This stuff is only for the sick, screwed-up, dis-eased, and dysfunctional. If you aren’t any of these, you are (1) wasting your time reading (2) in denial or delusion, and (3) going to write me a nasty letter, please don’t, I’m doing the best I can here.

These are my opinions, experience, insanity, and thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in seminary, the pastorate, and therapy (and some time with the Lord) to become so “brilliant” and make such outrageous statements.

My hope is to help a few, or at least let them know there is someone “out there” who is just as out there as they are. Like Alcoholics Anonymous, my favorite friends with whom I share a similar fate, one drunk helping another drunk stay sober (not just dry) one day at a time…sounds a little like the Christian life doesn’t it?

Finding the Perfect Place…My Obsession with Externals

If I had the right job/church, then…
If I had the right officers, then…
If I had the right car, then…
If I had the right answers, then…
If I had the right house, then…
If I had the right quiet time…
If I had the right wife/husband…

I’m in transition. Retired from the pastoral ministry, but not the ministry (‘cause God told me to) and waiting on what’s next (‘cause God told me to). “But God, shouldn’t I be doing something while I wait?” As if waiting wasn’t doing something!

Maybe it’s time for me to start writing…my good friend Steve Brown has been trying to get me to write for 20 years, and I quote, “Lea, if I can do it, anyone can!”

Well, to write I need a desk in a quiet place apart from everything and everyone else. Now, because I’m in transition this will have to be a “sanctuary” within the “sanctuary” called my house. So I’m going to “transform” the grandchildren’s nursery into the birth place of the next great Christian author.

I’ve got a desk. It’s in the garage gathering junk and dust. I’ve got an office chair that’s in the way where it is now. I’ve now got the perfect place in view. Ordered and arranged, all in my mind, and it’s about to become a reality.

Interrupt theory with reality. While surveying the nursery I look up and see an attic access panel which I decide to check out, because we’ve lived here seven years and never looked up there. A small side-road on the way to “writer’s nirvana.”

Now, imagine with me. I remove the two foot square access panel, stick my head up in the attic, while holding one of those orange, plastic encased “mechanics” lights for working on engines.

This is what I see. The louvers to the outside for air circulation at the peak of the roof, which is only two feet above my head, the wire screen “designed” to keep varmints out torn to shreds, a sea of insulation (the pink kind and the “blown” gray cellulose stuff), and a pile of squirrel sh–, four feet by six feet by six inches deep. Can you believe we’ve let our grandchildren sleep in the room below? Duh, it’s been there for seven years and no one knew, cared, or got sick. The previous owners had put poison up there, and the squirrels quit using it as their cozy dumping ground.

Well, by God, if I’m going to have the perfect sanctuary/office/creative space, within an adequate sanctuary, my home, then I’ve got to clean all this mess up and repair the torn screen. (My eyes are burning and all I can smell is squirrel crap while I write this…in another room.)

Right here I’m going to leave out a lot of hilarious details just to save time and so you don’t quit reading.

So, picture this…Ichabod Crane, 6’4”, 220 lbs, on a six foot wobbly, wooden ladder, with only his legs showing ‘cause the rest of him is “up in the attic” with a “shop-vac” strapped to the ladder so the hose will reach the “pile” and mine the rich deposits left by happy squirrels.

When I was flying jets off of aircraft carriers, the honest though still arrogant pilots had a saying about screwing up. “There are those who have, those who will and those who lie about it!”

While I’m hard at work, to the roar of the shop-vac at my feet, like the honey truck sucking your septic tank dry, I was doing a great job of emptying the attic of more than ten pounds of poop and spreading a fine coat of “poop dust” over the entire room…walls, ceiling, rug, furniture, and toys. You know, the wonderful white dust that covers everything when you cut or sand sheet-rock.

I had not put the air filter back in the shop-vac after a previous job. I was sucking up the big chucks, and covering my perfect place with a layer of my “good intentions,” until the fire alarm went off, I never knew there was a problem.

The perfect place is right where you are.
The right job is the one you have today.
The right situation is the one you’re in now.
The right church and officers are the ones you have now.
The right wife/husband you have is the one you have now.
(Notice I didn’t say the most fun, enjoyable, or comfortable.)

“Be still (and stay put) and know that I am God.”

PS Guess where I’m writing this…in my old chair in my old spot. I sat at the desk in my new perfect spot this morning, and even after six hours of cleaning, spraying, and burning scented candles, the smell was so bad, I immediately felt sick, got a headache, and had to leave.

PPS Pray for my grandchildren’s next visit.

PPPS I married way-up, so my wife didn’t kill me. She remembered the bathroom remodeling in our last house where the only way to remove the bathtub/shower was to cut it up right where it was. So with that wonderful “Tim, the Tool man, Taylor” roar of a chain saw in the bathroom, I covered our bedroom with fiberglass dust. “There are those who have, those who will, and some of us that will do it again.”

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