Day Nineteen

Day 19

My Purpose Driven Life

Cultivating Community

There’s a saying, “Can’t we all just get along?” Easier said than done, in the real world you can pick and choose who you want to hang out with and get along with. In a church body, you have no control over who shows up or who the other members are. God just brings together everyone with different personalities, with all their differences and characteristics and at different points in their Christian maturity. Some are saved, some aren’t. Some have been saved for a long time and some may have just been saved for a short time. Some may understand forgiveness and others may not. Some may be able to control their tongues while others still have trouble keeping it to themselves. But yet we are all one family. No different than the ones we grew up in or with.

Speaking of the ones we grew up in or with, everyone one of us grew up in a family that was different than the next. Some had a family that was complete with both parents all the way through their childhood, while others grew up with only one or the other parent. Maybe just one to begin with or maybe there was a divorce half way though our childhood and we had to go through the pain of seeing them split up and separate from each other as was the situation that I live through at the age of 14. The first time my parents split apart from each other was when I was in seventh grade. My mother came to my school and picked me and my sister up early one day to take us out for ice cream and tell us that our dad was at home moving his stuff out of the house into an apartment of his own. This bewildered us because we didn’t see why this would be happening. I guess we were still a little to young to understand what was or wasn’t going on between them yet. But at the same time it seemed like it was like our other friends that had only one parent at home and they would visit them on weekends. Their separation only lasted a few months and then my dad moved back in with us and then we moved to another city and they bought another home where we live though out Jr. and Sr. High School. But within just another year after that move my parents were separating again, this time for good. This time it was for a divorce, and also the happiest day of my life. I was finally glad to see him go. He was an angry and abusive man that had no idea how to be a father or a husband to anyone. Since this is the kind of father I grew up with, it is no wonder that the family I grew up in was not your normal Leave it to Beaver family. I always wondered why our family couldn’t be like the families I saw on the television shows we watched as children. Or why did television portray families that were so far out of reach for the way things really were? It seemed unfair to me to show us that this is how it is supposed to be but turn off the television and watch out, daddies home and he’s in a mood. Or turn around and there’s no daddy anywhere. And brother and sister just can’t get along. While the war in Viet Nam was in full gear, the war between the siblings was at its peak all the time also. While soldiers were hiding in wait for the enemy, I was hiding under my sisters bed waiting for her to go to sleep so I could reach my hand up and grab her and scream and scare the life out of her so bad it would be until she was 30 years old before she stopped looking under the bed before she went to sleep at night. In other words, my family was more dysfunctional than the word itself. So learning how to live as a family wasn’t the first thing I learned in life. Learning how to live life with others wasn’t the second thing I learned in life. Learning how to get along with others wasn’t something that was taught to me at home by any means. I feel the pain of it to this day when I so much desire a relationship with both my brother and my sister and it just isn’t there. I remember my brother who is six years younger saying to me one time when I was taking my 8 year olds in my third grade Sunday school class out for the day if he could go with me and I said no, “GEE Michael, how come you can be nice to your kids at church but you can’t even be nice to your own brother?” Why couldn’t I treat my brother like I treated the kids I loved so much at church? I loved my kids, but not my own brother. That was very sad. Why not? What made him so different?

So what happens when you put someone like me, who grew up in this kind of dysfunctional family with other people who grew up in their own kind of dysfunctional families, and you try to combine them all together with only one common bond, a belief in Jesus Christ. Try saying “So can’t we all just get along?” Who is the joke really on? Some have believed for a lifetime, some have believed for a lifetime and still never got it. Some just walked in the door. Some have the mentality that says “Well where I come from,” and then others don’t even say where I come from they just do what ever it is where ever they came from and don’t ever worry about where it is where ever they are at. Then watch the reactions from the family around them. See how the fan disperses the proverbial chicken poop. But somehow, we all just get along, why? Because there are enough people to handle loving the ones that are new at the family stuff, I know this from personal experience. Being one of the new members in my congregation, and being in a congregation that I feel like a family for the first time since High School, it’s like learning all over again. My Pastor’s wife wrote me a while back that she felt like God brought me here for Training. Training for future plans He has for my life in front of large crowds of people. So I am taking everything I am hearing and being taught very seriously, from everyone. So many things are happening all at once in my life. In the last three weeks God has brought back four people from my past, two that I knew over 10 years ago and two that I haven’t seen in about two years. I have to ask myself why is this happening all at once, all at the same time in my life. Not many people have this many friends just show up out of the clear blue sit next to them on the bus, or park next to them in the middle of the store parking lot, then just walk up to them in the middle of a Mall, or call them on the phone. God is doing something. God is preparing me for something much larger than I could ever imagine. So the work of everyone in my church family I am taking very seriously and I am using the wisdom and knowledge of all of them to teach me exactly what God wants me to learn. I feel He has placed each and every one of there at this point and time in my life. Just as He place everyone in my life at every moment of my life.

I wrote a letter today to a friend named Robert, a man I met in the hospital this week as I was having surgery. God divinely appointed this time and place for us to meet I am as sure of it as I am everything else in my life. In my letter to him I spoke of a man that was my boss for many years during my years in my twenty’s when I was also in the midst of my using Crystal Meth at the same time. My boss was not a Christian. But he was someone God used to watch over me. This is what I wrote Robert about my boss Brad Lane.

God gave me a boss that understood me and was more like a father than a boss. If it was any other boss I would have been fired so many times. But instead I would just call him and say Brad, I had too much this weekend, I need to go home, can you please come in. And he would. Or we would fight in the office over something, but after work was done, and the doors were locked, the fight stayed in the office and we went out for drinks. How professional was that? At 31 he took me to rehab. At 28 he took me to the hospital for my first rehab. And I walked out 2 days later. At 26 he was the one who called my dad and said Mr. Carpenter you son is a stubborn son of a gun and was supposed to be in the hospital last Friday at his doctors request but refused to go now here we are a week later and when he left today he didn’t look like he was going to be with us another day. Can you drive up and go check on him with me. God put a man who wasn’t a Christian by any means in my life to watch over me. He was in the Air Force for 20 years as an Intelligence Officer, a very smart man but also a very caring man. God knew that those years of my life I was going to need someone to pay attention to me. When I was estranged from my family and from anyone that would have any positive influence in my life, so the person that had dealings every day in my life was my boss. I thank God he put Brad Lane in my life during those years. I wouldn’t have made it through that part of my life without him.

Just as God put Brad Lane in my life at just the right time, I believe with my whole heart that He as placed my Pastor Michael Barta in my life with just as much precise care as He did in the past. And not just Pastor Barta but also his wife Linda and each and every member that He has brought to Johnson Chapel AME over the past years in preparation for my return to a corner I promised GOD I would never return to. It just has taken Him thirteen years to get everyone there ready for me. And once everyone was in place, He was then ready for me to watch a man named Jamal Bryant on television on a day and time that he wasn’t supposed to be aired just to get me in AHH to really get me to notice that something was special about this denomination to make me inquire about it specifically to a friend that led me to the corner of Second and Bristol in Santa Ana. My whole life I have been used to being the ODD MAN in the BUNCH. In elementary school I was only one of about four Caucasian kids in the classroom. In Jr. Hi and High School I knew I had to be the only one with homosexual feelings hiding beneath the surface, and as an adult no matter where I lived it seemed to be little Tijuana instead of AMERICA the Beautiful. But getting over the differences in me and in others is just one part of me that I am learning to overlook. It is also one of the gifts that God has given me to be able to reach out to almost anyone in any situation. I have been in almost every situation everyone has been in. From a drug addict, I have been there. To the mentally ill, that is me. The homeless, almost at times but I see them on the street every day because I am on the street every day. I have lived in Little Tijuana, in the Ghetto, in jail, in rehab, in board and care, in the hospitals, and with everyone that has resided in these places. Not too many people can say they have spent the majority of their lives in these places with these kinds of people as a way of life, and lived to talk about it. It is these places I am most comfortable. With these humans that others stray away from. Look at and walk the other direction, just because the lack the understanding. I may not have graduated High School with a 4.0 or even a 3.0 but test me on what I have learned in the last 30 years as a mentally ill drug addict plagued with a fatal disease they said I should be dead from since the early eighties, I don’t think anyone has learned to LOVE the way I have. Webster can’t even begin to define the word COMPASSION the way I can. What makes me sad is that I can’t just put my arms around some one and take all their pain away from them and make theirs all just go away. If I could take it from them and just remove it in an instance that would be the best thing in the world. But I know they must learn to go through the same things that I did to get to where I have to enjoy the JOY that I know today. IT is as RICH as anything I have tried to shoot up in my arm, and satisfying as any physical pleasure I have ever looked for, and as lasting as much as all the wealth I ever tried to acquire. And to think I told God thirteen years ago “God I really messed up this time, I promise with my whole heart, I will NEVER come back to this corner again as long as I live.” And I kept that promise. I broke a lot of promises to Him in the past, but that promise I kept, until He changed it for me.