SCL

I have a confession.

An international confession.

It’s a dark secret I really need to share.

Ready? Are you sitting down? Have you braced yourself adequately?

OK, here goes …

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“Do you consider yourself a pastor?”

Someone asked me that once during a Q&A at a conference. That one threw me for a loop and I answered it the best way I knew:

“I consider myself terrified.”

That’s the truth. I don’t know how to do most of this, so these weird moments are a mix of abject fun and slight terror. Like the time I mentioned having struggled with porn in the past to a reporter. You know what the first line of his article was? “In addition to many other problems, Jon struggles with P.” Awesome. Thanks fella. “Many other problems.” Fantastic.

But no one tells you how to do smart interviews. So you do dumb ones and then realize later, that was dumb. And part of the reason this whole thing is so weird is because I’m boldly and bravely tackling such hard issues. Like today’s. I don’t see Mark Driscoll or Rick Warren stepping to the plate on this one. But I am. We are. Today we’re going to settle something that is divisive and critical and currently tearing the church asunder:

Is God Mac or PC?

That is, up in heaven, is he cranking away on a Mac or a PC? Does he love the iPhone or is he currently listening to Michael W. Smith’s greatest hits on a Zune? Does he have a little apple sticker stuck anywhere?

I feel like lists work well on blogs, so let’s break it down list style and weigh all the facts.

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!Cat Scraptacular!

That’s what I would have named the cat scrapbooking magazine that someone I worked with once printed off the color copiers at our office.

I don’t have any proof that they were actually running a feline focused publication from within our office, but based on how many kitten photos and full color scrapbooking pages I found on our work printer, I have to assume that’s what was going on.

That’s not a great thing to do at your place of employment, but before I judge that lady, I have to remember which one of us was asked to leave that company.

I was …

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If I ever become a high paid executive, I already know the first two things I am going to do:

1. Purchase nicer belts.

2. Say the phrase, “I’ve got an open door policy.”

The first one is obvious. Everyone knows the power belt is the new power tie. Nothing says, “I’m all about commerce and synergizing our optimized customer touch points” like a gleamtacular belt. Right now, because I’m just a lowly copywriter, I only own one belt. It’s reversible. One side is brown fake leather and the other side is black.

The second part of my master plan is murky. There are a handful of phrases every executive I’ve ever met says at least once. One is “I’ve got an open door policy.” Executives are always talking about open doors, but to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine ever juking around a personal assistant, plopping myself down in the CEO’s office and saying, “Hey, I saw that your door was open. How things going on your end? This new timesheet system is killing me.”

I just don’t see that happening, but “I’ve got an open door policy” is still a fun phrase and it’s kind of the opposite of one my old boss used to say. When people would bring him problems, he would say, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions to problems.” It’s the corporate version of when you’d ask your 3rd grade teacher how to spell a word and she’d tell you to look it up in the dictionary instead. (Remember those things? They were made of paper and heavy? Wow. Good times, good times.) …

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It’s always good to have a friend who is a cop and I’m excited to say I just met one. His daughter goes to kindergarten with mine and we walked around together on Halloween night. I peppered him with the kind of questions a 7-year old boy would ask McGruff the crime dog but he humored me. And then, he told me something a little surprising …

International drug cartels use caravans of different cars to run drugs through Georgia.

I read about that in article but secretly hoped the organizational savvy of cartels that are now using a Wal-Mart approach to outsourcing their crimes was exaggerated. He assured me it was not. Here’s how it works:

When a drug cartel is going to drive drugs up from Miami or Texas, they use three different cars …

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A few weeks ago, I bumped into a problem that’s plagued me for years, if not decades.

Was it deodorant related? No, but thank you for asking. I am well aware of that issue. I’m Old Spice Red Zone all the way but fear I might have beaten it. Is that possible? Is it possible that my body has bested that deodorant and I need to move on to something else? I can’t wear Axe body spray in large part due to the countless semi-clothed ladies who uncontrollably throw themselves at you the minute you drench your skin in something named “Swagger.” I’m running out of deodorant options, and I’m not kidding. I was probably one of the only people who packed deodorant in the backpack they wore around the Catalyst Conference. Bible? Sure everybody had that. Notebook? Without a doubt. Deodorant? I had it. But that wasn’t the issue that came up …

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I love a comeback story.

I love when someone who has fallen or stumbled picks themselves up and keeps going. I love when the underdog outreaches the distance we assumed they could reach. I love when the small nobody rises above a thousand obstacles and turns out to be a big somebody.

And I don’t think I am alone in that. This is why we all get excited about the “Cinderella Stories” during college basketball season, those teams from schools in the middle of nowhere that some how beat the giant school. It’s not nearly as exciting to see the team that should win, win. It’s not nearly as dramatic or interesting to see the seasoned professional hit the winning shot. That’s just what seasoned professionals do. The kid with the gruesome background who taught himself how to play basketball on a peach basket in his backyard? That’s a shot heard round the world.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, our desire to see comebacks. David and Goliath is the classic example of something being made out of nothing. But Youtube has opened up a whole new way to experience stories like this and I have a new favorite.

The back story is simple and chances are, you’ve already seen this wildly popular clip. Danyl, an unassuming teacher from the UK takes the stage to audition for a television show called the X-Factor. Dressed in simple clothes and with a nervousness that is palpable, he starts to sing in front of Simon Cowell, the American Idol judge. Watch this video …

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My three year old daughter McRae and my six year old L.E. both asked if they could put the Stuff Christians Like buttons on the back of their school backpacks. I said “Sure,” until I realized that the “booty, God, booty” button might not go over well at the Methodist pre-school. I just figured McRae would not be able to explain the wry Christian satire and ultimate message of hope in Christ it represented to a teacher who saw a three year old wearing something that said “booty” on it. Twice. Fair enough.

But then it struck me that I too had done a pretty poor job of explaining where and what the phrase “booty, God, booty” meant. That post came out on April 3rd, 2008 and has been long forgotten under the onslaught of other posts. And lately folks who didn’t see the original post have been asking me, “What the heck is the booty thing?” Worse than that, I recently saw a post on someone’s blog that featured the booty logo and just slammed the whole thing as being directly related to the fall of Western society. (I am summarizing, but that was the gist.)

So here now, to clear up the questions and the confusion, is a remix of the original post that started the whole idea …

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This is going to come as a shock for many of you, but I wasn’t popular in high school.

I know, I know, given the unibrow, constant braces, and tap dancing lessons, you would think that I would have been homecoming king. But that wasn’t the case. I was a bit of a loser. And by “bit” I mean “big” and by “big” I mean “wicked big.”

I just wasn’t popular and although I’ve committed to raising my own kids as dorks, I was taken aback when my daughter confessed something the other night at dinner.

L.E. is in kindergarten. After three years at a small local church preschool program, she’s started her journey through the public education system. And last week at dinner she told us, “Mary told Janice that I was a big, fat loser.”

She just threw that sentence out on the kitchen table in between forced bites of vegetables. And it sat there for a second, with my wife and I not knowing quite what to do. With big blue eyes, L.E. looked back and forth at as, silently asking a loud question …

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I used to be a mailman.

My wife disagrees. She doesn’t feel one summer of delivering mail qualifies me to claim “I used to be a mailman,” but she’s never enlisted in the United States Postal Service. She’s never driven a jeep with a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. She’s never worn the badge of the red, white and blue and doesn’t understand that once you join, you are forever a letter carrier. To this day, I’m required by law to egg the UPS guy when he brings Amazon packages to our house. What can brown do for me? Brown can get egged. I’ve already said too much.

But if I were forced to rewrite the sentence, “I used to be a mailman,” I would rewrite it to say:

“I used to be a horrible mailman.”

That sentence is now accurate, because I was one of the worst mailman in the history of the postal service. My greatest fault, of the many I brought to that summer, was my speed. I was really slow at delivering mail, so much so that at the end of the day, I had to sprint and jump off of porches to try to get back to the post office with all the outgoing mail.

But my slowness wasn’t always my fault. One day, I was late because of a prayer sneak attack and that is a day firmly lodged in my memory.

I was walking up a driveway on a hot July day in Framingham, Massachusetts when I saw the homeowner watering his yard with a house. I had never met him before, (unlike that family who let me use their bathroom after I made the rookie mailman mistake of eating a steak and cheese sandwich from a vending machine at the post office. Who could have known that thing would be bad? And how awkward is it for the mailman to come in and use your bathroom?) I handed him the mail, we talked about the weather and then he laid his sweaty hand on my sweaty shoulder and started praying.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, prayer sneak attack. I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to pray too? Was he the opener and I was the closer? Should I bow my head? Were my mailman skills so horrible he felt compelled to pray? Should I close my eyes?

I was so surprised that I just stood there while this stranger prayed on me and then I walked back to the jeep and continued to be a completely mediocre mailman.

What’s the protocol in a situation like that? Could we come to some sort of bylaws or something? It’s going to happen again. And when it does, here are the three things I hope my prayer sneak attacker knows:

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