PROLOGUE: FULL DISCLOSURE


Christians make me nervous. Especially the evangelical ones.

There, I’ve said it. I just needed to get that out in the open, right off the bat. As I’ve been preparing to tell the story of the journey of faith I’ve been on for the last 30 years or so, I’ve been struggling with what I originally thought was just a really, really bad case of writer’s block. But last night I finally realized what was behind the writer’s block. I’ve been afraid to start writing, afraid to put my life on paper, because I’ve been worried about what people will think of me. Not just people, mind you.

Other evangelicals.

That’s right, other evangelicals. I’m one of them. Most of the time I cringe at the label of evangelical, because of what the term has come to mean. Tell non-evangelicals that I’m an evangelical, and immediately I’ll have their preconceptions thrown on me like the cheesy “Miss Texas” sash thing that a beauty pageant contestant wears with dubious pride. Mr. Evangelical: A conservative, right-wing Republican, for whom abortion and gay marriage are the most important political issues.

At least with most non-evangelicals, that’s where the preconceptions generally end. What’s much harder for me to take is that the expectations of what I should be as an evangelical actually seem to be more rigid and dogmatic coming from other evangelicals. Because if I’m really an evangelical, one of the true believers, not only should I vote along conservative Republican party lines, but I’m expected to endorse and embrace a host of other positions as well. I must believe that unless a person “accepts Christ” before the moment of death, he or she will be damned to an afterlife of eternal torture. I must believe the Bible to be infallible and literal, and that its every word is straight from the mouth of God and that it contains God's definitive answer to every complex question facing every culture in every age of world history. If I’m a true believer, I must live a pious life, and refrain from such worldly things as listening to raunchy music, watching raunchy movies, using raunchy language and telling raunchy jokes. In general, I’m to live a raunch-free life.

Oh, and then there’s the drinking. If I really take my faith seriously, and am a truly committed follower of Jesus, I certainly shouldn’t need to drink. While some evangelicals have come around in recent years to accept that a person can drink and still be a legitimate Christian, I still get a strong vibe from many that says a really committed Christian shouldn’t need to drink. If someone needs to drink, after all, they must be an alcoholic. Never mind that the first miracle Jesus ever performed was to make more booze at a party.

I recently spent six years of my life as the founder and president of a “Christian” non-profit organization called Healing Waters International. My wife, Dana, and I started it as a way to get local churches in poor countries to be the solution to the suffering and disease and death in their communities that come from people drinking contaminated water. Starting Healing Waters and growing it into a thriving non-profit was an intense and thrilling experience, and that story is a big part of the tale I want to tell in this book. Part of what makes my story a little different as a journey of faith is that although I was a Christian, I was not a straight-laced conservative evangelical poster boy. I was an unemployed pothead when God first called Dana and me to the mission field in the Dominican Republic. Our time there was a very frustrating one and a time of great disillusionment with evangelicals and especially with the traditional evangelical approach to missions. It was out of that frustration and disillusionment that Healing Waters was born. We founded Healing Waters based on the philosophy of service embodied in the Saint Francis quote, "Preach the gospel at all times.  If necessary, use words." We'd grown weary and cynical of the evangelical focus on making converts, and created Healing Waters not to convert people in the name of Jesus, but rather to serve them and heal them and help them in the name of Jesus.

By the time I left Healing Waters, it had grown to the point of providing clean water to more than 100,000 people on a daily basis. But as rewarding as the experience was of building Healing Waters out of nothing, there was always a gray cloud hanging over my head, especially when I was with the evangelicals who made up the majority of our supporters and partners. “What if they find out who I really am?” I constantly worried. What if they find out I lean more Democrat than Republican? What if they find out I don’t believe you have to “accept Christ” to be saved? What if they find out that I have more meaningful worship experiences listening to Springsteen singing My City of Ruins than I ever have singing along to the Christian Top 40 “praise songs” we sing in church? What if they find out that "shit" is one of my all-time favorite words? What if they find out how much I like beer?

I’ve now moved on from Healing Waters and have left it in the care of others, and obviously I still care about the organization we started and don’t want to hurt it in any way. But I worry about the implications of telling my story the way it really happened, and presenting myself the way I really am. What will our more conservative supporters think? Will they stop wanting to support the organization? Do I alter my story or edit my story so as to not to offend these people, people who I genuinely respect and appreciate and don’t want to offend? Losing their support worries me a little, but losing their respect and friendship worries me a lot.

I’m sure it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve now spent almost a year worrying about this. I left Healing Waters on February 1, 2008, feeling a strong pull from God to step out of the organization and focus on writing my story. But today is January 15, 2009, and I’ve hardly made a dent in the writing because I’ve been paralyzed with this fear of “what will they think?” Will they think I’m a heretic? Or, what would feel even worse, will they doubt that my faith is genuine? Will they think that I was a phony in the way I presented myself? Will they doubt how earnestly I’m really trying to follow Jesus?

The fear and anxiety over all this was becoming downright debilitating, and seemed to be building to a nervous breakdown crescendo. Then, last night, by the grace of God, I was given a gift. I believe that God speaks to each of us differently, and custom-tailors his communications to us using words or ideas or images that will resonate with us and that our unique minds will be able to understand, and that’s exactly what happened to me. The supreme God of the universe, creator of all that is good, the most high and holy God, spoke two words to me to help me overcome my fear of what everyone will think of me. Two words, two beautiful words, which God knew would contain all the freedom and grace I needed to be able to move forward. The words were these:

“Fuck it.”

With those two words, God let me know that it was time to let go of caring what anyone thinks of me. The only thing that matters, I finally realized, the ONLY thing that matters, is what God thinks of me. And thankfully, after years of confusion about that, I now know exactly what God thinks of me – he likes me.

He doesn’t just love me. I know that God loves me, but – I’m sorry – that’s not enough. God has to love me, because that’s who he is. God is love. But not only does God love me, he actually likes me. I’m serious – he actually likes me. He likes being with me. He thinks I’m funny. He likes how ornery I can be, and he likes how I’m not afraid to take risks in order to do what I think he’s asking me to do. The God of the universe likes me, so why would I give a shit whether anyone else likes me or not?

Now, I have to admit that I''m only 95% sure that it was God who spoke those exact words to me. I've never been 100% sure that it's God on any of the occasions that I think he has spoken to me. There's always that 5% of doubt that keeps me wondering and requires me to act on faith. But when I sense God speak to me, it's usually in the form of a thought that jumps into my mind and seems to have come from the outside somehow, distinctly separate from my own train of thought. My experience has been that when I meditate on the thought, when it's from God it's usually accompanied by a profound and immediate sense of peace, truth and rightness. That's what happened last night.

When God speaks to us, I think he speaks to us holistically. He speaks to our minds, hearts and souls simultaneously in what I would describe as meaning rather than words. It's the meaning that matters. It might be my own being that puts certain words to the meaning, but I doubt God cares what words my subconscious puts to it as long as I grasp what it is that he wants to communicate to me. On the other hand, I believe that God speaks to each of us uniquely, and I wouldn't put it past God to drop the f-bomb right into my gray matter. The Bible is full of instances where God uses some really weird ways to communicate to people - Balaam's ass, for one - and I've come to believe that he'll use whatever means necessary to communicate to us in ways that fit the way we're wired.

Like each of us, God has given me a very distinct personality and perspective, and, along with a strange combination of gifts and abilities, he’s woven all that together into my very weird self. He’s given me a life to live that is unlike anyone else’s life, and I’m pretty certain that he now wants me to tell the story of my life – complete with my bad habits, character flaws, idiosyncrasies and all – because he wants people to come to understand that no matter how far short of being a “good Christian” we may fall, if we simply trust his love for us and make ourselves available to him, he can and will use us.

My life could be described as a somewhat odd and schizophrenic life, and my journey has been both literally and figuratively all over the map. I’ve driven across the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains while hallucinating on acid, and I’ve seen the Holy Spirit descend on a group of Dominican high school kids and knock them unconscious. I prostituted myself as an ad whore and clawed my way up the advertising ladder until I won Best of Show at an advertising awards show emceed by the politically incorrect comedian Bill Maher, and I’ve also been one of only seven guests at an intimate dinner party with evangelist Franklin Graham in the mansion of a conservative Christian multimillionaire. I’ve been invited to government palaces and dined in expensive restaurants with cabinet members of a poor African nation, and I’ve politely ingested fried bugs and countless plates of rice and beans in homes with leaky tin roofs and no indoor plumbing. I’ve earned more than a million miles on American Airlines, and I’ve driven thousands of miles across the chaotic third-world country that boasts the world's second highest rate of road traffic deaths per capita. I’ve witnessed the drowning of a good Catholic friend only to have his mother blame “the evangelicals” for his death, and I’ve participated in remarkable reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics in one of the world’s hotbeds of violent conflict between the two groups.

God has led me on a wild adventure in life and has shown me great favor, and he hasn’t seemed to have been bothered very much by the fact that I’m still the same confused, arrogant, idiotic, perverted dumbshit struggling with pretty much the same sins I’ve struggled with since I was a teenager. Over time I’ve come to believe that God is genuinely pleased by my faith – as seemingly divided and neurotic and unorthodox as my faith may be – and frankly doesn’t give a damn about my sin.

I imagine that I’ve lost a lot of you already, at least a lot of you for whom my words so far have made you uncomfortable or maybe even made you mad. I’m sorry about that. I really am. I'm not trying to intentionally upset or offend anyone. Like I said, I believe that God speaks to different people in different ways, and I think he wants me to write this story for a small group of people who might glean some inspiration or hope from it. My hope is that if you're not in that group, and don't agree with what I'm saying and how I'm saying it, that you can just ignore it and not judge it and that you can be open to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, God has some kind of purpose in it, as farfetched as that might seem to you. 

So, if you don’t want to read any further, I understand. Maybe it’s better if you don’t. But as for me, I need to keep going.

After all, the Lord has spoken.

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