Stuff Christians Like (18 page)

The point is that miming is funny. It’s okay to laugh with it. And really, what’s a mime going to do to you anyway? Of all the groups I’m afraid of angering with this book, mimes are pretty low on the list. Will they come to a book signing and throw that invisible rope on me? Are they going to give me a middle finger – based book review on the side of the street as I walk by? I have nothing to fear. If they did step to me, I’d bust out some pop ‘n’ lock and challenge them to a break-off. And even if they won, they can’t talk. So I’d yell, “You got served!” just because I’ve always wanted to say that and have never really had the chance.

Of course now that I’ve made fun of Christian mimes, God is probably going to make me quit writing and start an inner-city mime ministry as punishment. We’ll call it “Gloves of Love.”

Unless I know there’s going to be some sort of animal show involved—maybe called
Noah’s Bark
, with a group of traveling dogs that reenact Bible stories—I’m probably going to skip the guest speaker at church.

I know I’m not the only one who does this because the parking lot and the sanctuary are significantly emptier when the
senior pastor isn’t there. I think my church is starting to catch on though, because they’re getting pretty tricky about telling us when the senior pastor is actually going to be in the building. Using video sermons and live feeds and satellite campuses, they’re shuffling him all over the place like the president during a terrorist threat. You never actually know where he is until you get there.

And sometimes you’ll even get there, see him do the announcements, and then
voilà
, a guest speaker magically materializes on stage. Clearly they’re on to us.

Have you ever heard someone do this? This might be more of a Southern Baptist thing, but I personally find it to be delightful. Here’s how it typically sounds in a prayer:

“Lord, we just pray for your strength. We just lift you up, Lord. We just praise you. And devil, ohhh devil, we put you on notice. No longer will you have control over our annual bake sale. The mistakes we made last year and the fights we had at the peach pie table have been forgiven and forgotten. We put you on notice, devil.”

Whenever I hear something like that I start to think about the devil. He’s at home, sitting in a chair by a never ending fire of sulfur and sorrow eating a deviled egg. He’s reading
The Da Vinci Code
when someone knocks at his door. He gets up, opens the door, and sees a delivery man standing there. “Uh, Mr. Devil. Just wanted to let you know that you’ve been put on notice. Mary Smith says you better stay away from the bake sale this year.” He shrugs, walks back over to his chair, and turns on some
Jersey Shore
on MTV.

I don’t know who originally came up with the word
voluntold
, but if I did, I would side hug him for about an hour. It’s such a perfect way to describe what happens when someone else forces you to volunteer for something at church or some “not random act of kindness.” You haven’t volunteered—someone committed you on the sly and then told you where and when to show up.

Studies I completely made up show that 84 percent of voluntold incidents originate with your parents or your spouse. You’re enjoying a perfectly normal day when your mom will say, “Hey, I volunteered you to teach the next door neighbors’ grandparents from China how to drive.” “This can’t be right,” you’ll think to yourself. “Did I agree to teach two sixty-year-olds how to drive? Their own kids have refused, and they’re blood. Is that something I agreed to? That doesn’t sound like me.”

Next thing you know, you’re in the passenger seat of a 1995 Honda Accord, doing impossibly slow laps around your neighborhood. For what feels like three days, you’ll keep saying, “Now faster…Now a little slower…Watch out for that mailbox.” Eventually, while still traveling 10 mph, the grandmother will throw the car directly into park in the middle of the street, causing the entire vehicle to buck into mechanical submission, and her husband will take his turn behind the wheel.

Your experience might be slightly different than mine, but I think there are three universal things you should do if you ever get voluntold:

Spread the joy of the voluntold by taking as many people down with you as possible. I mean, “By spreading the Christian attitude of service,” not “taking as many people down.” That didn’t come out the right way. I made my fiancée at the time ride in the back seat while I taught the elderly couple how to drive.

Find yourself doing something you didn’t intend to ever sign up for? Tell God, “You owe me.” Chances are he’ll laugh a little and then dramatically pause and throw down: “I sent you my Son. You’re watching a class of two-year-olds for one Sunday in your lifetime. Boo-yah!” I don’t know if he really says Boo-yah, but it felt right.

I’m a big fan of being up front when you’ve been voluntold. Most of the time, if your grumpy face is screaming, “I hate cleaning dishes,” but you’re trying to front like you’re happy to be helping out in the kitchen, people are going to know. They’ll know. So be open about it. Tell the lady next to you, “My wife signed me up for this. I think God wants me to have the heart of a servant, but that hasn’t happened yet. Do you have a sense of how many dishes that’s going to take? Do you know how many spoons you have to wash before you get the heart of a servant? Any idea of what that number is?” Chances are they’ll admit they don’t love washing spoons either, and you’ll become best friends and have a water fight with the soapy suds and laugh, laugh, laugh the night away.

Yes, God wants us to be compassionate and tender with each other. Not only that, but he wants us to love our enemies and serve our neighbors. Those things are great, as long as there’s no body-on-body action, such as in a “full frontal hug,” one of those sinful abominations where you just wrap your arms around a friend and embrace them. That’s why Christians the world over have embraced the “side hug.”

In the side hug, or “A-frame” as it is also called, there’s no risk of two crotches touching. Instead of face-to-face, you go side-to-side, putting your arm around the person and placing
your hip against theirs. Still having a hard time mastering it? Pretend you’re taking a photo and you’re both looking at the camera together. The side hug is safe for the whole family, friendly, and above all, holy. I don’t know the exact scriptural reference for it, but try the book of Psalms. That book is massive.

We’re all supposed to be equal as Christians. God is not up in heaven grading degrees of forgiven or measuring percent of awesome. Christ’s death on the cross was an equal opportunity situation. If you’re in, you’re not kind of in or really in, you’re in. Your soul is saved. Sanctification commences.

Sort of.

What we don’t tell new Christians is that there is one thing you can do that kind of puts the ultimate stamp of approval on your spiritual passport. And I would do it tomorrow, but the Jordan River is a long way from Atlanta, Georgia.

I think being baptized in the Jordan River would move me in places that are currently hidden under layers of sarcasm. Maybe I’ll go someday, but I’m afraid I’d throw my Jordan River status around like a verbal royal flush in my conversations with other Christians.

In any given situation, I’d find a not so subtle way to say, “That’s interesting. Kind of reminds me of when I was in the Jordan River, getting baptized…”

Then I would just let it hang out there, to really let it sink in, that I was the only “double in” Christian. That sure, despite being baptized by the Holy Spirit, the Jordan River is where it’s really at. Then God would have to strike me with lightning for my arrogance, and my wife would have to sprinkle the ashes over the Jordan River because she’s a fan of irony. While they were there, my kids would get baptized in the river and become cocky too. They’d get struck by lightning eventually as well.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I can’t get baptized in the Jordan River because my daughters would get struck by lightning. Seems pretty obvious when you think about it.

Decades ago, the phrase “Sunday Driver” used to mean old ladies with big hats driving back from church at speeds thirty miles below the legal limit. Not anymore.

Sunday is now one of the most dangerous times to be on the road. If I’m headed to church and you’re in my way, slowing me down and preventing me from getting a good parking spot or sitting in the same seat I always like to sit in, then get behind me satan. Or in a ditch on the side of the road—your choice. I’m fine with either.

Don’t let the little fish on the back fool you. If it were up to me, when I wanted to drive all crazy I’d have a little switch in the car that would automatically transform the Jesus fish into a Darwin fish. Then people behind me would say, “That guy cut me off! Oh, he’s an atheist. Phew. For a second, I thought that was the body of Christ cutting me off.”

And I’ll ignore you in the parking lot if I cut you off on the way to church and you then happen to park directly next to me. I’ll get out of my car, stare straight ahead, and just march right into the building without ever making eye contact. I might pick up my pace a little and walk faster than normal, but that’s only because I’m excited about worshipping today, not because I’m afraid of you. I don’t see you. I don’t see you, but God does, and he’s disappointed that your cautious, within-the-law driving is keeping his sheep from returning to his flock.

Sometimes I think we Christians throw satan under the bus for things he might not have been involved with. For instance, if your band at church sucks one Sunday morning, it might be really easy to say, “The enemy sure was attacking service today. None of the songs worked well, and our timing was completely off. What a mess. Satan sure was pressing in on all sides.”

I agree, that’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that you guys didn’t practice. Nobody showed up on time to rehearse the songs, and when they did, they ended up joking around, pretending they were Lincoln Brewster, or just grumbling about all the songs they’d like to play if the senior pastor would release his death grip on what’s “big-church” appropriate. So when Sunday showed up, you sounded about as good as you practiced, which was awful.

Did satan do that? That’s debatable. Was he down in hell watching the service saying, “Watch this: The drummer’s got a completely different rhythm going and it’s killing the bass player’s sense of self confidence and timing. My master plan has come to fruition!” Doubtful. I think more likely he was somewhere sinking ships or punching old ladies in the kidney when a demon came and reported, “Hey, Truth Rising Baptist Church had horrible worship music today.” To which he responded, “Awesome.”

How did this happen? I thought we were still upset that people say “X-mas” instead of “Christmas.” Weren’t we making bumper stickers that read, “We say Merry Christmas,” to counteract the Jesus neutralization of the Christmas season? Weren’t we mad
that people are saying “Happy Holidays” and de-Christifying the Christmas season? I could have sworn we were. But now, I keep seeing the word “Xian” popping up to replace Christian.

Is that a postmodern thing? Did this suddenly materialize because when you’re texting or Twittering or some other technology-driven activity that will inevitably start with “T,” it’s easier to type “Xian”? Are we trying to save five characters? Are our fingers really that tired? Or is it an Xtreme thing? Is this an attempt to make Christ seem more relevant and hip and likely to own a snowboard?

Are we trying to Mountain Dew Christ?

If my publisher ever lets me go on a book tour, I’m probably going to read these essays with my prayer voice. I’ll talk normally right up until we get to this section, but when we do, I’ll dim the lights and throw on some mournful piano music so that I can break it down slow. You’ll probably think to yourself, “Is this guy trying to make out with us?” But I’m not; I’m just trying to take these essays from your head to your heart, and every Christian knows those are the hardest twelve inches to travel.

I will accept anyone’s friend request on Facebook. I don’t discriminate. I don’t filter out weird people or hate on anyone that has a unibrow, like me.

But I never accept friend suggestions. If you’ve never used Facebook, a friend suggestion is a feature where you can send
a note to someone and essentially say, “I think you should be friends with this other person.” You get the other person’s name and a little photo of them. If you choose to accept it, then you send that suggested person a friend request.

It’s meant to be a neat little way to connect people, but I’ve started to get some random suggestions. Someone will send me one that says, “You should be friends with Tammy Smith, Red Bluff High School.” I’ll look at it, quickly realize that I don’t know Tammy Smith and think, “If I accept this friend suggestion, Tammy Smith, a high school sophomore, is going to get a random friend request from a complete stranger who happens to be a thirty-four-year-old married man living in the suburbs of Atlanta with his two kids who doesn’t even use his full name on Facebook and kind of has a weird smirk in his photo.” Wow, the only thing missing from my induction into the creepy hall of fame
is perhaps a mustache and a scar running down my cheek from a knife fight I got into behind a dumpster at a truck stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

That’s a completely silly thought, but while thinking about that one day, I realized that I approach witnessing to people about God in a pretty similar fashion. (I know, whoa, did he just leap from a New Jersey Turnpike knife fight story to witnessing to people about the everlasting love of Jesus Christ? Yes, yes I did.)

The truth is that sometimes I drop Jesus into someone’s lap like I’m sending a random friend suggestion on Facebook. I don’t really tell them much about him. I don’t really invest in the life of the person I’m talking to. I don’t even really listen to their story. I just rush to the end of my agenda and essentially say, “Yeah, yeah, regardless of what’s going on with you and your whole situation, I’d like to send you this friend suggestion to connect with Jesus. Here you go,
vaya con Dios
, stranger.”

It’s kind of like a Jesus drive-by, me just spraying folks with the name of Christ and hoping it sticks. I don’t think that’s a particularly good thing. I can’t imagine that’s what God had in mind when he gave us the Great Commission. So what can we do to change that? How do we not just “friend suggest” Jesus?

I don’t know. I’m all out of silver bullets, and to be honest there are about 15,000 other books that have better advice about sharing your faith. But I have started to do something differently in the last few months. I’ve started to ask people questions I genuinely want answers to. Instead of asking a question and then forcing the conversation back into my framework regardless of their answer, I’ve tried to just listen and let people talk and remain engaged in what they have to say. The more I’ve done that, the more I’ve been amazed at how willing people are to open up when you actually listen. And sometimes, when I feel like God is cool with it, I get to ask my favorite question of all, “Who is carrying all that with you?”

Because everyone has an “all that.” Whether you’re going through a divorce or the most wildly successful season of work
in your life, everyone has an “all that” they’re carrying. (Sometimes success is the most crushing “all that” you can face because what you thought would make everything perfect in your life just isn’t and that’s pretty terrifying.) It feels like 99 out of 100 times the answer to the question “Who is carrying all that with you?” is “no one.” One woman told me she didn’t want to burden her happy friends with her sadness so she keeps it hidden. One man told me he wasn’t a “guy’s guy” and since he didn’t understand football it was hard for him to form relationships with other men.

Time after time, the answer to the question “Who is carrying all that with you?” comes back as “no one.”

But it’s not one of those questions you can ask and then disappear as soon as you’ve friend suggested Jesus. You have to be willing to carry the “all that” with the person you’re talking with. You can’t fade into the weeds of life like dissolving into the sea of profiles on Facebook. That’s why witnessing is hard. That’s why it’s easier to friend suggest Jesus to strangers than it is to introduce your friend Jesus to someone.

It’s not right, but I think that’s why it happens. And I’m tired of it happening with me.

I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty awesome at applying Band-Aids. And make no mistake, there is an art. Because if you go too quickly and unpeel them the wrong way, they stick to themselves and you end up with a wadded-up useless mess instead of the Little Mermaid – festooned bandage your daughter so desperately wants to apply to a boo-boo that may in fact be 100 percent fictional.

Half of the injuries I treat at the Acuff house are invisible or simply wounds of sympathy. My oldest daughter, L.E., will scrape her knee and my three-year-old, McRae, realizing the
Band-Aid box is open will say, “Yo Dad, I’d like to get in on that too. What do you say we put one on, I don’t know, my ankle. Yeah, my ankle, let’s pretend that’s hurt.”

But sometimes the cuts are real, like the day my five-year-old got a scrape on her face playing in the front yard. I rushed into the house and returned with a princess bandage. As I bent down to apply it to her forehead, her eyes filled up with tears and she shrank back from me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t want to wear that Band-Aid,” she replied.

“Why? You have a cut, you need a Band-Aid,” I said.

“I’ll look silly,” she answered.

Other than her sister and her mom, there was no one else in the yard. None of her friends were over, cars were not streaming past our house and watching us play, the world was pretty empty at that moment. But for the first time I can remember, she felt shame. She had discovered shame. Somewhere, somehow, this little five-year-old had learned to be afraid of looking silly. If I were smarter, if I had been better prepared for the transition from little toddler to little girl, I might have asked her this:

“Who told you that you were silly?”

I didn’t though. That question didn’t bloom in my head until much later, and I didn’t understand it until I saw God ask a similar question in Genesis 3:11. To me, this is one of the saddest and most profoundly beautiful verses in the entire Bible. Adam and Eve have fallen. The apple is a core. The snake has spoken. The dream appears crushed. As they hide from God under clothes they’ve hastily sewn together, he appears and asks them a simple question:

“Who told you that you were naked?”

There is hurt in God’s voice as he asks this question, but there is also a deep sadness, the sense of a father holding a daughter that has, for the first time ever, wrapped herself in shame.

Who told you that you were not enough?

Who told you that I didn’t love you?

Who told you that there was something outside of me you needed?

Who told you that you were ugly?

Who told you that your dream was foolish?

Who told you that you would never have a child?

Who told you that you would never be a father?

Who told you that you weren’t a good mother?

Who told you that without a job you aren’t worth anything?

Who told you that you’ll never know love again?

Who told you that this was all there is?

Who told you that you were naked?

I don’t know when you discovered shame. I don’t know when you discovered that there were people who might think you are silly or dumb or not a good writer or a husband or a friend. I don’t know what lies you’ve been told by other people or maybe even by yourself.

But in response to what you are hearing from everyone else, God is still asking the same question, “Who told you that you were naked?”

And he’s still asking us that question because we are not.

In Christ we are not worthless.

In Christ we are not hopeless.

In Christ we are not dumb or ugly or forgotten.

In Christ we are not naked.

In Isaiah 61:10 it says, “For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.”

The world may try to tell you a thousand different things today. You might close this book and hear a million declarations of what you are or who you’ll always be, but know this.

As unbelievable as it sounds and as much as I never expected to type this sentence in a book:

You are not naked.

Have you ever been in a small group with people who confess safe sins? Someone will say, “I need to be honest with everyone tonight. I need to have full disclosure. Like ODB from the Wu-Tang Clan, I need to give it to you raw!” So you brace yourself for this crazy moment of authenticity and the person takes a deep breath and says…“I haven’t been reading my Bible enough.”

Ugh, you dirty, dirty sinner. I’m not even sure I can be in a small group with you anymore. Not reading your Bible enough, that is disgusting. And then once he’s gone, someone else will catch the safe sin bug too and will say, “I need to be real too. I haven’t been praying enough.”

Two of you in the same room? Wow, freak shows! I can barely stand it.

But what happens when people start confessing safe sins is that everyone else in the room starts concealing their real junk. If I had been surrounded by confessions like that in the eighth grade I would have instantly known I couldn’t follow the “not reading my Bible enough” guy with my own story:

“Soooo, this weekend when it was snowing I told my parents I was going to the town dump to sled, but instead I was really just digging through a 100-foot mountain of warm trash looking for pornography people had thrown away.” And the same principle would have applied to me in my late twenties. I wouldn’t have been honest sharing my struggles with internet porn if everyone else confessed their “safe enough for small group” sins.

And that sucks. It sucks that as broken as we all are, as desperate as we all are for a Savior, we feel compelled to clean ourselves up when we get around each other.

But writing the blog
Stuff Christians Like
has taught me something unbelievable. If I stop writing tomorrow, this will be the lesson I cling to the most.

When you go first, you give everyone in your church or your community or your small group or your blog the gift of going second.

It’s so much harder to be first. No one knows what’s off-limits yet and you’re setting the boundaries with your words. You’re throwing yourself on the honesty grenade and taking whatever fallout that comes with it. Going second is so much easier. And the ease only grows exponentially as people continue to share. But it has to be started somewhere. Someone has to go first and I think it has to be us.

Let’s give the gift of going second.

The only time I’ve ever been recognized was not as weird as I thought it would be. I guess in my head I envisioned my family and I would be walking in the mall and some stranger would exclaim, “Jonathan Acuff?
The
Jonathan Acuff? Wow, it is you!” Then I would blush and maybe shield my kids behind me with my arm because this person’s adoration would be so intense. They’d say, “Oh, please, say something that is both sarcastic and insightful at the same time. You’re so wise and adequately heighted.” I’d correct them on the use of the word “heighted,” which is actually not a word, and then I’d say two or three off-the-cuff sentences that would change their life and then maybe sign their arm or a Bible if it were available. Seems like a pretty reasonable expectation, right?

It didn’t happen like that. A guy just walked up to me at church and introduced himself. We talked for a few minutes about
Stuff Christians Like.
The whole thing was over before I knew it and was pretty uneventful. Which is probably exactly how God wanted it to be.

I tend to get ego drunk pretty quickly. When people compliment me, outwardly I do the Christian courtesy of immediately
rejecting the kind words. Inwardly though, I’m often drinking in their kindness and doing a little “look how awesome I am” dance. I’m patting myself on the back with both arms and both legs at the same time, which is difficult but not impossible since I’ve taken yoga twice. (Which may or may not be “of the devil”—jury’s still out on that one.)

Knowing that about myself, knowing I’m prone to massive “me parades,” I am constantly wrestling with God over the unexpected growth of StuffChristiansLike.net. There’s a circle of famous Christians right now: big pastors, authors who have written amazing books, speakers who stalk conference stages like cougars. And I wanted to be inside it. I wanted to become a famous Christian.