on bridges burning and being rebuilt

There was this kid I grew up with that I didn’t like very much. I didn’t like him because when I looked at him I saw the things I wanted for myself, and in my adolescence, I didn’t know how to handle that. He was a few grades behind me, but popular with the kids in my grade, more popular than I was with them. He was some sort of basketball prodigy, and everyone knew it, and worse, he knew it too. Already, he was an inch or two taller than me, which wasn’t that big of an accomplishment. Two years later, when I got my drivers permit, I was still 5’2.

One Friday night, while all the students and alumni and faculty were sitting in the football stands, wearing green and gold, holding up banners, and yelling at referees, my friend Matt and I went into the gym and turned on the lights. We were shooting a few basketballs, banging them against the rim mostly, when this basketball prodigy kid came in with several of his friends. He asked me if I wanted to play him to ten.

I told him that was fine, and he asked what we were playing for. I had no idea; the thought of playing him for money or a snack cake from the vending machine added this strange urgency to the game, made me feel like it really mattered. I watched him stand there, just past the free-throw line, dribbling the ball between his legs, waiting for me to come up with something.

“Five bucks?” I asked. I still had the bill my parents gave me for the concession stand stuffed inside my sock. Why I put my money in my sock instead of my pocket I have no idea.

Somehow, through some sort of miracle, I won. I was behind the three-point line, and threw the ball toward the basket. It careened off the backboard and went in.

I couldn’t believe it. Neither could my friend. Neither could the prodigy. He said he wasn’t going to pay, because I had just gotten lucky, which I had, but still. I said some things, I can’t remember what, but they must have been pretty horrible because while I was saying them my nose was on fire and my mouth was full of blood that tasted like metal from where he hit me. It was the first time anyone had hit me.

I could feel my heart pumping all the way in my head. I looked at my hand and saw the blood from my nose and mouth all crimson and sticky, and looked at this kid and he looked so calm, so peaceful, and I remember wondering how he could look so calm and wondering if my friends could see my legs shaking. This rage just exploded inside of me, and we were on the ground and I didn’t care how often I got hit, I just wanted to hit him too.

When our friends pulled us off one another, there was blood on the gym floor and on his shirt and I knew some of it was mine but remember thinking some of it was his, too.

I’m only telling you this to say that that was my only memory of this kid until I was in college. I never talked to him again.

I didn’t keep in touch with anybody from middle school, or high school even, but during my sophomore year of college, my friend Matt – the one I had gone into the gym with – tracked down my phone number and called me one Sunday night.

We were talking, laughing, reliving. He lived in Louisiana now, was thinking about tech school, but not sure. He still had a few friends from our middle school days. I asked him if he remembered that night, and the lucky shot, and the fight.

“You know what happened to him, right?” he asked.

I had no idea.

He told me that earlier that year, that kid - who was now a junior - was arguing on the phone with his older brother, who was a student at some military college somewhere.

“Their parents were going through a divorce, and his brother was cussing at him, telling him how much of a fuck-up he was and how their parents were probably getting a divorce because he was always in trouble and stressing everybody out, and he just stood there, listening, and then he said, ‘You’re right.’”

Then he put a pistol in his mouth. His brother heard it on the other end of the phone.

I lay on my loft bed that night and listened to my roommate sleep in the bed beneath mine, and thought about the younger brother saying, “You’re right,” just like that, “You’re right,” and I wondered if when he said it he looked as calm as he did after he punched me.

I tried to imagine what he must have felt like, how wrong he was for believing it was his fault, or that his parents didn’t need him, or that the world would fix itself if he wasn’t around to keep screwing it up.

I knew it wasn’t my fault, that us getting in a fight in middle school had nothing to do with his suicide, but still, I couldn’t help but feel like I should have been a better person somehow. Like maybe if I had lost that game, or said, “Oh my god, that was a lucky shot, I should pay you,” then we could have laughed about it and maybe something, anything, something would have been different.

I lay in bed and cried these heavy tears and prayed and tried not to wake up my roommate.

****

A few weeks ago my friend Colin invited me to this prayer meeting he hosts. He asks me to come every few weeks, but I’ve always had stuff going on. I told him that I would probably get an anxiety attack if I did go. I haven’t been to church in several months. We were sitting at a bar eating pizza and drinking beer.

I told him that when I know it’s going to be a group of Christians hanging out, I usually find it easier to come up with an excuse, to keep working late into the night, or tell them I wanted to go to bed early because I have to get up early the next morning. They probably all think I have some dirty secret that I’m hiding, or that I’m watching porn, but the truth is I sit at home and read a novel, and if I do go out it’s to go for a long walk by myself. The strange thing is, when I’m walking through the crowds on Market or East Bay, I feel more connected to God. I feel like I can talk to Him easier, and like He wants to talk to me. More than that. I feel like He needs me. Not in the “He needs me because He can’t do it on His own” kind of way, but like He needs me. I wish I had the words to explain it.

Colin asked me why I think it is that groups of Christians give me anxiety attacks. It was a good question. I didn’t know the answer. I’ve been thinking about it, though, and I think it’s that you can only be told you don’t belong to the club so many times before you start to believe it.

After I caught my wife having an affair, the leadership in the church I worked for told me I wasn’t welcome there anymore. I remember sinking into the soft green chair of Mike’s office, the man who for all practical purposes had been my father and my biggest encourager at the church. He was the first one to hear about Caroline’s unfaithfulness.

I listened to him tell me I was going to have to take a few months off. I nodded my head.

“We’re going to tell people it’s a few months, but you need to know this is permanent,” he said.

I was too beat up to argue. The next week I asked the leadership team if I could meet with them.

They said, “No.” They told the church “there’s been unfaithfulness in the marriage, and John has been removed.” It was humiliating.

I’m lucky: I made it 25 years without having to feel that abandonment. I grew up with a great family, a mom that put snacks in my lunchbox and a dad that drove me to Florida every year to watch baseball games. Maybe that’s why it hurt so bad when it happened. When I did feel the pain of being thrown away, it almost destroyed me. Hearing Mike tell me I couldn’t be a part, seeing my friends Adam and Nate turn their backs because the situation was too messy, the whole thing was too much for me to handle.

I wanted to run away; to go to New York, or Boston, or Toronto. I wanted to get lost, live a new life, forget about church and relationships and community, to pretend the whole experience was a book I had finished reading. Instead I moved to Charleston.

I felt like the best thing for me to do would be the last thing I wanted to: I went back to church. For three years I gave all I had. I helped out with the small groups, and went to all the services, and joined an early-morning men’s group where we sat around a conference table drinking coffee and talking about our lives and wives and jobs. I’m not trying to say any of that was bad. I actually enjoyed it. Especially listening to the conversations around the conference table.

When I made the decision to leave the church, it didn’t have anything to do with not liking the music, or finding the sermons boring, or old women with fried hair looking down spectacled noses at me because I have tattoos. It was because I felt like the people I looked to for guidance and acceptance really didn’t care about how my life turned out. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it felt that way. It felt that way strong enough for me to walk away from something I had given the last decade of my life to. I began to believe something must be wrong with me – some intrinsic and flawed characteristic, a chromosome out of whack – something that would keep me from ever being let inside the circle.

I don’t know if this walking away is a permanent thing, or just my mind telling me I need a temporary respite from the institution of church, but I’ve noticed a beautiful thing since I’ve been gone. I’ve noticed people, lots and lots of people, good people, people who want to serve, people with hearts as big as music, people who would, and do, give the coats off their back.

I look at the way they give, at the relationships they build with kids in financially bankrupt schools and emotionally bankrupt families, and I see the complete joy that comes over the kids they serve every single week. I look at these people and I see Jesus. A handful of them are Christians. A few even go to church. Most of them are just vegetarians.

I hope this doesn’t come across in a way I don’t intend it. I don’t talk about the pain of the past because I want to tell a story, or feel like I deserve some sort of prize for not killing myself, because God knows I’ve had it better than some of these kids we see every week. I talk about it because I like questions.

Since most of the betrayal or abandonment I’ve experienced came from church, that’s where my questions tend to start. Why do I need to have a distant pastor of a mega-church, or a TV personality with a $50,000 car? Why can’t my church be my friend D.A., when we’re sitting in Marion Square late at night, drinking dark beer and asking big questions? Why can’t it be Bryan, when we’ve just left the movie, or are walking down humid streets to the smoke shop, and he makes a joke that’s slightly off-color, and we laugh these belly laughs, resonating off the narrow homes, and I realize we’re not laughing because the joke was so funny, but because telling crude jokes is so out of character for him? I’m not asking to persuade anyone. I’m asking to figure it out for myself.

I talked about some of this with a friend from high-school earlier today. He’s wondering the same things, feeling the same not-fitting-in-ness, tired of giving all he has to give. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s wanted to go to seminary and be a preacher. This week, the leadership at the church he’s invested in told him he didn’t have “the gifting,” and wasn’t “called”. I told him I was sorry, and that in some way, I understood how he felt. I wanted to scream curse words.

It’s not about feeling important, or special, or even “called”, it’s much more basic than that. It’s about feeling needed. To feel like you’re a part of something that wouldn’t survive without you - a business that would go under, a family that would disintegrate, a cause that wouldn’t have a voice – is a fundamental element, a longing we all share. Even though the thought of being needed is sometimes suffocating, the truth is, we have to feel that way to keep from imploding.

A preacher friend of mine sent me an email a few months ago after we had sat down for coffee and I had explained some of my frustrations – frustrations with the lack of support I had felt from the Christian community, and frustration at my own sin for harboring bitterness. She told me I needed to be careful because I had already burned bridges with some of the leadership at her church, and it wouldn’t be good for me to burn more.

I respect her a lot, and she’s always had good things to say, even if it’s hard for people (like myself) to hear. Still, something about that sounded off, almost right but not quite, a chord with a note that’s a half-step flat. It took me some time to process, like most things do, but what I came to is this: if we’re both trying to be like Jesus, shouldn’t burning bridges be impossible?
I should throw in the disclaimer that I don’t think she meant it as quite the grenade of an email it came across as, but still. It’s made me ask myself that question a lot. Wasn’t Jesus’ whole purpose, in fact, to show that there is no such thing as a burned bridge? Didn’t he come to reconcile: people to God (Our Father), people to their physical needs (Give us this day), people to people (As we forgive those who have trespassed)?

***

I walked through the empty streets to Waterfront Park late last night, and thought about burning bridges, and how, ultimately, burning bridges is saying, “I don’t need you. My life is better without you in it,” and I sat on the wooden swing and looked at the lights of cars crossing over the harbor, and thought about my friend whose church crushed his dreams, and the basketball prodigy that took his life, and struggled with all of these things.

Obviously, there’s a healthiness to some relationships dying. Surely, I’m not supposed to be friends with my ex, or the men she was sleeping with, or the leadership from the church that fired me.

But sometimes, when I think about drinking coffee with Mike, or the day I installed a sprinkler system with Nate, or mountain-biking with Adam, I miss them very much.

And this is what I’m trying to say: We need each other. Not in the “We can’t live without each other” kind of way, but more like “Why would we want to?”