What Are We Doing

Introduction

When I was growing up I got bullied alot. I was overweight, my family and food have always got along. I had a bad nickname, Jay-Bo. Add all of that up with a family that didn’t fit in and I was easy pickings.

When we moved to a new town before my freshman year, I was ready to disappear. What I didn’t know awaited me was a new terror, Farmers. One in particularly hated me. He was terrifying. I hated my life. I didn’t even know all of the pain inside of me that was a timebomb. All I knew was I hated my life.

We had found a church 45 minutes from our house after my parents got back together after their separation. So in the midst of the awful I went to the youth pastor and told him my hurt and terror. What I was met with was what I would encounter time after time as I got older. I told him about the farmer and the new school. I told him about the loneliness and the confusion about why. It was known I drank and partied, but I threw that in too.

The last part was all I got a reply too. He told me I was a sinner. That Jesus came and died for me and what I really needed to do was pray the prayer he said he would pray and I could repeat after him. I just wanted the awkward to end in the office room we sat in. So I went along to get it over. He and his wife were so excited but I felt worse then when I came in. He said the next thing for me to do was tell my parents about my decision and read my bible. The book of John was where I was told to start.

I could care less about telling my parents anything. I hated my house. My mom’s affair had ripped the childhood I longed for away from me. My dad had turned into someone I didn’t want to be like, ever. It was their decision to move me to that awful place. On top of it I hated the God I was presented with.

I read John when I got home, as the anxiety about school the next day grew. I have been to seminary and been in ministry at some level for over a decade. I can honestly say John is with all I have learned that John 1 is hard.

John 1:1–8 CSB

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify about the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but he came to testify about the light.

I was out and closed the book that made no sense and meant nothing to a hurting 15 year old. It would have been better to have been sent home to read 2 Kings 2:23-25 (Look it up).

This book is about how I went form a broken kid who never saw the intersection of the “christian thing” to a follower of Jesus who has found my life cast in the great redemptive drama unfolding since before creation. The Christian Message changes everything. That message is historic, true, and has everything to do with a hurting kid, a single, a parent, a husband or wife, and the hope that “Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost..” Tim Keller the Reason for God

Chapter 1 Hello My Name is Jason and I am an addict…

My 5 year old son has changed his desired adult occupation more times than I can count. He wants to be a police officer, an ambulance driver, a football player, and a veteranarian, and counting. Every kid does this. We dream big because of the life we believe it will bring. A life that fullfills even the longings of a kids heart. What happens, as I have realized with the help of a great counselor, is that while we all do this it gets distorted as children encounter a world that isn’t how its supposed to be.

When I would walk to my moms apartment I always went to the library on my way. Everytime I would renew my checked out VHS. It was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was a place to immerse myself into and escape as an 8 year old. I was like my son. I wanted to be a baseball player and dreamed of the life it would give. A life where I was in control of greatness that would make me lovable, impossible to be left, and too full of joy to feel inadequate or unprotected. I dreamt up that life and the path too it to survive.

None of us are taught to check the causal core of our longings and the life we imagine will get us there. I carried that belief, that that life was the only way to safety, into my college and post college life. James K.A. Smith paints the picture of our human condition this way: “our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave. It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of the “good life” that we desire” James K.A. Smith You are what you love. I had defined the good life at 8 and had a vision to get myself there. The uniamginable weight of making that happen is too much for the human heart to carry.

So what happens when you fail to achieve that vision? What happens when man takes it from you? What happens when you make mistakes that cost you that life? What happens when you believe that God is who He says He is and doesn’t seem to quite be big enough to protect you from losing it? What else but despair?

That was me in my twenties. I had made it to Division One baseball and a few at bats in Independent Pro Ball. I was already aware that the life to save that 8 year old me had passed me by in a traumatizing way. A dream had become a nightmare and it ended on a unremarkable afternoon, in an unremarkable town, in an unremarkable way. The general manager called me to come to the office. He handed me my release papers and that was the end of it. I walked out alone to my car and closed my bats and glove in the trunk. I sat in that parking lot and wept. It was a weeping almost 2 decades in the making. I didn’t want to be alive anymore and hated the God who had made me. I didn’t want to feel anymore. I didn’t think I could. So I began to drive. Every couple of miles I would take a vicodin. By the time I hit a truck stop in Indiana I was almost through the brand new prescription from the team doctor.

I was a professional emotional escape artist for a while. I was getting high and getting drunk for a long time. I took the reigns off that day and didn’t look back. I could close my eyes and see an 8 year old me with a ball glove and a look of “how could you fail me” in his eyes. I hated myself and numbed to not feel it. I hated God who let it happen so I could care less about some rules He had to not steal, or lie, or get high, or look for love in people. Everyone was to blame and if people had stood in the way a saving life they were simply commodities now to an all out pursuit to never be me again.

We have a saying in my 12 Step Group that “In our addiction we did many people great harm but most of all we harmed ourselves.” Longings for life didn’t end I simply believed my chance to see them fullfilled was dead. I only did more wounding to an already wounded kid. The longings of an 8 year old never went away. “Longing is at the heart of the broken and addicted. What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of brain, belly, or loins but finally of the heart.”

Because they are human beings, addicts long for wholeness, for fulfillment, and for the final good that believers call God. Like all idolatries, addiction taps this vital spiritual force and draws off its energies to objects and processes that drain the addict instead of filling him.”

Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 131.

Eventually an unmanageable life goes off the rails. I was sent to rehab involuntarily. 2 decades of hurt take twice that long to unlearn but it was there I encountered something I never had. Several times a week someone from the mega church nearby would come to mingle with the less than. You cannot fool a room full of addicts. Middle age guys in sweater vests would sit and ask as their open, “if you had a spiritual jackhammer would you use it”? It was no different then my youth pastors office. A verse or two out of context that made no sense to the UHaul full of pain and issues I drove around.

One day a new guy came to speak. He wasn’t like the others. He was meek and approached us as if he was no different. He carried a bible and taught chunks of entire books at a time. Whatever truth was in the passage he taught. There was no reference to addiction or mistakes. It was simply the Jesus of the Bible. It was the first time I ever heard expository teaching. I cannot remember his name today. I wish I could find him and tell him where I am now. He saved my life with the true Christian Message and the true Jesus of the Bible. I walked out of a devotional and stood in front of a picture of Jesus on the cross. It was a messy, brutal, real take on the death of Jesus. Beaten and bleeding I knew He did that for me for the first time. I didn’t know it all or how to get free from the mess 20 years in the making but I knew that He knew, that He cared, and He had done something about it.

A great redemptive drama had been playing out in the cosmos since before time began. From a man I cannot even remember I heard about it. I heard that the real Jesus came to wage war on all that has taken. I saw the real Jesus who knows every person ever to walk the earth is haunted with longings for home we can’t ever seem to get too. I saw a Jesus who wept at the sight of the human experience and drank its furry to get me home. I had never met a Jesus like that. It wasn’t my list of the bad sins I had commited he as after. He came to hunt down the blinder of my heart and kill him to make me see for the first time. He was after my heart. The true rehabilitaion began in that building. “Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings”. James K.A. Smith You are what you love pg. 2. A journey to rehabilitate my loves and longings began that day.

Every wednesday I get to introduce myself to my home group. “Hi my name is Jason and I am an addict”. I am in a lifelong rehab of my heart. I sit there though with new eyes and new hope. My hope is in the promises of the God I met in a Georgia rehab facility. In Hosea God says “16 In that day—

this is the Lord’s declaration—

you will call me, “My husband,”

and no longer call me, “My Baal.”

17 For I will remove the names of the Baals

from her mouth;

they will no longer be remembered by their names.

Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Ho 2:16–17.

Those days began with the day Jesus was born. The hope of that promise is that the things that have devoured me have met one bigger than them. The day is coming when I won’t even be able to remember its name anymore. The day is coming when it will never be on my mind or come from my lips again. My pain has an expiration date. My longings will one day be home.

I had only, ever heard a Christian Message reduced to my need for saving fro the bad things I have done. If you have the list of those I have it seems like an insurmountable task. The Christian Message I heard in rehab was the full Christian Message. “The danger in asnwering only the first question (what must I do to be saved) without the second (What hope is there for the world?) is that, standing alone the first can play into the Western idea that religion exists to provide spiritual goods that meet individual spiritual needs for freedom from guilt and bondage” Tim Keller shaped by the gospel pg 35

I had only, ever heard a Christian Message reduced to my need for saving fro the bad things I have done. If you have the list of those I have it seems like an insurmountable task. The Christian Message I heard in rehab was the full Christian Message. “The danger in answering only the first question (what must I do to be saved) without the second (What hope is there for the world?) is that, standing alone the first can play into the Western idea that religion exists to provide spiritual goods that meet individual spiritual needs for freedom from guilt and bondage” Tim Keller shaped by the gospel pg 35

Chapter 2 The Miracles Matter

Chapter 3 Sitting on a couch at seminary -

Morgan and I never fit in at seminary. We had both became followers of Christ after college. I didn’t come in already having a couple years of youth ministry under my belt. When people found out she went to Alabama for undergrad the first question was if she had been in the Baptist Ministry there. There was no category for a person not having saving faith in college.

Two events truly made us feel lost. Among the sea of “healthy churches” that surrounded the area we found ourselves at the cool kid table of churches. it was led by an edgy celebrity pastor who was the awe of small town baptist guys in pursuit of being the next David Platt. This pastor made sure to let everyone know that Platt was a close friend. The first day we visited we dropped our cholicy son off in child care, exhausted from life and a new baby. My son’s name is Beau. As we dropped him off the guy in childcare asked his name and we responded. He immediately asked if Beau was short for Boaz, the character from the Book of Ruth. We were not at home anymore. Our son’s are named Beau, Boone, and Baker. We didn’t fit in with the swarms of Josiah’s, Judah’s, Geneava’s (get it? for John Calvin?), and Mephibasheths. We wanted to run back to Birmingham.

The other was just as brutal. It is hard when you don’t have the handrails for christian things from a life in the church. My wife struggled as I failed to realize I wasn’t the most important thing in the world. I had my own ambitions to be a big name guy one day myslef. I left her on her own with a rough baby and no real friends. So she reached out to some of the other moms in the duplexes, still looking like the 70’s. In response she was invited to a bible study the ladies were starting. It was a greek new testament study!!! The only other invites came from moms who seemed interested in a walk to get to know her. Only to get a salespitch mid walk for the Multi Level Marketing Scheme she just knew was right up Morgan’s ally.

I sucked those first few years there. I was in classes that made me question everything. Some of that was good but we missed what we had hoped we would learn. We had never had someone teach us how to read the bible. We had never had anyone enter into our life in the rythems of life and show us how the Gospel changes everything. We went to seminary to get that. It was almost our last year there and I finally repented of being a slefish turd for almost 3 years. It was then things changed.

She had a class taught by the best theology teacher in the world, Christie Thornton. Christie cared about my wife and cared about theology shaping the heart just as much. I met Chris Lee. We would sit and talk for hours and our world changed. Chris is a brilliant philosophy student and teacher. He opened my eyes to things I never knew I needed to hear. presuppositional apologetics, narrative theory, authors like Carl Trueman, N.T. Wright, G.K. Beale, Tim Keller, and James K.A. Smith. We grew more in that last year then we did in the decades that led up to it. I was in an M.Div with philosophy, counseling, and hebrew remaining. I switched to an M.A. to finish sooner and leave the bubble because I was getting more of that sitting for hours with the best at those. In addition I have been on so many counseling couches I have a good frame of reference for how that works.

One afternoon we had Christ over and he sat on our couch as Morgan and I peppered him with the craziest questions we had about Christianity. Where is Jesus now?

Chris Lee asking why are you a Christian - We didnt fit in at seminary “were you at ____church at alabama” womens greek study, our is Beau short for Boaz

Chapter ? God created the heavens and the earth - my longings for my sons- a dead cat

CHapter ? Playing in Poop

Chapter ? I have no clue what I’m doing

Chapter ? Just give them the chicken - competing voices for church and a jesus of your imagination, conferences, celebrity, local level disenchantment