Timothy

Timothy.

Timothy sat down and introduced himself to me as the guy who has to come into this bar later and clean the floors. This is one of the last bars in the city to allow smoking, but they don’t have ash trays so all the cigarette butts end up on the floor. He set down two beers that were both for him and had a newly lit cigarette in his hand. The whole time we talked I don’t think that he took one drag from the cigarette. He explained that people in the other room were mad at him for beating them all at pool. We started talking about jealousy. We started talking about this because everyone in the room with the pool tables was jealous of his skills, and he talked about it was the same when he was in college at USC. He explained that he was the 4^th person in the nation to receive a scholarship for Frisbee. And because of this everyone was jealous. He couldn’t understand why people cant just celebrate others achievements. I completely agree with him. I gave my opinion that too many people feel entitled so they get upset when they see people get things that they want themselves.

Now Timothy very well may be a bullshitter. It’s a good possibility. But if he is, he is a really good one. He told me details that were almost meaningless. They were either the details of very well rehearsed story, or this was actually true. He told me that he has been shot. I actually believe this. He was shot in the leg and he lifted up his pant leg and showed me the scar. I believe it. Where the bullshit may lie is in the details. But I will describe them to you as Timothy told me. You see Timothy used to be a professional poker player, and over the course of his career he made millions of dollars, but obviously he had not been smart with it if he was now cleaning the floors of a bar. But the truth is that a irresponsible gambler is not entirely unheard of. Poker became a sport so that gamblers could call themselves athletes, it sounds better. Bad athlete even sounds better than bad gambler. Rabbit trail. Back on course. So he was traveling from Vegas to Illinois for a large poker tournament that had a million dollar buy in.

He was gassing up his Cadillac late at night at a gas station that was in the middle of nowhere. He had $300,000 cash on his person and another $200,000 cash in his car. He had $250,000 worth of jewelry on his body. He was walking into the gas station to pay for his gas when a guy with a shotgun walked out followed by a guy with a handgun. Timothy had a gun too. But it was in his car. The guys then told him to give them his jewelry, money, and car keys. He agreed. He started pulling off all of rings and trying to stall by explaining to them all the features of the rings. What kind of diamond, how many karats, where he got them. Didn’t work. He took off all of his jewelry and the cops still hadn’t arrived.

They then demanded his money; he pulled out of his pocket a wad of $50,000. And instantly he was shot in the stomach, and then once in the leg. He woke up six weeks later in a hospital in Chicago. He now has no money and no car. He is in Colorado because that’s where he ran out of the money that a friend had given him. He now works in a dive bar. Interesting. Right about that time a couple friends of mine walked in the door, so I excused myself from the conversation, but before he let me go he said this. “Find whatever it is your good at and do it, and don’t let any one try and stop you, I’ve been shot and stabbed and I’ve lost it all, but I know who I am.” I will probably see this guy again, I go to this bar pretty often and he said that he is there every night. He is a pretty good storyteller, so I might let him bullshit me some more. Or he could be telling the truth.

From Trash to Dinner

I some times eat food from dumpster. There, it’s out there, actually sometimes is probably not the right term. I often eat food from dumpster. I go looking in dumpsters for food. I make late night excursions to a few dumpster around town that I know have yielded fruit in the past, and not just fruit, let me list some of the things that I got out of dumpsters on my last search, popcorn, canned coffee drinks, frozen pizza, lettuce, bread, Naked brand fruit Juice, spices, doughnuts, coffee, and food is not all, from behind a sporting goods and outdoors store I got a bike rack and a ski rack for my car, from another dumpster I got a signed picture of Siegfried and Roy with their tiger (I am not sure if it’s the same on that mauled Roy)

Is it safe to eat food that came from a trashcan? That’s a legitimate question. I think yes. I take steps to make sure its safe. I stay away from dairy, I don’t get meat, I clean anything that is not packaged before I eat it, I check expiration dates(I don’t always follow the expiration dates, unless it is dairy) 95% of the food that I get is packaged never comes in contact with anything else that is in the dumpster.

Why do this? I do this because it saves me money. I can get a lot of food from the dumpster, I filled my car the last time I went, the whole trunk and back seat. I then try to distribute the food to others who would want or need it. I do this because I am upset by the amount of waste that exists today. An apple has a small spot on and it’s thrown away, when the area could be easily cut out with a knife. I went to a dumpster of a distribution center for one of the major natural food grocery store chains and saw a stack of boxes full of bread. On this stack was a sign that said “missed shipment, do not touch.” The bread was not expired or anything, it just missed its truck and then was subsequently thrown away. I also do this because its fun. I enjoy sneaking around buildings late at night and jumping into dumpsters. It’s a scavenger hunt.

Is it legal? It’s a grey area. Dumpster diving itself is mostly legal, but the dumpster themselves are mostly on private property and so you could get into trouble for trespassing. The people who threw it away have no ability to charge you with stealing, but the trash company can. How is this? Well the dumpster that the garbage is thrown into belongs to the trash company and then technically whatever is thrown in there belongs to them as well. How much any of these laws are enforced is a grey area also.

These are just some thoughts on this subject. Dumpster diving is not for everyone. But maybe you can be more thoughtful about what you throw away.

Separation Anxiety

A man comes on the bus wailing and crying into his phone. I over hear that he is talking to his mom. The tone in his voice immediately peaks my interest. I over hear that social services is about to take his son. He received a phone call from them saying that if he didn’t get home right away they would take him. He just barely manages to communicate this in between sobs. He talks about other problems he is going through. Some girl, I presume a wife or girlfriend, is just getting out of the hospital, his truck has been repossessed, and he is in the middle of moving. Most of these are problems I have never had to deal with. I feel like I would like to help him, but I feel overcome with inability. What could I possibly do or say to give him any comfort. As I sit there I say a prayer. I pray that the God who loves family would keep his together and also make them into a family pleasing to him. The truth is that I don’t know the circumstances. Is there real cause for his son to be taken away? Or is there an ex-wife making accusations against him? There are a lot of scenarios that could be possible. I know prayer is very powerful, but do I substitute it for action? I think maybe I do. I need to learn to do both. I think that both prayer and action done in faith can be very powerful things.

A woman tries to give him comfort after he gets off the phone but he is too upset to listen to anything she has to say. She is in mid sentence when he yells at the bus driver to let him off he needs to transfer to a different bus. He steps off the bus and throws the drink in his hand into the bush and screams in anguish. He is visibly shaken and upset, and understandably so. He obviously loves his son. The thought of loosing him has moved something so deep at his core that he cannot hide his emotion. I wonder if God the Father felt this way as Jesus was being led to the mountaintop to be crucified. His son, against whom false accusations were being charged, was about to die. Maybe even the Father, who has the ability to see the outcome, was over come with grief. Maybe that moment of separation was almost unbearable for Him. It was almost unbearable for Jesus who was wholly God, and wholly human.

Broken House

I was reading an email from a Christian organization and the writer mentioned a "return of prosperity." These three words got me thinking about the prosperity that we once had as Americans. I say as Americans because the prosperity was pretty much limited to America and the western world. So this desire to have this "return of prosperity" is a somewhat ethnocentric desire. I am not writing this as a attack on the individual who wrote these words, but I think that we as Christians need to take a look at what our prosperity looked like to the rest of the world. We need to examine the prosperity that we so wholeheartedly took a part of, and we need to decide if that's what we really desire to return.

I am not going to write a lot about this because I have not done all of my homework, but I would recommend a couple books for people.

Jesus Wants to Save Christians - Rob Bell, Don Golden
The Irresistible Revolution - Shane Claiborne
Jesus For President - Shane Claiborne, Chris Haw

Nuff Said.

"Why do they have no altars, no temples, no images?... What shall I build Him when the whole world, the work of His hands, cannot contain Him? Should we rather not make a sanctuary for Him in our souls? The whole heaven and the whole earth and all things beyond the confines of the world are filled with God... I would almost say; we live with Him. What a beautiful sight it is for God when a Christian mocks the clatter of the tools of death and the horor of the executioner; when he defends and upholds his liberty in the face of kings and princes, obeying God alone to whom he belongs. Among us, boys and frail women laugh to scorn torture and the gallows cross and all the other horrors of execution" Minucius Felix AD 200

My Exit, Unfair.

There I was laying on a foam mat covered in vinyl that squeaked every time you moved on it. The blanket that was given me I used to cover the mat. The large room that we were in smelled like the wrestling room at my high school, body odor that they had attempted to cover by some kind of disinfectant. But this was the smell before the 130 men that were expected to sleep there that night arrived. The mats were laid on the floor in rows of about twenty or twenty five. I watched as the men filled into the room, signed the sign-in sheet and were told what mat number they would be sleeping on tonight. As the room filled it took on a different smell. The body odor increased dramatically, so much so that the smell of the disinfectant was gone. It was replaced by a different smell. It was the smell of booze. A little bit sweet, but it burns as you smell it in that quantity.
The way that they interacted was as a very dysfunctional family. One man would yell at another "Hey shut the fuck up!" that man would respond with "You shut the fuck up!" Than the first would yell back "I fucking love you!" the second man would respond like wise. Than a third man would yell "I fucking love you too!" Than the first would yell "I wasn't fucking talking to you!" There was this family bond with a underlying tone of hostility.
As the night went on people slowly got their area organized, laid down and went to sleep until eventually the lights went off. But it never got truly quiet. There was the sound of people shifting positions in their bed, the sound of people snoring, the movement of people who went out of the room every two hours for a smoke break. And then there was an interesting sound. I think that it was the sound of someone coming down off of a high. All of a sudden I heard a man say "ohh, ohh, ohh shit, ohh" and then silence. A little while later, not sure how much later because I was dozing in and out of sleep, I heard it again. "Ohh, ohh shit, ohh, ohh." This happened a couple more times through the night. I was never able to tell who was doing it. I know though that there are a lot of Vietnam vets that sleep in those shelters, I wonder if it could have been someone having flashbacks to some hell that he expierienced many years ago, but in his mind its as if it was still going on. For many of them the battle is still going on. They stepped out of the jungles of southeast asia to jungles of Minneapolis. The battle still going on in their mind. The drug addictions carried over from the battle field to streets.
Finally I slept. Only to be woken by a man saying "If you want breakfast, you gotta get up now." So I slowly crawled out of my bed. No need to get dressed because I wore everything that I was wearing the day before to bed, including my shoes. We were warned that if we took our shoes off there was a high likely hood of them being stolen. I made my way out of the large sleeping room for men named the "safebay" into the hall where they were serving grits and coffee for breakfast. I lined up and got my grits with a big spoonfull of sugar and butter in it. It was one of the best breakfasts I have ever had. In all honesty it was delicious. The sweetness of the sugar and the salty taste of the butter, made it the perfect ending the night. I came away with mixed emotions. I was relieved that the night was over. But I had this sorrow that for everyone else that night would repeat itself again and again, that it had been repeating itself for a long time now. And that they were used to it. I don't know if I ever could get used to that. I would never want to. I walked out of that room knowing that I would never spend another night there. It almost seemed unfair.

East of Eden

From the title you would think this was a blog about the book bu John Steinbeck. Well sorry to disappoint you but its not. The title of the book reminded me another book. Jesus Wants to Save Christians by Rob Bell, but more specifically something he said in it. He talked about Cain and after Cain killed his brother Abel and where Cain ended up. Genesis 4:16 says "So Cain went out from the Lord's presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden." East of Eden. How many times in my life have I found my self east of Eden. I do not listen to God and so I find my self in a place I do not want to be. I feel cut off from the presence of God. I try and do things on my own, striving in the flesh, failing miserably. Interestingly enough the word "Nod' means wandering. Cain found himself wandering. Separated from the presence of the Lord, but I could imaging constantly trying to find it.
That's where the story ends for Cain. In Nod. Wandering east of Eden. East of where God would rather have him be. Thank God, that's not where it ends for me. Hebrews 12:24 says "But you have come to... Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word, than the blood of Abel" After Cain killed Abel. His blood spoke out to God from the ground. It cried out for justice. Jesus' blood cries out for mercy. Mercy and salvation for those who believe in Him. For those willing to take on the covering of His blood. Mercy is a much better word than Justice. Justice was done. It was taken care of. Jesus took care of it on the cross. He took our punishment. To me that does not seem very just. The perfect Son of God took my sins. That's called Grace. Thank you God for Grace.