Even though I’m not wearing 45 belt loops Z-Cavaricci’s I got at Chess King and ladies have far less perms, our neighborhood pool is very similar to my high school cafeteria.
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Serious Wednesdays
Brad Pitt & Hott Wives.
Every time I go to Wal-mart I feel bad for Brad Pitt. Not horrible, I don’t feel all that bad. Just like when John Mayer sings on his most recent song about his heartache I think about his $20 million watch collection and string of models and I don’t feel all that miserable for his troubles. But Brad Pitt, jeez.
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Being lazy for the Lord.
“Guess what my favorite sky spirit is? There are three: wind, water and sun. Guess which one is my favorite?” Oh boy. My four year old McRae said that in the back seat of our car the other day and I almost drove off the road into a gully and/or a holler.
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Believing the 2-Star Reviews too often.
Stuff Christians Like
“reads like it was cobbled together in about a weekend.” That’s one of the quotes from a 2 star review someone gave me on Amazon.
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Resisting Rest.
I once had a job where a manager fell asleep during a training course. We paid tens of thousands of dollars to bring in some experts to train us and in the back row of the conference room he was sprawled out in his chair sleeping.
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Throwing up.
Last Sunday was one of the worst days of my life.
I can say with very little Kent Brockman hyperbole that Sunday, February 14th will live forever on my top ten list of worst days ever.
Why?
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Worrying about talent.
Chances are, we’ve never met. We’ve never hung out or read comic books together or played racquetball. (Which Brian Regan calls the only sport in which you can be looking at the ball and get hit in the back of the head at exactly the same moment.)
But despite that, I do know at least one thing about you. I know that at some point, you’ve doubted that you had the talent to do whatever it is you feel called to do. Even if you don’t have a shadow of a doubt that you’re supposed to be doing what ever your “it” is, doubt creeps in. And so you don’t feel talented enough to be the one doing it.
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Hope.
“Promise me if you go on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, you’ll take me so I can sit in the audience.”
This is my father’s only request when it comes to the book release of Stuff Christians Like. I’ve never been on television. Two people attended the only meet and greet I’ve held. I’ve been assured by one of the biggest publishers in the world that Christian humor books simply do not sell. But I think that parents are required by DNA to hope. To believe that anything is possible if not down right probable.
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Regret.
“Can I talk to you for a minute in a conference room?”
A co-worker asked me that a few weeks ago. My first thought was of course, “I’m about to get fired.” Even though this was a peer and not a superior, I still thought that maybe I was about to get the ax. Call me paranoid, I just assume that when a girlfriend says, “We need to talk,” they’re about to dump you and when someone at work asks to “talk to you for a minute,” they’re about to fire you. I admit, it’s a very sweaty existence I lead.
But when we went into the conference room, the one that smells like dry erase markers and disappointment, he turned to me and said something I wasn’t expecting, “I watched someone die yesterday.”
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Caring too much about failure.
In the 8th grade, the other wrestling team burst into laughter when I got on the scale in the locker room in my tighty whiteys because I was so skinny.
In the 9th grade, I shaved stripes into my eyebrows so that I would look more like Vanilla Ice.
In the 11th grade, I got dumped by a girl in a coat closet of a dance at the Polish American club in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In college, every frat rejected me.
I’m no stranger to failure and it’s many flavors, but what about you?
What if you fail?
What if that thing you want to do, just bombs? What if you get embarrassed? What if you leave a safe job for a new adventure and it’s all a big mistake and you regret every stupid minute that you thought you could do it and you end up gaining a lot of weight because you’re unemployed and eat macaroni and cheese for breakfast? (My summer of 2001.)
What if?
We worry about and that makes sense. I know right now, that if you’re like me, you wonder if you’re really doing what you were designed to do. You wait for the weekend and wonder if there’s a job where that wouldn’t happen. You wonder if there’s a mission or a goal or a journey you’re supposed to be on right now because such a small percentage of who you are, who you really are deep down is getting used at your day job.
And you think about trying something new, but that voice comes back in and you wonder,
“What if I fail?”
I wonder that too. The Stuff Christians Like book comes out in April and I sit down at night with my wife and talk about it not selling. At all. People have said that. Smart people with pleated pants and straight teeth have told me Christian humor books never sell. And I worry about that, about failing.
But I think as Christians, we have a duty, a responsibility, a call from on high to look at failure differently. So in the last few weeks I’ve come up with 3 new ways to answer the question, “What if you fail?”
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