Humans aren’t made of diamond; we are not unscratchable. The pain we experience can leave an indelible mark. When the inevitable dents and bruises come, the marks don’t just buff out. People can do things to us that can’t be undone. Say things that can’t be forgotten. Bend us in such a way that we must contend with the resulting distortion for decades.

My interviewer (a pastor) asked me this question on a Sunday morning. As a guest, I was about to talk about Jesus’s wisdom. The impromptu interview was designed to help people get to know me a bit before I spoke. Many listening were Christians. Some weren’t.

         The good question gave me pause.

My thoughts buzzed like a circuit breaker about to shut off. Too many cords plugged into one outlet.  My feelings raced about like loud and giggling children bounding into the living room on Christmas morning.

         How do I describe what’s so good about Christianity to strangers in ninety seconds? I thought of the person I’d just met a few minutes before who’d never been to church and wasn’t a Christian but risked coming that morning for the first time in her life.

         “What’s so good about Christianity?” I repeated.

         “The tears of God,” I said. “I’m a Christian because God cries.”

Anxieties are agitated things; thoughts that pace the floor, feelings that bite their lips, a right thumb pressing deep into the left hand to push and scrub into skin.

Anxieties found me before I was a pastor. Bouts of anxiety dapple the biology of my kin. Add to that my own share of providential trauma along with ordinary cares proportionate to my age and calling and both body and soul contribute plenty to these ants-in-the-pants-moods that crawl about with their jitters and creepers.

Becoming a Jesus follower and a pastor did not un-anxiety me.

Perhaps today you struggle below the surface wondering when the light will appear and I want you to know how brave you are to wait, to pause, to risk resting when it seems like others blossom, popping up all around you.

Sadly, I was years into my life and ministry before I ever cried out, “I am a fool.”

I lay on the floor, heaving beneath shelves of Jesus books, behind a desk on which an engraved ordination gift announced my job and name, “Pastor Zack.”

But being Christian and spiritually gifted doesn’t make one wise . . .

For those of us whose formal introduction to Jesus was muddled and mishandled, whose hearts and minds and bodies have held onto the terror of the threat rather than the loveliness of the shelter we sought, who continue to struggle to connect to the love that our God professes for us – a prayer:

0ur friends did not need my thoughts or advice. There were professionals in their lives better equipped than I to provide that. What they needed was a safe place with faithful friends where they knew they were heard, appreciated, and cared for. They needed the gift of grace called listening.

Our aim is to locate Jesus as our compass, for those who feel lament and protest on the one hand, relief and joy on the other, and for those who are anxious and worn out on all sides, who just want to say “F” the world.

Nearly everyone attending disliked Paul. As one said so plainly:

I can hear Jesus as gentle even when I don’t know what to make of him. But I have a hard time hearing Paul as gentle or anything other than a religious man who is harsh and arrogant.

Most nodded their heads in agreement with this perspective. Each had a story of pain to tell.