On Fire For Jesus

The warehouse went nuts. All sorts of people came forward, compact mirrors hanging out of their mouths. They too claimed that their silver fillings had been turned to gold. I couldn’t take it. I stood up and raised my hand.

“Praise Jesus,” the Mullet Prophetess cried. “More gold!”

“No gold fillings,” I corrected her. “I don’t have cavities - Look, Pastor … Hulk, I know God can do whatever he wants, and I came today because I want whatever He has for me. But this doesn’t seem authentic.”

The Hulk pastor smirked. How do you explain the silver fillings turning into gold? He flexed his muscles. Unless it was The LORD?! The crowd snickered along with him.

If it WAS the Lord, I reasoned, Why didn’t he turn the silver filling into TOOTH?

Without warning the Hulk smashed his eyes closed. “Lord! I pray for my sister here. I pray you would cast out the demons of pride and arrogance from her!”

I heard a few Amens mumbled through mirror-stuffed mouths, and that was it. I stood up, calmly ran through out the door, got into my car, got onto the freeway, cranked up K-Rock on the radio, and screamed at the top of my lungs. “That’s it God, I hate you! I hate you! You and all your side show freaks! Get a way from me, get out of my life!”

What was more terrifying than the rage, was the feeling I had just been being spiritually violated. And not by the Hulk or the Mullet, or the idiots with mirrors in their mouths. I felt like God had done it. I had gone there trusting myself to God, and was met with something dark and sinister. Or maybe all anger is sinister, and there is no bottom to it. I later recovered my senses, but I was done with God.

If this was a love story, then this was the breakup. But you can’t break up with God. Not really. Once you’ve had an experience of God, you can’t go back and pretend that experience never happened. I remember too much. I remember being 8 years old, watching my brother fly a kite in the March sky. The clouds were so high you could see them hug the curvature of the earth. Suddenly God felt so big, and so close. I was not alone. I knew I was loved, and that I was loved by a Person. Ever since then, I’ve being running either toward - or away from - that knowing.

I’ve come back to church since then. Never with the same faith or trust, but I’m back. I’ve tried the Lutherans with their Jello salads, the Episcopalian champagne communions; the Presbyterians with their intellectually cogent sermons… As we unpack the theological of God’s sacrificial love or “agape” in the Greek, as that love is transmuted to us, it is then experience the phenomenon of joy, or “falapalos.” It’s like going to a lecture about Beethoven, and not hearing a single note of music.

What happens in a relationship when the fire dwindles? Or maybe you still love the other person, you just can’t stand his friends.

I know there are freaks and geeks everywhere. And there’s not that much difference between Shambala and chanting a mantra … except for the yoga pants.

That night I told God off, I drove down to the beach to watch the Malibu fires. Have you ever seen fire at that magnitude, out of control? I’ll never forget it. It was stunning, beyond good or evil. It was pure Nature. It was God. And God was beyond my control. As if He were saying, “I’m not a circus monkey here to entertain you with gold teeth or your personal fulfillment. I am that I am. Get over it.”

A while ago I woke up from a dreamless sleep: I had heard a deafening sound, like all the notes of the audio spectrum had been swept up into one whispered word: my name. I heard my own name. It was terrifying. And it was over too soon.

I don’t miss those days, waiting on God to tell me what cereal to eat. I don’t miss the gold fillings. But I kinda miss being on fire.