself? And what would happen to sin if the Devil repented?

Perplexing questions of aliens, the devil’s fate, and mermaids aside, what I do know of grace is this: Grace is vulgar, offensive, and despicable. It is unfair. It shows no favorites, and respects no boundaries. It is by far the most hypocritical part of the Bible.

Grace is Samson, a man favored by God who slaughtered an army of 1000 men with a donkey’s jawbone and still (anointed as he was) gave into temptation and slept with that Siren, Delilah, who shaved his head and stole his strength. At the end of his life, disobedient to God, eyes gouged out, bald, and chained up in a dungeon, he called on God to be used one last time. And God answered.

Grace is Moses when he parts the Red Sea, leads his people out of Egypt, speaks directly to God, and personally delivers the Ten Commandments when in the first chapter of Exodus, he kills a man with his bare hands and buries him in the desert. And when he calls on God, God still answers.

Grace is the apostle Paul, previously known as Saul prior to preaching the gospel, a Biblical contracted killer hunting down and eliminating Christians for a living.

Grace is the woman at the well, and the prostitute who hid spies in her home,

Grace is me here and now, writing this, married and breathing after all the hearts I’ve bruised, the lies I’ve told, the brothers I’ve betrayed, the churches I’ve bashed, and the addictions I’ve let control me.

Grace is the Son of Man being nailed to a tree crying out, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Grace is the thief on the cross who in the last moments of his life shouts to the Christ crucified along side him, “Don’t forget me.”

Grace is Christ’s reply to him: “On this day you will be with me in paradise.”

copyright © June 20, 2012 || Make It MAD

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read: We Can’t Go Home Again

“How have you been not going to church?” Clint asked, sipping a margarita on the back patio.

Matt leaned against the wall, taking quick, careless puffs on his cigar. The sunlight reflecting off his glasses, the cloud of smoking rising around him, he seemed more like an apparition than my friend. “I’ve hit a plateau. My relationship with Jesus isn’t any different, but it’s not any worse.”

“It’s been what, a year now?”

Matt nodded. “I don’t even think about church on Sunday. This is my community now. You guys right here. And I’m fine with that. Church is wherever I go. Wherever Jesus was standing, church was under his feet. I don’t see what the big deal is about being a Christian who doesn’t attend a church regularly.”

Clint sat back in his chair, setting the drink on the table. I watched the glass sweat beneath the sun as he spoke. “I wake up at five every morning. I spend an hour reading the Bible and praying. I eat breakfast, go to work, exercise, relax, pray, and do it all over again the next day. I don’t have any desire to go back to church right now. I’m sick of the vocabulary and the business.”

Still puffing that cigar, Matt said, “Any church is a business. It has to grow.”

“That’s why I want nothing to do with it.” Clint tugged at the hem of his shorts. They were pink and out of place at a backyard barbecue. His shorts made me want to be at the beach playing volleyball or swimming in the ocean instead of eating burgers.

“I used to go to a church that was not shy about asking for that. For money. For your time.” Eddy was standing in the corner, talking to his wife, one knee up on a chair, sunglasses on, and a beer bottle in his hand. He leaned forward on that knee with his elbows — leaning into her, his wife, like they’d just met and he was hoping to take her home. He turned to us and finished, “Look. I don’t want that. I think I want to go to a church with a lot of homeless people. There are a lot of homeless people in my neighborhood. I want to gather them together and read the Bible to them. Is that church?”

He said, “A homeless guy asked if I had any money the other day. I told him I didn’t, I never carry cash, but I would buy him lunch. I assumed, because it’s lunchtime, you’ve got to be hungry. Homeless people get up early, you know… They don’t have blinds… He hesitated like he had better things to spend my money on. This guy was high. He agreed to lunch, and he knew exactly what he wanted. He got the food. I said, ‘God Bless you, man, let me know if you need anything else.’ And it’s noon. I’ve been yelled at for four hours now by some asshole on the thirtieth floor. And this guy here, this homeless guy, this adult male, is high. He is doing the Harlem Shake, laughing and smiling, getting his lunch paid for. And right then, I hate this guy. He’s high as hell on a Monday afternoon living well, and I hate him. And then he sends back his burrito because it wasn’t made exactly how he wanted it.

So I called my dad that night. My dad’s a pastor. I said, ‘Dad, what am I doing?’ And he proceeds to give me a two hour sermon. He finishes by saying somewhere in Philippians it talks about derelicts in life. They need tough love. They need to get better. You need to enable people. Most importantly, you need to love them. That shit’s involved. It’s pretty easy to buy some dude lunch and hate him afterwards. ‘Here’s five dollars. I’m going to forget about you.’ The tough part is really helping people out with no strings attached. Expecting nothing in return. Not even a thank you. So my dad talked me down. ‘You’re never gonna end poverty, homelessness, or hunger,’ he said. ‘But when you see someone in need on the streets, it’s like being a doctor who is helping a patient that is bleeding. You solve the current problem.”

I wondered later that night if that’s what the church was meant to be all along? Our streets have been hemorrhaging since the fall of man. Perhaps we got so caught up with our rules and tithes and sin when Jesus didn’t come back as soon as we thought he would, that we unknowingly sacrificed an entirely different concept: a group of people gathering together in the name of Christ to stop the bleeding.

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read: We Can’t Go Home Again

Copyright © May 2012 || Max Andrew Dubinsky

This has lead me to wonder how I will introduce my children to Star Wars. Will I even bother? How do I protect them from the special effects crimes committed in the Special Edition trilogy? Do I let them watch Episodes I, II, and III first? Do I even tell them that Episodes I, II, and III exist? Do I cover their ears when Darth Vader shouts, “Nooooo!”? Yet, what kind of father would I be if I robbed them of the same obsessive, friendless childhood I had because of my all-consuming admiration and addiction to a galaxy far, far away? Can a child actually turn into a healthy, well-functioning adult capable of surviving in society without knowing what an Ewok or the Millennium Falcon is?

More importantly, what does it look like to live a lifetime of never knowing if Han or Greedo shot first?

Star Wars is a cultural phenomenon seemingly more popular than the story of Christ himself. I’d be willing to bet more people have heard of Star Wars than have heard the Gospels.

This is the story about that man named George Lucas, and our disgust with him as we cried out, “He raped [our] childhood!” Fortunately for me, Lucas didn’t do anything to my childhood but give me a sense of wonder. Star Wars was rocket fuel for my imagination. Today, as an adult, I cherish the memories of experiencing Star Wars as a young whipper-snapper cruising the streets in my knee pads and roller blades, making light saber noises and dressing up as Han Solo for Halloween. George’s cutting and recutting and re-imagining and releasing of the trilogy has not affected a single day of my adult life except for the fantasies I sometimes have about my wife wearing that gold, metal bikini.

I was five-years-old and in Oklahoma on a family vacation visiting relatives the first time I watched Episode IV: A New Hope. (I also discovered Dip-N-Dots ice cream and rollerblading while there, both of which, along with Star Wars, I would take back to Ohio with the intent of starting a revolution.) My oldest cousin, Shawn, grew up a fanatic. He was a teenager by the time I made it to Oklahoma, and perhaps realizing he was a bit too grown up for the Sci-Fi adventure (preposterous, you say?), I found the VHS of A New Hope stashed away in the back of his video cabinet. I took it out, turning it over in my hands, feeling the weight of its magic. I knew I had stumbled upon something special. When I showed my mother what I had found, she smiled and said, “Oh, you would really enjoy that.”

And so began my journey. In less than a year I knew the names not only of every character in every movie, but also every line of dialogue they spoke. I remembered the names and model numbers of their blasters and light sabers. I had the title of every planet in the galaxy memorized, knew the entire lineage of Luke and Leia’s family. I spoke and completely comprehended Wookie. I collected every action figure, every vehicle, Micro-Machine, Lego set, and even traded the Star Wars Customizable Card Game with my fellow elementary school student body. If only I had known American History as well as I knew Star Wars History, I might have graduated High School with honors.

Then in 1999, Jar-Jar Binks and a Yoda better suited for nightmares happened. The world shifted. There was, I’ll admit, “…a disturbance in the Force.” We’d given our money to George Lucas, and he duped us all. We tolerated and swallowed the bitter pill that was the Special Edition, but the atrocity of The Phantom Menace would not go down.

Kids, I’d heard, loved the new movie. But what about us adults? Where was our movie? Well, weren’t we all kids and teenagers the first time we saw A New Hope? That one was for us. Argue a case against Lucas all you want. In the end, he will always be a young artist who took an enormous risk on a movie he believed in when no one else did. His downfall is that he’s an artist who doesn’t know how to walk away.

I know I’m about to cause a coronary in someone by writing this, but, Star Wars is just a film. Hell, 87 minutes of Return of the Jedi is a Jim Henson Muppet movie that must have been shelved until George Lucas stumbled upon the footage in 1983 and thought, “I could make a movie out of this.”

Two years ago was last time I saw Star Wars. My friend, Dave, was 24 and still hadn’t seen the movies. I was so excited to share this piece of my childhood with him. Yet, as we watched, I couldn’t help but think, “This isn’t as exciting as I remember.” Maybe it was that CGI Jabba, or maybe, just maybe, I was finally seeing Star Wars for what it was: A movie made for the kid in all of us by a kid fresh out of college.

Somehow, screwing with the original Star Wars is like someone messing with your younger sibling. “Hey!” we shout to the bully in question. “No one messes with my brother or sister but me!”

“Hey!” we shout to George Lucas. “No one messes with Star Wars but us!” We lash out at the very man who created Star Wars like we could have done a better job. Now I’m not saying we couldn’t have. I’d have liked to have seen Episodes I, II, and III directed by David Fincher or Martin Scorsese. Did you catch Topher Grace’s cut of all six movies edited into an 87 minute, entirely comprehendible movie-watching experience? No other film in history has as many fan films and parodies inspired by it. Because the world George Lucas created is so much fun to play in.

It’s a world the creator himself still loves playing in.

Ask people where they were on May 25, 1977 when Star Wars was released, and they can recite with perfect clarity what they were wearing, who they were with, and what those precious moments of their life was like on the walk from the theater to the parking lot. I feel as though we have very few of those moments today associated with good memories. It’s always an assassination, a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack that sparks such clarity.

The thing is, now when we watch Star Wars hoping to feel a bit of what we felt the first time, we can’t. Our past has been altered. So the problem, if you want there to be one, is that we as human beings take ownership of anything we have an emotional connection with.

The Special Edition movies of Star Wars are fan films made by the ultimate fan: George Lucas. He is an artist with no boundaries, which is a gift and a curse. He is a man who doesn’t understand that a work of art forever remains incomplete. He has never accepted this fact, and in search of perfecting his masterpiece, he upset the most important people of all: the fans who recognized a masterpiece before it was finished.

So who shot first? Han or Greedo? I have a better question for you: who gives a damn?

I say let George keep manipulating his work if it makes him happy. I’ll pay to see whatever he does next because watching him is like watching Da Vinci stand atop a ladder and drop a can of paint in slow motion on the Last Supper. I’d pay to see that.

All I’m waiting for now is George Lucas to admit that the last time he recut Star Wars, he ended up with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. So instead of releasing a new edit, he called Steven & Harrison, and they just went with it.

May the Force be with you, George.

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Read: We Can’t Go Home Again

Ask any writer with an ounce of respect for the craft what the hardest part of being a writer is, and they’ll probably tell you, “Sitting down to actually write.” Some of them will even follow up with, “I know, how cliche, right?” before getting back to Facebook or looking at Internet pornography. Writers are told at all cost to avoid cliches while becoming living, breathing cliches themselves because someone once said, “The hardest part about writing is sitting down to write,” and we believed them.

I might tell you the hardest part about being a writer is being a writer. If history proves anything, the life of a writer is a constant struggle. A struggle to get published. A struggle to find work. A struggle to get our prose read by someone other than our wives and mothers. We go from clinically depressed and self-loathing to invincible and high-as-an-addict twelve times a day. We face constant rejection and feelings of inadequacy.

Why in God’s good name would any self-respecting human being with an ounce of decency in their soul subject themselves to being a writer? I say the world doesn’t have enough accountants and taxi drivers. Writers write because they were born to bleed to death, pouring their hearts out upon the page. As the delightful Maya Angelou said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Writers often don’t write because they want to, (that’s just a generous side effect) they write because they cannot not write.

For me, the hardest part about being a writer is not the actual writing. I write as if my keystrokes keep the Earth’s revolution around the sun intact. I act as though the world depends on my words even if they’ll never be read. Writers write what they know, and I know me pretty darn well. As a result, I tell stories about my life. Unfortunately, this results in a lot of collateral damage. So the hardest part about being a writer? How to write without ruining my relationships with everyone around me.

When I decided to go to college — a decision I regret as the automated voice messaging system that is Sallie Mae, an entity I can only assume is now self-aware, becomes a sure sign of the robot apocalypse James Cameron warned us about — my sister both innocently and harmlessly (as she meant not to see me perish, but succeed) said, “You’re going to art school? Why don’t you go to real college first, then to art school so you have a backup?” My hopes dashed to one day be a writer. A filmmaker. An artist. If my own family doesn’t believe in me, who will?

I started writing in first grade, (my first book, The Turkey and the Pilgrim, followed up by my sophomore slump, The Giant Valentine VS. The Dragon) and believed until I was eleven that writing was a perfectly acceptable career choice. However, as years passed, I became painfully aware of my inability to dribble a basketball or run without looking like a wounded gazelle. Irrelevant for your development unless all your friends were athletes, and played in the mud. I cried whenever a bug came within 30 feet of me. And in the backyard during the kind of summer afternoon young boys dream about living within forever, I learned just how little I would contribute to society as a writer. “What are you going to teach your kids? You don’t know how to do anything. You can’t even throw a baseball,” as if a career in athletics was the only suitable and respectable choice for a young boy to pursue in 1990′s Boardman, Ohio. My friend had asked this as inquisitive and innocently as my sister would eventually question my college decision.

Writers don’t contribute to the world. They are just reclusive drunks with drinking problems, or talentless hacks writing billion-dollar movie franchises featuring dialogue as stimulating as a conversation between first-graders. (I’m looking at you Transformers 3.)

Fast-forward to one unfinished Bachelor-of-the-Arts-Degree later worth fifty grand, and a feature length film I wrote, directed, don’t even own a copy of, and believed was going to pay for itself as well as my education. I can understand my sister’s advocation for a backup plan. In pursuit of becoming a writer after dropping out of college, I spent three years living in LA sleeping on other people’s couches, working dead-end jobs, getting fired, being homeless, and eventually living on the road.

Plenty of my wounds are self-inflicted because no one wants to read about a life without tribulation. Though I may have had second thoughts about becoming a writer had my sister instead shouted from rooftops, “You want to be a writer? You want to study art? Stop! Or you’ll destroy our family! Even worse, no girl will ever want to date a writer!”

How wrong she was. Every girl wants to date a writer. A young writer’s words, when placed properly upon the page, can be a tangible dopamine high to the still developing mind of teenage youth. (Many adult women, one may find, if one felt so inclined to do the research, still experience the same high when left alone with high school poetry.) My dearest sister should have told me, “No girl wants to break-up with a writer! This will cause many problems when you try to leave your first love.” How does a writer not write about the misfortune of unrequited love? I thrived for years on unrequited love and its paranormal affects on my psyche, including, but not limited to: romantic self-aggrandizement and a need for making enemies out of lovers. No woman dreams of being written from the vantage point of her ex-lover, for it is her most unflattering side. The only cure for this is to marry another writer, which I miraculously did, as a woman’s poetry upon the page is far more lethal than anything a man could ever hope to muster. The playing field: now nearly even, but slightly in her favor.

As for my family? You poor, aimless sheep, slaughtered at the hand of my keyboard. How will you ever forgive me? You’re all so far from perfect and perfectly dysfunctional, what else was I supposed to write about? You put a roof over my head, you fed me, raised me, and I thanked you by making you the villain of my manuscripts and essays. And while I don’t deserve your grace, I struggle with wanting to thank you for being the catalyst of some of my greatest work. Where is the line? Asking a writer not to write about his family in some exaggerated way is like asking a painter to create a masterpiece without paint, or suggesting to Kanye West that he tone down his ego.

Because I write, people assume I read. Which I do. Quite a bit. But when I tell someone I am a writer, they automatically assume I have read the entire library of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka, C.S. Lewis, John Updike, William S. Burroughs, and/or Charles Bukowski and understand references to the likes of George Santayana and André Maurois, two gentleman I have never, ever heard of in my life. The only reason I can include their names within: I lifted them from another article like this one penned by another writer, who, in the same sentence featuring these two names, said, “…only other writers will understand this reference.” Does this mean I am no longer a writer?

Also, the only C.S. Lewis book I’ve ever read cover-to-cover is Out of the Silent Planet. But I’ve been following @CSLewisDaily on Twitter since 2010, which has gotten me halfway through The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, and Narnia simultaneously at the rate of 140 characters a day.

As a writer, you must be prepared for the inevitable, unavoidable question, “Who are your favorite authors?” asked as though it somehow validates your talent as a writer, trumping your resume and the quality of the actual words you put to paper. If you say your favorite writers are Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka, C.S. Lewis, John Updike, William S. Burroughs, and/or Charles Bukowski, it somehow merits literary favor from illiterate professionals. And while I love the work of JD Salinger, Jack Kerouac, and C.S. Lewis’s posthumous Twitter feed, my favorite authors are Kelly Braffet, Dean Koontz, Charlie Huston, and Ray Bradbury not because I think their writing is above anyone else’s, but simply because they wrote some of the most enjoyable books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.

“Every single person I ever told I was an English major responded with, ‘Oh, so you’re going to be a teacher?’ As if there was no other job possibility,” My oldest sister, the one who didn’t try to steer me away from artistic misery, said over the phone last night when I asked about her choice of schooling. She graduated ten years ago, and it took her ten years to find a use for her degree (aside from editing all of her younger brother’s work): the extremely successful blog, Calling All Cool Moms.

“English is a blow-off major,” she said. “Everyone else would be studying finance, working hard, and I would slap a poem down about a tree, and hit the bar.”

The verdict for all you would-be English majors intent on writing the next great American novel: by the time you graduate, China will have finished buying us, and your dream is shot. You’re better off studying foreign policy relations over seas, and investing in the Chinese edition of Rosette Stone.

The only difference between a writer with a degree and a writer without a degree is the degree. College does not make a good writer a great writer. It just makes you a competent writer. The difference between a good writer and a great writer is the difference between writing because you think you have something to say, or writing because you have a story to tell.

Whenever I let on to anyone that I am a writer, the response is always the same: “Oh, you’re a writer?” Like they didn’t hear me correctly and need clarification, completely taken back that the profession isn’t as dead as Latin by now. “People are still speaking that language?” Yes, I confirm. I am. “What do you write?” they always want to know. I tell them I write fiction. I used to lead in with, “I have a blog,” before I followed up with the fiction part, but the scoffing of, “Oh, you’re a blogger,” sounded so much like the scoffing assumption of, “You’re a screenwriter,” when I tell people in LA that I am a writer, reverberated so loudly against the walls, nothing else I said could be respected. “What kind of fiction do you write? Hard Sci-Fi?”

“Really depressing, heart-wrenching stuff about relationships and redemption. Also, dinosaurs sometimes.”

“Oh,” they say. “Reality is already so depressing. Why don’t you write something people can escape to?”

“Because,” I say, “people need to know that broken is just experience for the best of hearts.”

read more: We Can’t Go Home Again
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Copyright © May 2012 || Max Andrew Dubinsky