Chapter 8 The Reason

 

Chapter 8 The Reason

 I don’t know how my parents ended up together.  My mother came from the country.  My dad did not.  My Granny, mom and mom’s sisters would sit around a pot plucking whatever grew on their farm.  They grew so much food, they gave some away.  My dad told me how his family ate.  His mom would cook dinner for thirteen children and lay it on the dinner table.  Siblings late for the dinner bell could go to bed hungry.

 My mom only watches the Hallmark channel for fun.  The rest of her time is spent with her grandchildren, her business, and teaching at her church.  For fun, my dad…well.  When I threw Mike Tyson fight night parties at my house, my dad would show up with his fiancée Gail and be more popular than me, even though I paid for all the refreshments and called all those ingrates my closest pals.  He still dominates every room.

 Peace always saturated my mom’s actions.  During a civil rights protest at my mom’s college, she hid under the bed.  She feared calling her dad to tell him she got arrested. My dad came out of the womb a warrior.  Once during my dad’s twenties, when playing an insignificant pickup basketball game, my dad’s defender kept fouling him on his jump shots.  To teach this guy a lesson, he deliberately planned to educate his opponent with a well-placed elbow.  Dad hit his defender so hard, the guy’s teeth went through his bottom lip.

 People saw my mom as Hannah, the biblical character who prayed to God for a child.  When God blessed her with one, she gave him to the temple to become a prophet.  He became one of the greatest prophets of all time, Samuel.  She founded a non-profit called Hannah 3 to spiritually minister to inner-city children.  In golfing circles, my dad’s friends call him “Big Kat”.  I think it was code to warn everyone else that just because this large black man dresses with class and plays this country club game with grace and skill, don’t get fooled into thinking he is domesticated enough to be too familiar.  Don’t approach like you would a Siamese kitten.  Tread softly as you would when seeing a lion.

 If my mom lived during the time of Moses, while thousands around her reveled in the activities at the Golden Calf celebration, you could find my mom fighting through thousands to get as far away from sin as possible.  But when it came time to go into the promised land, and she heard the report of the need to defeat giants sired by demons and to scale walls that reached toward the clouds, she would resign to make her home in the wilderness. 

 Out of the two million that refused to go into the promised land, only two Israelites did not cower to fear.  If my Dad lived during that time, there would have been three.

 I can imagine Moses asking Joshua, “Didn’t Aubrey go with you to spy out the land?”.  Joshua would have sighed, “You know Big Kat.  He decided to stay and attack one of the seven gates of Jericho by himself.” But, you also might have caught my dad leading the electric slide at the golden calf soiree.  Not because he knew it to be wrong but just because there was a party and Big Kat can’t help but be the center of it. 

 I don’t know how they got together.

 As you can imagine, being the amalgamation of these two extremes makes me, at times, act bipolar. 

 Often, I would wake up with a greasy face as a child.  My mom would pray over me and anoint my head with oil while slept.  Sometimes, other Dads would get jealous that my brother and I starred on the teams he coached and accuse him of nepotism.  My Dad would throw either of us out onto the field like gladiators and challenge these dads to go against us with their sons.  Any drill.  Anywhere.  Anytime.  Their sons against his sons.  Dad expected to win whatever competition the other dad chose.  We never lost one.

 In college, I once brought a homeless man to my mom’s house to sleep on the couch in the living room.  When my family confronted me with their irrational fear of ending up on the evening news as murder victims, I rebuked them.  I quoted scripture about God’s divine protection and called them “Ye, of little faith.” That is the mom in me.

 The next year, I went to a club that paid one of my best friends to hurt people as a bouncer.  I had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time, and she showed up separately at the same club and concocted a plan to make me jealous.  She alarmingly informed me that a Black guy in a flannel shirt pushed her.  Enraged, I went to every single Black male with a flannel shirt in the establishment, grabbed him by the collar, and asked him if he touched my girlfriend.  At least twelve guys mumbled a shocked “no” as I moved on to the next one.  When I went to the last guy, he matched my size.  My girlfriend identified him as the perpetrator (of course). We went nose to nose as we threatened each other.  The whole club stopped dancing and surrounded us to witness this heavyweight fight.  Another best friend pulled me aside and told me to look behind me, and I saw twelve Black guys in flannel shirts staring at me with fury in their eyes.  They looked like a football team lined up at kickoff.  They just needed a whistle to stomp me through the dance floor.  My friend stepped in, and by his reputation alone, backed everyone down.  He saved my parents the cost of my funeral.  That’s the Dad in me.

 Consequently, I recently told my mom that story, and she said, almost with tears in her voice,

 “I can’t believe you were that crazy.  Why were you in that place of sin in the first place? What happened to my Pharisee?”

 I told my Dad the same story, and he, with all seriousness, said:

 “Why didn’t you call me?”

 He was upset that as soon as I saw that there were thirteen guys wanting to fight me, I should have told them all to wait for a couple of minutes so I could call my Daddy; wait for

Dad to drop whatever he was doing and drive to the club; work his way through the crowd and join me in this circle of death; and then commence as father and son taking on all of these men together.

 And people wonder why I can get crazy sometimes.

 Recently, a Jehovah's Witness knocked on my door. Two genuinely nice ladies noticed the Bible verse attached above the peep hole and probably decided I would welcome their visit. Even though I disliked the interruption, the Mom in me greeted them cordially and excused myself from further conversation. They asked if they could visit another time, and I did not refuse. I had never met a Jehovah's Witness before. Curious, I looked them up and became fascinated by what I read.

 They don’t believe God resurrected Jesus’s physical body after his death. They don’t believe in heaven for those who call on the name of the Lord, as stated in Romans 10. And they don’t believe Jesus is God.

 I don’t necessarily care what people believe. Religious freedom in America originated from the Baptist denomination. They didn’t care if Americans held atheist, agnostic, or Anglican views. They believed the love of their God in Jesus would persuade them all. I try to love people in the small ways I can: prayer, striking up a conversation, digging to the heart, and offering living water in the way Jesus did for the woman at the well. It has worked. I have guided over one hundred people (including agnostics, gay people, atheists, spiritualists, and alcoholics) to an initial prayer request for God to make Himself real. These events occurred everywhere except church, including over the phone, in offices, in homes, in bars, and in classrooms.  One time, an uber driver on a fifteen-minute ride home.

 It doesn’t bother me to converse with people of other beliefs. But the Dad in me stood up when I realized that these kind old ladies saw the scripture on my door and still proceeded to try to convert me to their appellation. It may seem innocuous but robbing me or killing me would show more love for me than convincing me to give up my belief that God walked this earth as Jesus Christ. Not to get too technical (Paul explains this), if Jesus were not God, then the limitations on His life would fail to satiate the weight of the world’s sin. This would mean Christ died for nothing.  If the price of sin is eternal death, then only an eternal life can absorb its punishment. By rejecting the notion that Jesus’s body was not resurrected with Him, they make him like any other person who died on a cross. His resurrection proves He is God because only God can take all death and all sin and raise His body in holiness. They thought they were recruiting a large Black man to knock on doors with them and forsake Christmas. Ignorantly, they tried to get me to damn my soul and wreck my life. It seems like it’s a small thing—this variation of truth—but it’s not.

 Have you ever wondered how the children of Israel chose a golden calf to worship after their emancipation from Egypt? After all, Egyptians worshipped idols that looked like serpents, bulls, falcons, and cats, not a calf. It is because God invited seventy of Israel’s judges to His mountain for brunch. The Bible says they saw God. The Bible also states that no man can look into the face of God and live, so this passage requires more exegesis for deeper understanding. When Ezekiel, recorded in the first chapter of his book, saw the glory of God, he described angels called cherubim. Ezekiel described the cherubim’s feet as calf hooves and described the throne as having the appearance of sapphire. Moses also uses this description to describe what the judges saw “under God’s feet.” He does not describe God’s feet but the floor, which looked like sapphire. Even Moses could only visit God in a cloud and could not look into God’s face.  Considering Ezekiel’s description of the throne room, it is more than likely that the Spirit, who wrote the Bible, wanted us to know the judges saw the throne room of God, but God, as with Moses, hid His glory in the cloud. So, one might imagine a conversation like this when the judges came down from the mountain:

 The Israelites: What happened?

 The Judges: We saw God.

 The Israelites: What did He look like? (Wouldn't this be the first obvious question you would ask?)

 The Judges: We did not actually see God’s face, but we saw the floor of heaven and what looked like calf’s feet.

 Considering the socialization of four hundred years of Egyptians euphemizing animal deities, it seems logical that they would assume the God who defeated Egypt and parted the Red Sea was indeed a calf. They named Him Yahweh. They had the right God but the wrong representation. Ironically, God punished them for it in the same manner He punished the Egyptians for their idolatry: plagues. This all occurred before the Israelites even knew the Ten Commandments existed. 

 The truth matters. The Bible states clearly that if an opinion, philosophy, or advice exists outside the word of God, it does not come from Him (Isaiah 8:20). Of all the scriptures that speak of truth, Titus 1:1-2 stands out to me. Truth leads to godliness and eternal life (knowing God in the way Jesus knows God), which God promised before the beginning of time.  You cannot please God without truth. 

 I overcame alcoholism (so far) simply by Step Four: moral inventory. In fact, these "Dad Gospels" are an exercise in Step Four. I found the lies that created the behavior that created the pain in which I used alcohol to medicate. As soon as I identified the lies and replaced them with God’s truth (repentance), there was no desire to embark on destructive behavior (sin) and then medicate the destruction it caused (alcohol). I continue to do this multiple times every single day.  However, I realize, as I take responsibility for my travails on the path of destruction, it’s not only my lies that need replacing.  It’s the lies of preachers and authorities and teachers and counselors and even loved ones, who lighted and greased my way down that road.

 This revelation, amazingly, is not unique. Every person in recovery walks this same process. And while we are grateful to be alive and to experience the manifest grace and adoration of a Higher Power, we can’t help our overwhelming hatred toward the lies. The lies almost killed us. They should have killed us. We all, LITERALLY, were saved by grace. If our redemption did not come at the point of hanging off a cliff with one pinky finger keeping us from a terminal plummet, we all realized our route steeply declined toward that inescapable demise.  The bottom line is everyone should feel this way, regardless of what our addictions are.  Lies kill.  Unfortunately, they kill some people slower than the rest of us.

 As crazy as it seems, my mom taught me country values, put me in church, scolded me for unkindness, and pushed me toward moral living. But it’s the warrior my dad taught me to be—coaching me on the field, teaching me how to handle myself in the streets and the boardrooms, and by example—that saved me and saves me now. I never, ever backed down from an opponent or fight, no matter the odds and no matter my fear.  It’s the way he raised me.  When the doctors said I would die, it was my dad in me that rose up. When I could barely walk, it was my dad in me that compelled me to stumble around on neuropathic feet, to take care of myself, and to work out to get my health back. When I sent him a video of me throwing away my walker and dancing, the joy that I heard coming out of his mouth almost made me cry.  He never sounded that happy when I scored a basket or got a sack on a football field.  When they said that my life was essentially over for accomplishment, even if I lived, it was my dad who called out the warrior in me to not look at my situation as shame but as an expression of God’s love for me. “He saved you for a reason,” my Dad would say over and over and over again. “You are too special to God for your story to be over.” It was my dad who would analyze my voice every time I talked to him, looking for strength, for what was once his powerful son. And when he, finally, heard it and read it and saw it, he shouted with laughter, “My boy is back.”

I am back.

I don’t know how my parents got together, but I finally know why. My mom gave me the weapons to use: love, joy, peace, the Spirit, perseverance, faith and truth. But it was my dad who showed me how to use them. David would dance and sing and worship the Lord like no other. But when David went to battle, he came back holding the enemy’s decapitated head.

I finally know the reason they came together. It’s God’s promise to me that the enemy will finally find out that reason, too.

2 Corinthians 10:4-6

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ.