An Embarrassing Encounter

An Encounter that Gave Me an Unwelcome Glimpse of Me

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Rachel Held Evans had the honesty and humility to tweet an embarrassing admission.  Perhaps I should tell my more embarrassing life-encounter that probably helped change my life.  Here is Rachel Held Evans’ admission that she tweeted today:  “Quietly judged a lady at the grocery store based on her appearance and accent.  Then she ran after me to deliver a bag I’d left behind.”  Ouch I hate when that happens, and I’m pretty sure most all of us have been there.  I appreciate her saying that, and it reminded me of a life-changing encounter long ago.

            Let me fill in a bit of background before I get to the encounter.  I began to follow Christ shortly before going to college.  I toyed with the idea of studying for the ministry.  But I had been going to school for sixteen years.  Would three more years prepare me for ministry?  I decided, no not for me anyway.  I hadn’t even been a real member of a church, simply a college kid going to college-aged Christian campus groups.  No, three more years of college wouldn’t make me ready for a Christian ministry.  I decided to get a job, a manual job; because my non-teaching history degree with a philosophy minor wasn’t really an ideal education for a vocation.  I had thrown my eggs into the basket for preparing to study at seminary, and then come to the conclusion I needed the school of hard knocks.

            A few years later, I was still doing manual jobs.  I was a member of a church.  A lot of us thought our church was a fortress for the truth.  As one old minister put it, we were the sort of church that sometimes behaved like “You and I may be the only Christians alive, and I am not sure of you.”  I definitely wasn’t the happy sort of Christian.  It is a difficult place to imagine hardly anyone else has a valid Christian experience.  It is even harder to be happy when you think you “are that” and still you are working at a menial job because somewhere in life you got sidetracked and have sort of accepted this as your unhappy lot in life for the glory of God.  That is where pride takes us.  We are full of ourselves, arrogant in our exaltation of self over others, incapable of being happy or joyous, or to enjoy the people around us.  We become afflicted with a spiritual bi-polar disorder that allows us to think we are the defenders of truth when what we really are is nothing but discouraged.  I wrapped myself in right-wing Christianity and right-wing politics.

            The state to which I had moved after going to college was moving rapidly in those days from being a “yellow dog Democrat” state that voted Democrat in state and local elections and Republican in presidential elections.  But we were in the process of becoming perhaps the reddest state in America.  Whether I really followed the issues of a specific campaign, I was now a “CONSERVATIVE.”  That meant I was against anyone that ran on that party label against us Conservatives.  About this time a Democrat mayor in the biggest city in our half of the state had been in an election and I can remember opposing him vehemently, mostly because he wasn’t a Republican.  I understood the issues because I could say the platitudes.

            During the mayoral election, the Democratic mayor had a primary challenge.  The primary challenger hadn’t voted for years.  He had virtually no experience in trying to decide city policy.  But the mayor had the problem that the old “yellow dog Democrats” were being replaced or even becoming “red state Republicans.”  In his term of being a mayor the conservative movement’s tireless attacks upon non-Republicans had done their best to sell the mayor as incompetent.  On the night of the primary the newcomer, who hadn’t voted in years actually defeated the incumbent mayor for the mayor’s party nomination.  It had to be a bitter and humiliating defeat for a man who had given much of his life to serving the public in city and local government.  Of course, I was gleeful of the results in those days.

            A few months later came my chance encounter.  I was attending a junior college to take some foreign language courses.  I had no plan for life, but the courses interested me.  I went to the junior college cafeteria between work and going to my evening class.  On this day, almost all of the cafeteria’s tables were full of people.  I am pretty much an introvert, but fortune was with me it seemed, for there was one table where no one was sitting.  I got to the table and sat down.   I could generally be polite to those who came to a table where I was the only one, but I hated introducing myself to strangers.  I had been seated for a very short time when someone asked if I minded if he joined me at the table.  I looked up and it was the former mayor.  Once he was seated not many people would join us, because well you don’t interrupt a former mayor that everyone in our area had seen numerous times of television.  No one else would join us the whole time we ate our meal.  I was a bit uncomfortable for I had been a right-wing punk and suddenly that didn’t seem so cool.

            We talked.  He was teaching a class on how government works.  He told me that what he most wanted to do was to encourage young people to realize that the local government was a part of the process through which life in a city could be improved.  He wanted them to know they could work with others, and felt his experience gave him some insights into helping teach this in a practical and realistic way.  This was from a guy who recently been defeated overwhelmingly by someone who had absolutely no qualifications for being mayor.  But he still had a positive view on life, and a plan for continuing to move forward in life and to be a part of a positive process for making a city a better place to live.  The conversation left me feeling my own sense of arrogance and emptiness.  I realized that I had no real plan for my life, that I was bitter, and here was a guy still yearning to do his part in joining others to build a better city.

            It wasn’t long after that that I began to read things like Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Life Together and C.S. Lewis on The Four Loves and I began to realize that becoming Christian was more about becoming human than I had ever really learned to be.  A lot of changes perhaps started with that encounter.

So when I read Rachel Held Evans’ admission today, I remembered all this.  It was an embarrassing encounter, maybe just one of those chance encounters.  But maybe for me that encounter was a gracious act of a loving God using an impromptu encounter to change my life's trajectory.  It is one of the things I can be grateful for this Thanksgiving.