I sat there. In an overcrowded Starbucks east of campus. I was nowhere near my comfort zone. I didn't like burnt bean soaked water. I didn't consume products from the chain in which I was holding an empty table. As a matter of fact, I was in the beginning stages of a life-long boycott of that particular chain coffee distributor; but, it is where he wanted to meet. So I set my convictions aside and obliged graciously. Like a good Christian should.
I saw him come in before he saw me. A short, staulky man wearing an old beat up LSU ball cap and glasses. I stood quickly as he approached so that he knew that I was the one he was meeting. We had met once before, but it was at a party, so I doubted he would remember me. I slid the chair back so fast it banged into the girl behind me, helping her spill her drink down her front. I turned to apologize adamantly. Then I turned back and he was standing there, with a smile from ear to ear.
"What happened, champ?"
As I tried to explain what happened with the chair and the crowd and her drink, he was instantly talking to her. "What did he do? Awww man, you ruined this girl's shirt. Why did you do that?" He said this chuckling with an aggressively firm punch to the arm. He spent the next few minutes talking to the girl and her friend while I stood there, hovering. I was standing over the entire conversation like I was sitting in the cheap seats watching this all go down. An observer of a situation that I caused. A muted participant as they bantered about this and that. Poking fun at me with a sly realism that made it acceptable to do so.
After the introductions, laughs and other random comments on tattoos, everything was smoothed over. They let me go without paying for dry cleaning or buying a new shirt, both his ideas.
He looked at me with the same huge grin as we sat and said, "You want something? I am buying."
Great. This is off to a fantastic start. I explained my position on coffee and the current franchise boycott was was involved in. He listened. He laughed, got up and got himself a coffee and sat back down after making it through the twenty person line backed all the way out the door.
As he sat back down, we started discussing why this meeting was taking place.
I had moved to Texas two years prior to that meeting. In those two years I went from drunk pot-dealing surf bum to good Christian student. After doing the "good" thing for two years, I felt a thirst. A drawing. A pushing, pulling, yearning for something deeper, something more, something hard to explain, that thing that we all know what it is, but cannot explain. It is the feeling that you have when you get to the last chapter of a novel and you want to know how it ends or and what happens to the characters you have grown to know and love. No one can put a book down on the last chapter. No one can walk out on a movie when it looks like the good guy is going to lose. It is the feeling of needing more, needing to see the turn, to see the where the end will end.
I needed to know more of Jesus and his disciples and what He wanted of me before I could spend another Sunday in a pew, or Thursday night in a meeting or Wednesday morning feeding the homeless. I couldn't take settling for the mediocre Jesus that everyone seemed to have tucked in their back pocket. I knew there was more to the story, more to Him, more to me than to settle for that. I just didn't know how to get it.
After voicing my concerns and gripes to my friend, she recommended her father who was a pastor of a small home church. He knows guys, he loves teaching people, he is a ... um ... motivator?
I thought it was worth a try. Hell, anything was better than sitting in another "What would Jesus Do" symposium with three steps to better your life.
So here I am. In the place I was not comfortable, disgruntled in where I was as a christian and having embarrassed myself mere moments before meeting a man that could potentially change my life. This is how life is, isn't it? Right before something great happens, you are made to feel upset, placed in an uncomfortable spot, embarrassed and then it hits you. An opportunity of a life time. Granted, some of this is shear coincidence, but I see it too often to consider it to be unconnected to something else. Something bigger. Something that ties it all together, us all together.
And that is how it all started. With a meeting over a coffee in a spot that was frequented by so many people that, by odds alone, one person had to have a life-changing event there every day. That day was mine. After that day a lot changed. How I saw the world, God, myself and just about everything in between.
