I have a confession to make. It is not pretty, and I wish I did not have to share it with you. But, I really cannot stand you not knowing any longer.

I have a wonderful life. I have a wife that loves me, we live in a very nice duplex with tall ceilings and hardwood floors, surrounded by books and kitties and lots of friends. We have a huge front porch where we sit in the evenings, watching the moon set over the city skyline.  Our car is dependable and safe, something that was not always true for us. We never go hungry.

And despite all of that, I am still not happy – for I am a jealous man. My Buddhists friends say that suffering comes from our attachment to outcomes. In other words, I am doing this to myself. My suffering is of my own manufacture.

At the core of Christianity is the death of our own ego.

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Whatever. By that definition, as a man of faith, I fail – miserably.

I open my Facebook account this morning and see that a guy I know has published yet another blog post that is traveling throughout the social networks, getting tons of comments, +1’s and ‘likes’. I read the post and think it trite, pabulum, really. Why do people read this crap, I ask myself.

But the reality is, while it might be trite, it is not crap. It is well written, he has an obvious following and he works hard at his craft. He plays to his audience and he does it well. The problem for me is not that he is successful – it is that I am jealous of his success.

Or that guy who started a nonprofit about the same time I did, but who courts evangelicals – using all the right code words- and as a result, gets invited to speak at all the big events. That guy drives me nuts. But in reality, he is not the problem – it is me and my frustration that while he flies all over the country, speaking to huge audiences, I am sitting in a crack house, talking to a sex worker that got beaten by a bad John. He is praised and lauded, and I struggle to keep my bills paid and to get $2 bus passes for homeless men so they can work today.

But, you will tell me, being there for the sex worker is important. It is real.

Oh yes. It is all of that. It is real as hell.

The ‘unfairness’ of it bugs the shit out of me. Because, deep down inside, I want to be lauded, I want to be praised; I want to be patted on the back. Because I am human.

Intellectually, I know that my work is valuable and good and all of that. But, in a world that heaps accolades on celebrities, that lives on the soundbite, that praises authors and packs stadiums to hear how you can have “your best life now”, it is easy to feel like a failure.

Like a nobody.

Like a nothing.

Even when I know that I am not. And even if I am, it’s not the point.

Because none of this is about me – it is about embodying Christ to the world.

I just wish I were better at remembering it.

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If you liked this post, you might enjoy my newsletter Praxis.

Once, a lady told me she thought I was not Christian. I was fairly certain I was, so I asked her what made her think so. Her argument boiled down to my not using the right code words when her mother asked me if I had been born again (another code word).

Code words are important to us. It lets us know that someone is in our tribe, or that they are not. It tells us if we are safe with this person, if this person or organization shares our values, if we are welcome.

As someone who often feels unsafe around a tribe I am on the edge of (Evangelical Christians), It bothers me when people use code words to build false affinity with a group. For instance, when was the last time you heard a politician say that they were not a Christian? Am I to believe that there is no political ambition at all in the 30% of the population that does not believe in God?

It also bothers me that if someone uses the right code words, they get a pass on everything else. For instance, a former president had no problem sending us into multiple armed conflicts and slashed benefits for the poorer members of our society, yet because he used the right code words, Christians all over the US accepted and embraced him.

By the way, if you are looking for a great explanation of what Christian code words like Justification, Born Again and Salvation really mean (it is probably not what you think) I recommend Speaking Christian, by Marcus Borg. I don’t read a lot of popular theology, but I was lent this last week by a friend and loved it. 

You don’t know me.

Well, most of you don’t. I imagine that of the several hundred people who come to this site on a daily basis, I have sat down and ate a meal with very few of you. The number of you who know basic things about me – say, my middle name, what branch of the service I was in or the state I was born in, is even less.

But, you do know, or at least you could know, that I like to read, and that I have two cats, and my wife’s name. But more than that, you have an idea of my political views, and my city, and how I feel about it and lord almighty, what you know about my relationship with religion. If you are my friend on Facebook, you not only see who my friends are, but you can read their stuff too, which means you get to see what my friends think about those things, too. You know things about me that you don’t know about the guy who has sat in the cubicle next to you for the last three years.

By any measure of things, this is weird. But, increasingly, this is normal. We are closer than ever before, yet more estranged.

For example, I run a hyper-local nonprofit. Virtually every single person our organization benefits sleeps within 3 miles of my house – yet more than 50% of our funding comes from more than 100 miles away from that same address. In other words, dozens of people believe so strongly in what I do that they send us money, despite never having had a cup of coffee with me, or shaking my hand or even seeing me face to face.

This takes some getting used to. Yesterday, I had the surreal experience of coming across a forum online where folks were discussing the merits of one of my blog posts. They are talking, back and forth about what I do and don’t believe, whether I believe in propositional truths, whether I am a sucky friend for having friends who are homeless, and so on. My chief defender was an atheist.

None of these people know me.

A while back, I wrote this blog post, about how, because of a $250 donation, we were able to get a couple who had been homeless housed. The comments blew up, because one particular “defender of truth” wanted to criticize me because the couple was not married. He does not know me. I would not recognize him were he to walk in my office right now. In this blog post, I answered a question about my beliefs – and was beat up for evading the question. The accuser does not know me.

No, they only know the image of me that is a combination of what I show and what they want to believe about me – a distortion of the ‘real’ me, to be sure – as distorted as the reflection in the funhouse mirror. It is frustrating to me is that blogging is a broadcast medium – I have no control over who reads this. So, I write a blog post about how some people are harmed by religion, and someone who has never felt harmed by religion thinks I am slamming him or his church. Or I talk about how some church people mistreat people who are homeless, and I get emails telling me that their church would never do such a thing, and that I am wrong.

I wish that those people would remember that they don’t know me – they only know the funhouse mirror version of me they have constructed in their head. And that is not the real me at all.

photo © 2009 nerissa’s ring | more info (via: Wylio)

For the last two weeks, I have been developing a new practice. Three days a week, I am getting up, putting on running shoes and hitting the street. That’s right – I am running.

Lord have mercy.

Actually, it is a lot more like shuffling than it is running, and it is, at this stage anyway, more walking than anything else. I am following the Couch to 5K protocol, which is designed for chunky middle aged guys who have not ran in 10 years. Or something like that.

There are a lot of reasons I am running again, which will be talked about in a stand-alone post pretty soon. But today, I want to talk about where I am running on these mornings. I run in the cemetery.

This is the cemetery in my town where very important people are buried and have been for hundreds of years. As a result, the lawns are manicured to exacting standards. The sounds of the birds in the trees are periodically covered by the sound of the walk-behind mower, pushed by a stooped black man who has seen many summers come and go. Both birds and man are oblivious to the pasty white chubby man shuffling by, wiping the sweat from his eyes.

And underneath us all- mowers, birds and runners- are the dead. The path winds throughout the cemetery, and when I am running, so do I: past the graves of Confederate soldiers, past the towering obelisks of captains of industry, past the slabs of crumbling stone that say nothing more than Infant Daughter – 1863.

All long since gone. Deceased. Passed on. Dead.

I like cemeteries. They remind me that all I have on this earth is the short dash between my birthday and the day I die. No matter what I accomplish, no matter how many lives I change, no matter how much wealth I accumulate or how many children I leave behind – 200 years from now, my time on earth is reduced to to a name on a rock, a pithy epitaph, two dates with a dash between them.

Last summer I spent a week at a monastery in South Carolina, on an old plantation that was on the bank of a broad river. The church where the daily office was said seven times a day opened onto a wide green court that overlooked the river. And the entirety of this plaza was given over to the simple headstones of the monks who had lived and died while living at that monastery. And seven times a day, the monks walked into that church, past all the dead that had gone before them. And seven times a day, they would file out of that church, again passing the dead.

When I first saw this, I thought that would be depressing as hell to do every day. But now, after two weeks running among the dead, I think I get it.

I hate to burst any bubbles you may have had, but this whole “Minister to the Homeless” gig pays, well, pretty much squat.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my work, and I love the people I get to minister to and among. I love that I get to bless newborn babies, and I love that because of my advocacy, sometimes those babies get to stay with their parents. That I get to provide pastoral care to people who have lost everything they have, that I get to be a ray of light in the face of overwhelming darkness, that I am trusted by people who have ample reason to trust no one – that I get to do this I am truly blessed.

I love that, on a shoestring budget and one paid staff person, we managed to get 12 people in permanent housing last year and helped dozens more with getting uniforms for work or bus passes to get to work. And I love- love!-that we served upwards of 5,000 individual breakfasts last year.

But the reality is, in that same year, I earned a hair over $1400 a month. And my wife, who is on disability for a heart problem, was notified today that they have, because of my massive income, cut her disability payment down to a bit more than $300 a month.

Well then.

This is not sustainable. Not at all.

At this point, the limits of my ability to keep doing what I am doing have more to do with my economic realities than they do my mental health.

I cannot realistically expect to be present for people in crisis when I myself am in crisis.

So I am not really sure what to do about this. The reality is, right now, Love Wins cannot afford, based on our current level of income, to pay me much more than they currently are. So, it looks like I will have to find other ways to make money. The thing is, I don’t have a lot of options.

I guess I could get a part-time job. But if I do that, it means I am spending fewer hours with my people. In addition, it would need to be a simple sort of job that I would not be mentally invested in. The last thing I need is one more stressor playing games in my head.

Or, I could try to increase the number of paid speaking gigs I do. However, most of the speaking gigs I get are for fairly low pay, and getting even those require work on my end to get. It seems that the market for someone to tell you the truth is not high.

Or, I could write a book. Lots of people want me to do this, but I understand that in Christian publishing, a $5000 advance is considered pretty good, and not to expect to sell beyond that. If I am putting that sort of work in, working at Home Depot seems a more lucrative option. And I would have benefits.

I could sell advertising on the blog here, but honestly, that feels a lot like wearing a rubber chicken suit and twirling a sign. For not much money at all.

Any ideas?

Update: This post set off a bunch of email and tweets to me, asking how people can help. I am honored you would ask.

• Tell the story of Love Wins anyway you can. We need your links to our blog, your Facebook friendings, your twitter following, etc.
• Consider supporting Love Wins (and thus, me) in your monthly giving. While we appreciate all your gifts, my salary is pulled from the recurring gifts part of the budget, so if you gave monthly, that is what most directly helps me. Click here to find out how to give.
• If you are a pastor, or if you have any sway in your congregation, consider adding Love Wins to your mission budget. Or, invite me to speak at your congregation, or retreat or whatever.

I did not write this post so much to say poor pitiful me – I knew the risks when I started this, and this is the life I have chosen. But just the act of writing it was beneficial, and that you guys want to help means the world to me. Gonna go now, before I get weepy again…

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If you liked this post, you might enjoy my newsletter Praxis.

In the last six days, I have been in North Carolina, Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, back to New Jersey, then back to New York, then back to New Jersey and on to Philadelphia, where I caught a flight to Chicago and then back to Raleigh.

In those six days I traveled by car, train, bus, plane, ferry, taxi and subway.

And I am wiped out.

Next Monday, I will re-enter the blogosphere, and hopefully resume a more regular schedule.

Have a great weekend!

PS: I spoke at Revolution while I was in New York City. They have the audio from that up for your listening pleasure.