Handcrafted Read online

  When we weren’t at the soup kitchen or spending our daytime hours in language classes, we were trying to get Parisians interested in our mission. Our nights were spent either trying to stay warm in our apartment, or occasionally going out to a movie and dinner with new friends and fellow team members. Despite the fact that, in the time Kelly and I were there, we never managed to get more than a trickle of folks interested in our church, life was certainly never dull. That’s because whatever was or was not happening with the ministry, it was all playing out against the backdrop of this amazing City of Light. The thing is, paradise was quite expensive. During our first three months abroad, with an incredibly high rent payment and costs of commuting back and forth to Amsterdam, we blew through $12,000 of the $30,000 we’d raised. By the time we got to Paris we were limping at best.

  * * *

  Before Kelly and I had left the States for Europe, my grandmother Martin, Mom’s mom, had fallen ill. I’d visited her before our departure, knowing it might be the last time I’d see her. One month after we arrived in the Netherlands, Kelly and I went on a mandatory retreat out in the country. After a walk with some colleagues and friends, we returned to the hotel to find a note for me at the front desk. “Call your mother,” it read. My grandmother has passed, I thought as I tapped out my mother’s number.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said when she picked up. “What’s going on?”

  She paused. “Honey,” she finally said, “your grandmother Harp died.” The night before, Mom told me, my father’s mother had prepared herself for bed as usual, brushing her teeth under the watchful eye of the Clark Gable poster she’d bought on a trip to Universal Studios that she and I once took together. She’d climbed into bed, said her prayers, and drifted off to sleep. She never woke up.

  Losing a loved one is never easy, but this was a complete shock. I’d been expecting to lose Grandmother Martin, which was hard enough, but my father’s mother? I was stunned and devastated. I made my way into the woods alone and cried. That afternoon, I lay on my bed and listened to a hymn that my old friend Chris once wrote. “And with your final heartbeat / Kiss the world good-bye,” went the lyrics. “Then go in peace, and laugh on Glory’s side.” I must’ve replayed that song thirty times on my old-school MP3 player.

  A few months later, after settling into our Paris apartment. I got another call from home. “What’s up?” I said, my pulse quickening when I heard my mother’s distressed voice.

  “Honey,” she said, “Mama’s gone on home.” Mama, of course, was Grandmom Martin, my mother’s mom.

  I couldn’t travel back home for either of my grandmothers’ funerals. Kelly and I had no money for that, nor did our families. So across an ocean, with nothing to do on the day of Ann Callaway Martin’s funeral but put together IKEA furniture and go for a run, and with a whole lot of sadness, I said good-bye. There are times when we’re called on to rise up and meet whatever life sends our way, to make the best of an impossible situation. And then there are those seasons when, miles away from anything familiar, all we can do is be raw.

  * * *

  By the time Kelly and I decided to become part of church planting, I’d moved away from some of what I’d been taught as a child. Not all of it, of course: I did and still do respect many of the principles I was raised with. But a few things needed to shift, and really, I suppose that’s what it means to grow up—to grow into what principles and faith mean to you. For instance, I’d grown up thinking I needed to have an answer to every spiritual question that arose. “I don’t really know” was not an acceptable response in many of the circles I grew up in. But within our ministry team in Paris, not only was it all right to admit “I don’t know,” we actively encouraged one another to explore God’s mysteries. The more I did that, the more the rigid religious walls I’d built in childhood began crumbling.

  Like my take on drinking: back in Atlanta when I was sixteen, my church had welcomed a new pastor, who’d rolled into town from Waco, of all places. He wanted to shake things up, and boy, did he. In place of old hymnals, we sang new worship songs, with the words projected up onto a screen at the front of the sanctuary. Look out! He also brought in a band with guitar and drums. All good. And then he crossed a line.

  There’s a Bible verse that says deacons shouldn’t be “given to too much wine.” Our church took that to the extreme, falling in with the Southern Baptist tradition that deacons should not drink at all. Period. Well, our new pastor suggested that we change that rule and allow deacons to pour up a glass now and then. I didn’t like it one bit. At the time, I was living with my family in an apartment building flanked by two halfway houses. My parents would sometimes invite the men from those houses into our home for Bible study. From my spot on the couch, I’d listen to their stories. Their addiction to alcohol had cost them so much.

  Not that I’d never had a drink. One evening when I was twelve, I was hanging with some of my cousins at the Roost. After the grown-ups went off to bed, one of my cousins mixed up some vodka and orange juice to make herself a screwdriver. “Want a taste?” she asked. I nodded, desperately wanting to impress her and feel cool.

  She put the rim of the glass to my lips and I took a swig. It tasted like hair spray. But it piqued my curiosity enough. I grabbed a Miller Lite from the fridge and downed it like chocolate milk. Just as I was guzzling the final suds, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. It had to be my uncle Howard. I threw out the beer can, quickly grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge, and knocked it back in an attempt to hide the odor. “Hey, buddy,” my uncle said when he rounded the corner into the kitchen. “You’re still up?” I nodded and rushed off, hoping he wouldn’t notice the smell of my breath. Ten minutes later I was passed out on the couch like an old drunk. I didn’t touch the stuff again for over a decade.

  By the time the new pastor proposed relaxing the church’s alcohol rules, I knew where I stood: arm in arm with the teetotalers of the world. The congregational leaders decided to hold a town hall meeting one Sunday night, so church members could vote on whether deacons should be allowed to drink. Before the vote, long lines of people made their way up to microphones to argue for or against the issue. Usually, Sunday evening services were poorly attended, but on the night of the vino vote, you would’ve thought Jesus Himself was the guest speaker. The place was packed.

  Soon it was my turn at the mic. “None of the men I’ve met from halfway houses set out to be alcoholics and lose everything,” I said, with that brand of earnest conviction reserved only for adolescence. “It all started with one sip.” My tears began to flow. “My own grandfather had a tendency to drink,” I went on, “and it has been really tough on our family.” (I recalled, but didn’t share, that Granddad Martin used to ask me, “If we aren’t supposed to drink, then why would Jesus turn water into wine?” I usually replied, “That was more like juice, Granddad. It’s different from our wine today.”) Smart aleck.

  My heartfelt plea in church that evening drew some “Amens,” and a few people were even dabbing at their eyes. But none of that mattered in the end, because we lost the vote. I was like, Whatever. Go wild, deacons. Go wild.

  Fast-forward to 2002 in St. Petersburg, Florida, when Kelly and I first met the leaders of our church planting organization. They all ordered a beer for lunch. I didn’t follow suit. But weeks later, at the home of a couple who hosted us as part of our pre-trip orientation, the group shared a bottle of wine. This time, I decided to partake. Hair spray.

  Nowadays I love a spicy margarita, a nice Cabernet, or a strong IPA, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that, once again, the narrow-mindedness of my youth was starting to come loose. I was an uptight and inflexible guy who needed to have my boundaries expanded, who needed to understand that there’s more than one right way to do life. In Europe, I realized just how little I knew, and that the capital T in “Truth” sometimes comes in shades of gray and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I did not and do not have all the answers, and in Paris, I finall
y stopped pretending I did. Life, I was discovering, was so much bigger than one set of rules.

  * * *

  Coming up on a year into our time in Paris, we were running out of money, fast. I get it that Jesus once multiplied five loaves and two fishes to feed a multitude on the banks of the river, but maybe sometimes we’re meant to learn the lessons of going hungry. I mean, we still ate. But when you’re constantly worried that your next subway fare might be your last, you’re awfully close to the edge and it’s exhausting.

  Enter the IRS. We’d filed for an extension to complete our taxes, and in May, we were finally ready for the task. This was the first time for us to file separate from an employer, so we were in uncharted waters. Up to this point, I’d always gotten a refund, so when our tax preparer pushed the “calculate” button at the end of our online tax form, my jaw hit the floor. “You owe $6,000,” it read. What?! Throw in the $4,000 in credit card bills we’d amassed to keep the lights and water on, and you can see why we were up to our eyeballs in debt.

  Turns out that as missionaries, we were officially considered self-employed, which meant we were responsible for estimating and paying our own taxes directly to the IRS every quarter. I remember our organization saying something about that, but we were candidly on our own, and left to my devices back then, let’s just say you wouldn’t have wanted me to manage your finances. When you work for a US employer, your company typically withholds a portion of your Social Security and Medicare taxes from your paychecks automatically. Not so when you’re an entrepreneur, or in our case, missionaries living abroad. We’d set aside some money to square up at year’s end, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We didn’t even have the money to cover our monthly bills in the first place. We were screwed.

  You’d think that as a business major at Baylor, I might’ve picked up a few pointers on handling finances—maybe I should’ve studied a bit more. But I was used to a more “fly by the seat of your pants” existence, and quite frankly, that method had been working okay so far in my young adulthood. But not in Paris. Not when my wife and I were in a foreign country with no safety net, no family money to back us up, and no generous supporter to bankroll our spiritual mission and pull us out of our $10,000 hole.

  Over the next few days, Kelly and I had many long talks. The toughest one came late one evening in the shadows of our living room.

  “I’m the reason for our financial situation, Kelly,” I told her.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “Because I don’t know how to manage money,” I admitted. “I never have. I knew that, but I didn’t want to address it. But now there’s no escaping it.”

  Life has its patterns. The sun comes up and then it goes down. You can count on that every single day. And then there are those personal patterns, good and bad, we learn early on and keep living out, like: if I’m genuinely nice to this person, there’s a high likelihood my kindness will be returned. Or, if I don’t change my oil until the engine light comes on, I’ll have to spend hundreds in repairs. Back then, one of my most regrettable patterns, a habit that had stuck with me like gum on a shoe, was to ignore financial realities until my hand was forced—and then hope somebody with money would offer me a “get out of jail free” card. I basically lived to enjoy each moment, with little worry for how I’d later settle the check. Knowing it was time to end this pattern, Kelly and I made a difficult choice: we would cut our mission trip short by four years and go home. Even before our team leader had the chance to try to talk us out of it, we had purchased our return flights. That’s how sure I was that I needed to break the cycle of expecting someone to save my behind.

  Our ministry team was disappointed. Many of them were also struggling financially, yet somehow they were working things out. “Isn’t there some way you can stay?” Frank asked me. We didn’t budge. Then another married couple on our team offered to cover our tax bill. It was incredibly generous of them and Kelly and I were so thankful, but I was finally clear that their proposal was tantamount to dangling crack in the face of a hard-core addict. For me, it wasn’t about getting bailed out one more time. It was about growing up. We wanted to repay our own debt. We politely declined their offer.

  While money was the reason we had to come home early, things were also turning out different than we’d imagined with the ministry. We were starting to have some major doubts and didn’t feel like we had a lot of reasons to fight to stay. Why had we felt the need to plant a church in a place where the congregations and culture were older than the country we came from? The idea of continuing to befriend locals, always hoping that we could eventually reel them into this postmodern church concept, left me feeling conflicted. I personally wasn’t convinced of the spiritual value of our mission anymore. But regardless, we were broke, and it was time for us to go.

  Our last team meeting was painful. Tears were shed. Some people expressed feeling abandoned, while others just stayed quiet. “We know you’re doing what you feel like you have to do,” one teammate said, “and we wish you well.” But the predominant feeling in the room was one of sadness. When we returned to our apartment that evening, my wife and I just sat together and cried.

  It was raining the day we left Paris. The team members who could came to say good-bye. They gathered outside of our building, in the rain, and helped us load up everything we owned into the back of the taxi van that would take us to the train station. Our friend Christian’s girlfriend, Nadine, cracked an inside joke her family loved: “I wish I never knew you,” she quipped, a smile on her face. That joke felt awkward to most everyone except me—I’m a sucker for dry humor and loved her attempt to lighten the mood. Later, Kelly and I stood at the back of the train with all our belongings piled around us. A young woman walked into our train car. And though it’s rare in Paris to talk to strangers, and even more rare to find one who speaks fluent English, we struck up a conversation.

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked her at one point. Without hesitation, she said, “I’m a stripper.” She told us she’d danced in clubs all around Europe for years. It struck me that before moving to Europe, I’d have blushed at her story, and I’d no doubt have judged her severely. But in a train car that was carrying us away from an experience that had clearly changed me, I enjoyed meeting and talking with her. She was no different from me. She was God’s child, just as Kelly and I were. And for the duration of that ride, we were all traveling alongside one another on the same road.

  Later, Kelly and I would reflect that our time abroad hadn’t gone anything like we’d planned. We’d hoped to master the French language, crisscross the continent, help start a flourishing church community, and maybe even have our first child while living in Europe. Instead, we were leaving with hardly enough French under our belts to hold a conversation with a five-year-old, and the pages in our passports were woefully unstamped. Though I knew we had made the right decision, a feeling of failure hung over me.

  If I’d known then what was just up the road and around the bend for Kelly and me, I would’ve left the City of Light without a single regret. But in the cloud of disappointment that surrounded our departure, it would be a while before I realized that Paris had given us exactly what we needed—the raw materials with which to build a life.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  CRAFTSMAN

  Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

  —Scott Adams, cartoonist

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  Wood Grain

  Looking at a pile of wood sitting on my shop floor might be one of my favorite things to do. I’ve built enough tables to know that what might appear to be a mess in front of me is really a beautiful creation just waiting to be put together. The pieces are there. It just comes down to sorting them out. I lay each board, one at a time, on the ground. If the wood could speak, it might be annoyed with my indecision and pickiness while I toe-kick and bump each board together. From there, I c
an step back and see how it might all eventually fit.

  “Babe, I saw this little white house today,” Kelly told me one evening back in Dallas. “Pretty small, but so stinkin’ cute.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s over on Ross Ave. Want to go see it?”

  “Yeah, okay, sure,” I said. I figured it was free to look.

  We’d been back in the States for a year by then, and what a whirlwind twelve months it had been. Even before we left France, I’d called my old boss at the mortgage licensing firm and asked if I could have my old job back. There happened to be a vacancy, and he agreed. Meanwhile, Kelly applied for a job as a sixth-grade teacher and was hired. When we touched down in Dallas in the summer of 2004, she had just a few weeks to prep for the coming school year, and I had one week to get settled before heading back to work.