We Had Hoped

and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
[…]
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-E. E. Cummings

We had hoped, after everything that had happened, for crystal-blue water and sugar-white sand. Through four of the worst months of our lives — involving a painful rupture with people we truly loved — my wife and I told each other it would all be okay if we could just get the family to Mexico. We’d booked our family vacation at an all-inclusive in Cancun for the end of May, right as the kids would be getting out of school. The photos online were spectacular; the reviews were stellar. It seemed to us that all our problems, all our anxiety and worry and disappointment and frustration and bewilderment, would dissolve in the crystal-blue water, sink into the sugar-white sand.

But after eight days in Mexico, escaping the Moon Palace Resort felt like Andy Dufresne burrowing, crawling, and retching his way out of the Shawshank Penitentiary, the Caribbean water we encountered there every bit as murky and malodorous as the sewage pipe in The Shawshank Redemption. And while the food was surely better the Shawshank mess hall, there is something disorienting, unsettling, and frankly downright sinister about sitting down at the resort’s fine dining French restaurant on Day 7 and your waiter mumbling “Bob appetit, señor” as he places a plate of braised lamb in front of you. A week felt like an eternity in this uncanny valley of hotel ballrooms cleverly converted into different ethnic restaurants, karaoke bars, arcades, and gift shops. There are only so many orders of poolside nachos and strawberry mojitos one can consume, and they can’t mask the unease in the air of this real-life Hotel California, where even checking out feels ominous and somehow impossible.

But we did it, we left the resort, loaded onto a bus and then a plane, passed through customs in Fort Lauderdale, and settled in for an eight-hour layover. That’s when I decided, come hell or high water, I was going to put my toes in some sand and surf before we got back to Alabama. I ordered a taxi and told her to take us to the public beach in Fort Lauderdale. We’d ride out the layover there.

The taxi drops us at the marina across the street from the beach. We drag our luggage to a large dining table between two food stands, where we take turns ordering lunch. I grab our two little kids, six-year-old Amelia and four-year-old Jack, and head across the street to the beach. The sand is grainy, grimy, yellow, and littered with cigarette butts. A shirtless grandfather drunkenly dances the salsa, beer in hand, his adult son tends a charcoal grill, the grandmother and daughter-in-law laugh, and the grandkids climb on a public beach playground. There are no orderly rows of wooden chairs and umbrellas — just people, ordinary people, having an ordinary day at the local beach. It is overcast, slightly misting. I take the kids to the water’s edge, where they immediately begin testing my patience, wading ever deeper and getting ever dirtier as they dig in the wet Atlantic sand. I gaze past the dull-gray water to the horizon, where cargo ships and oil tankers lay anchor. So much for my tropical vacation. The anxiety and worry and disappointment and frustration and bewilderment remain. After everything that had happened, we had hoped.

At the end of Luke’s Gospel, two of Jesus’ followers — a guy named Cleopas and his unnamed companion — walk despondently from Jerusalem to Emmaus following Jesus’ crucifixion, talking with each other, trying to make sense of what had happened. A third person walks beside them. Unbeknownst to them, it is the risen Jesus.

There’s a story Cleopas and his friend had been raised in and told they were a part of: that we are a small but special people, chosen by God. We’ve suffered exile, slavery, occupation, and persecution, but we know God will one day send a messiah who will redeem our people and set everything right, who will put our enemies in their place, who will make sense of all the anxiety and worry and disappointment and frustration and bewilderment, once and for all.

So when a new rabbi appeared out of Nazareth, warning God’s people to repent in advance of the coming of the Kingdom of God, turning water into wine and a picnic lunch into an all-you-can-eat buffet for thousands, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead, and fulfilling scripture left and right, Cleopas and his friends naturally slotted him right into their story: here he was, finally, the messiah, the king, who would redeem Israel from the Roman occupiers.

And then the Romans hung him up on a tree, like it was nothing.

It’s hard to imagine a more crushing, hope-killing climax to the story they’d been living their entire lives. “But we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel,” they said (Lk 24:21).

As they walked, Luke tells us, “they talked with each other about everything that had happened.” Today, we call it processing: to attempt to reconcile events, information, and reality and make them fit inside the story we’ve been telling each other for so long, and to start casting the parts in our shared drama: here is the hero, there is the villain, here are the supporting actors.

We all do this, all the time. And we get pretty confident in our stories, in the ways we’ve made everything fit together, in the parts we’ve cast. And those stories we tell ourselves become our identity, so precious that they must be protected at all costs.

But at what cost, exactly?

I’m a member of Generation Y, that cohort that entered adulthood right at the turn of the millennium. Y2K felt absolutely momentous, especially to us, as we had been eyeing the year 2000 our entire lives. It wasn’t clear at all to us whether we were bearing down on the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end, but one thing was certain: our generation would be center stage as history unfolded. We would either save or doom the world.

There was a lot of pressure — to put it in the vernacular of the youth — to have “main character energy” and not to be an “NPC.”

I had just completed my junior year at Rhodes College when a middle-aged John Piper, the rising star in the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement in American evangelicalism, begged 40,000 college kids like me not to “waste your life.”

Preaching at the 2000 Passion Conference in Memphis, Piper pulled out a small sheet of magazine paper, an article from Reader’s Digest. “I’ll tell you a tragedy,” he said. He began reading from the magazine: “Bob and Penny took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida” — he made sure to enunciate “Punta Gorda,” as if the name itself betrayed its absurdity — “where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball, and collect shells.”

“That’s a tragedy,” Piper intoned. “And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. … With all my heart I plead with you: don’t buy that dream … a nice house, a nice car, a nice retirement, collecting shells as the last chapter before you stand before the Creator of the universe to give an account of what you did: ‘Here it is, Lord — my shell collection!'” He delivered the line with devastating mockery, with a child’s silly pride in her kindergarten art project.

“Don’t waste your life,” John Piper implored us. “Don’t waste it.” Piper’s point couldn’t be missed: God’s counting on you. Don’t disappoint him. “Live a life that echoes in eternity,” he said. “Live a life that makes a difference, that matters.” Be a main character for Christ.

But there was another voice in the air too. Around the same time, the movie Fight Club gave my generation Tyler Durden, who preached a shadow gospel to Piper’s: you are not your job, not your bank account, not your car, not your résumé, not your respectable little life. You are not special. You are disposable. You are, Durden says, the “all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world” — so why not do whatever you want?

And these two philosophies — Piper’s and Durden’s, the stakes of life being either breathtakingly high or so low as to be nonexistent — battled to shape my own story for many years.

And what I’ve decided is this: though Piper’s story is much better than Durden’s, maybe the devil doesn’t much care which one I choose, because he can work with either one to keep me from truly discovering the real story.

***

Influenced by Piper’s “Don’t waste your life” message and my own upbringing as a do-gooder Methodist, I decide to join Teach For America after graduating college in 2001. They sent me to a poor school to teach seventh grade English and coach baseball. I’d be no Bob and Penny, collecting shells. I’d live a life that mattered, that made a difference. I’d close the achievement gap all by myself.

But by the time spring semester rolls around, I am fully disillusioned — much more Durden than Piper. We’d watched the Twin Towers come crashing down, live, on the 19-inch Magnavox that hung in the corner. I’d had a fifteen-year-old seventh grader flip me off and invite me to violate myself in front of the entire class. I’d refereed diss battles and fistfights. My carefully decorated bulletin board, which had featured an inspirational quote from Paul “Bear” Bryant, had been defaced, and my creative masterpiece — a cartoon character named “Billy Grammar” that I’d invented to explain parts of speech to kids who came to me not knowing the difference between a noun and a verb — well, Billy was an amputee by now.

The daily bane of my existence is a student named Treyvon. Treyvon shares 900 square feet with his grandmother. He’s an only child. His mom lives across town. No one knows where his dad is. He constantly sings nonsense little rhymes he makes up on the spot, mostly to mock me. Anytime I bend over, even a little bit, he makes a farting noise. He calls me by my first name just to see if I’ll crash out. (I do, sometimes.) He’s always dancing, joking, messing around, though it’s clear the other students don’t know how to engage him and keep him at arm’s length. He’s a live wire of a human being, fully charged, liable to shock you and light you up.

On this day, I give the class a writing assignment and sit at my desk, browsing the internet.

I look up from my computer to check on the class. Everyone looks busy except Treyvon. He sits upright in his desk, looking straight ahead, rarely blinking. He hasn’t so much as taken out a piece of paper. I stride over to Treyvon’s desk and hover over him.

“You can either begin your essay right now or you can leave my class,” I whisper, a little more hotly than I’d intended. Treyvon’s eyes meet mine, and I see pain. Without breaking eye contact, he deliberately takes out his notebook and grips his pencil tightly. I strut back to my desk, impressed by my own effectiveness but a little shaken by what I’d seen in Treyvon’s eyes.

A few minutes later, Treyvon throws down his pencil, rips out his notebook paper, walks across the room, and lays his essay on my desk.

It is titled “WHAT?!”. Here is what it says.

“What is the basic for all life? Life is like a pig and a farmer. The farmer and his family love the pig, but as soon as they get a little hungry, it’s off with its head.”

Well, that’s certainly a start, I think. Then I remember I’d heard Treyvon’s girlfriend, Lakeisha, had broken up with him the day before. That was the pain I’d seen in his eyes. I wince at my own thoughtlessness in coming down hard on Treyvon.

At any given moment you what? You worry about the trials and tribulations in life and it makes you want to commit suicide. You can’t prevent the inebitable. You die and that’s it … If life is so precious, why do I waste it? If you have free will, why force yourself to do wrong? It should be so evident what the right way is, but it isn’t.

I look up from the paper at Treyvon. He has his head buried in his arms, on his desk. I can see him heaving, sobbing. I continue reading.

But the Lord is my Shepard. And I will not be in want.

If all you do in life is live day by day never accomplishing anything, you my brother should not worry about next day or this battle but it’s the Big Picture or the War you should stay focused on. His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me. He watches me. He cares about me. He loves me. He keeps me in perfect peace. Halelujah  to God Almighty, to Jehovah Jira, to the Awesome Ruler. To Him which is Yes.

The line hits me in the chest: “To Him which is Yes.” It’s an allusion to the E. E. Cummings poem we’d read in class a month earlier. I didn’t think anyone had gotten it. But Treyvon had. I’m stunned.

The writing skips a couple of wide-ruled lines, and closes like this:

So, what. What does this all mean. Well, it means this.

W hy
H e
A lways cares about
T reyvon.

And, just like that, Treyvon has discovered the secret door out of the false choice between Piperism and Durdenism, out of the anxiety and worry and disappointment and frustration and bewilderment that come with it, and he has shared his discovery with me. And that secret door has a question mark on it: “Why He Always cares about Treyvon?”

Our relationship shifts after that day. We become frenemies, if you will. He’s uncontrollable in class, but he’s the most engaged student I have. He tortures me, needles me, but I come to realize it’s because he thinks I see something in him, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. I take him to the gifted and talented teacher, who refuses to let him in her class at first because of his behavioral issues. But I insist Treyvon be allowed to test in, and he does, easily. He’s the best brass player in the school band. He creates an entire fictional world during his free time that he calls “Nathan Adam Ryan and the Bluegrass Mafia.” It’s as wild and silly as it sounds. It’s pointless and devotional at the same time, and maybe all the best things in life are that way.

A few years later, in the late 2000s, we find each other on Facebook, strike up a friendship. By then, he’s earned a music scholarship to a four-year university, and I burst with pride when he gives me some credit for his success. He excels in his classes, graduates, and takes a position as a middle school band director; I’m now a lawyer at a fancy law firm in Birmingham. He makes a name for himself as a rising star in music education, attracts the attention of an elite charter school. I’m moving back home with my then-wife and our newborn daughter to fan the dying embers of a retiring lawyer’s small-town practice, desperately trying to find myself. Treyvon is ordained as a music minister in his church; I discover my longtime music minister and youth director, my own mentor and friend, had been sexually abusing kids for decades.

And then we lose contact in mid-2010s, which makes sense to me, because that’s about the time I lost contact with everyone I ever loved, plus myself and God, as I spiraled into Durdenism and came to believe I was the all-singing, all-dancing trash of the world; and I selfishly lit the fuse that would blow up my dreams — to live a life that makes a difference, that echoes in eternity, as Piper had put it — and the dreams of my wife and children too, of a loving and stable and intact family, of beach vacations and shell collections, before I finally met the Living God.

Recently, I thought it would be nice to check in with Treyvon, to put a little bow on our story. His Facebook went cold in 2016, and I couldn’t find his faculty bio on the charter school’s website. My sleuthing eventually led me to a devastating conclusion: Treyvon committed a crime in 2016, went to prison for several years, and was released the same day I was standing on a beach in Fort Lauderdale, cursing my failed vacation, comparing a posh resort to a decrepit penitentiary, and chastising my kids for getting too dirty digging in the wet sand.

And that’s how it goes, even with the best versions of our little personal stories. In the end, they don’t hold up. They can’t hold up. They’re ramshackle houses built on sand.

The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre described us as “story-telling animals,” and who can argue the point? We don’t experience the world so much as we narrate it. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is full of people caught between what they want and what is — grasping, wandering, scheming, fighting, failing, hoping. It’s no wonder Jesus so often chose to teach through parables, through storytelling — he understood perfectly how God designed us.

How does story work? What propels it, gives it fuel? It’s this: the tension between the main character’s perceived reality and his desired state. For Cleopas and the story of Israel, it was the tension between an oppressed, underdog people and their desire for God to vindicate them by putting their enemies in their place.

Which is interesting, because that seems also to be, more or less, a great working definition of what we call anxiety: the gap between who, what, and where I am; and who, what, and where I think I’m supposed to be.

And maybe, all of religion and spirituality is, at its core, an attempt to deal with this anxiety, to relieve this tension somehow. And there are many spiritual disciplines and systems and codes that can help alleviate anxiety: detach, meditate, follow these rules, live like this and not like that. And that’s all well and good.

But following Jesus isn’t just that. Christianity isn’t just that, or isn’t supposed to be. It makes a far more audacious claim: it seeks to heal us completely. Jesus’ ministry, after all, was a healing one. The gospel isn’t a list of rules or disciplines or life hacks; it’s not a code of morality or a philosophy; it’s a balm.

It seeks to heal us, first, by validating and sanctifying our God-given sense that life is, indeed, a story — that it does, in the end, make sense. The gospel affirms our storytelling nature, then unveils the truth:

There is a story beneath and above all our stories: beneath them because it is the Reality holding us even when we cannot see it; above them because it is too large to be contained by any private drama, national myth, or church narrative. The story, the gospel, gathers every wounded, foolish, unfinished story unto itself, transfigures it, and reveals God’s true nature through it.

And it goes like this: In the beginning was Love, and Love was with God, and Love was God. And God, who is Love, couldn’t give up on us, because Love always perseveres and never fails. So Love, which is the most powerful thing in the universe, made itself small and took on the nature of a man named Jesus, who humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross! — to demonstrate that nothing in the universe could separate us, all of us, each of us, from God, who is Love.

And that is what makes the gospel “good news”: life is full of meaning, and we don’t have to supply it. We no longer face the false choice of carrying the weight of the protagonist in our personal drama or saying phooey with it altogether. We are neither the main character nor an NPC; neither our own messiah nor the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. Whatever story we’ve authored in our own head is far too limited, far too impoverished, far less hopeful than the gospel story, the one where God has already redeemed the world through Jesus Christ.

That is what Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus couldn’t see until Jesus opened their eyes at dinner. Even as Jesus himself walked with them, they couldn’t recognize him, so lost they were in their own inherited version of the story.

I hope Treyvon knows this, gets a glimpse of this, or remembers that he knows this, because he knew it in 2001 in a seventh grade classroom after his girlfriend broke up with him. I hope he can eventually marvel again at that question: Why He Always cares about Treyvon, no matter what?

No matter what.

***

As I’m emptying my pockets at the security scanner at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, trying frantically not to hold up the line and fearful of being screamed at by someone in a uniform, I pull out two handfuls of wet, grainy, grimy sand and a couple dozen seashells. Apparently, while I was lost in thought, staring at the Atlantic horizon and lamenting my situation, Amelia and Jack had filled my pockets with shells they’d found in the surf.

The TSA officer stands between me and home sweet home. She smiles. “I like your seashell collection,” she says.