it was a hollow pulpit that was supposed to tell me that life is much bloodier than expected.  like a spiritual omaha beach, a normandy of the soul…that’s what it feels like.  constant shelling. ridiculous numbers of casualties.  no real time to mourn them as they fall – mourning equals exposure equals shooting gallery equals death.

Jesus. He knew. He got it.  like literally.  He got that this life wasn’t made of little tikes plastic.  no safety mats under His feet.  no gloves for heavy lifting.  just rocks and donkey crap and splinters and dirt mattreses…and nails. the nails were the worst.

bloody. first nail set in place where blood already was, then driven through blood, skin, tendon, tissue, muscle, nerve, more skin, wood. more blood. new blood mixing with the old blood that had dried on his hands. second nail the same. third nail had more layers, but the same.  just a bloody mess. 

part of Him knew it.  full disclosure the realtors call it.  gotta be honest and up front about a property before you sell it.  the have to tell you if someone died in the house, or if there was an alleged haunting before you sign that dotted line…it a law. full disclosure.

(Pistons had a guy named Isaiah that they called Zeke back in the 19’s, thats a legit faith jump from Isaiah to Zeke, like a Robert Tilton style leap,  but whatever)…so Jesus had told Zeke that he could write down some stuff about a hill that would one day come into play.  it played big. big like Ralph Sampson. or Kareem, well, Lew Alcindor…but He told Zeke that there would come a day when it was going to go super bad, Zeke wrote about bruising, piercing, beating, and he said that there would be some carrying involved, like a lot of carrying.  full disclosure on a little hill shaped like a skeleton head…Zeke told us, and strangely Him, that there would be a murder on that hill…gotta say it, full disclosure and all.

its a tough piece of real estate to sell Calvary is.  i mean really, people may indeed buy the house that someone was killed in, for the right price they can deal with it.  but tell me who is the guy that will buy the house after he finds out that a murder is going to take place in it? any takers on the next bad guy’s lair? going once…

too many late nights have been spent watching the same vanilla camera work, the same vanilla narration, the same vanilla sky, and all to show the most incredible rock on earth.  everest.  huge.  not like “dang that’s big!” but like billy graham cussing under his breath big.  bigger than anything else in fact. 

whites have been fighting to conquer everest for a long time.  i’m 33 so “a long time” is gradually becoming real.  the list of guys who have actually stood 7 miles high is relatively short. but, there’s this crowd of people that walk most of the way with them, and not just with them but with them and their stuff.  the sherpa.  a man’s man, if heighth isn’t a secret requirement  for superlative masculinity. they not only listen to the guy in $4,000 worth of gear belly ache about the same thin air they are breathing beside them, but they also haul all their Kudos bars and Egg Beaters up that gargantuan planet-deformity. 

sherpas. they carry the crap the climbers can’t.  makes you wonder how tough those little guys are.  also basically assures you that they are the most underpaid and underrated workers in the world…like the polar opposite of Mandy Moore.

so Zeke said that there would be some carrying.  and that day, that bloody day.  that day that would literally become the only God-forsaken day in history, a sherpa started walking up the tallest spiritual peak in history. 

i walked with Him.  not beside Him. but on His back.

i rode the back of a man who had been beaten into hamburger meat. yeah, i’m a real class act.  i hung out on His shoulders laughing with drunken, perverted, and despicable disconnection to the entire gnarly scene.  He carried me and my lack of desire to care, my lack of drive to try, my garbage mind and my garbage tongue and my garbage life.  i even trashed my ride, didn’t care that i was sitting on a wounded man. “just keep moving would ya? and pick up the pace! i could crawl faster than this! my God you’re slow!…”

He laid.  He felt the pain. He gave up the Ghost.  and He knew every step was going to be a nefarious and tragic.  every foot placed in front of the other would have to find strength bigger than will power, bigger than fortitude, stronger than self-actualization…it would have to be love.

love for the guy who cut the timber He carried

love for the guy who beat Him with leather, bone, glass, and a smirk

love for the turncoats who cemented His conviction

love for the drunken jerk playing cards on His back

is it any wonder that when i chose to follow Him…not just accept who He was/is…that i would wind up as a target? am i somehow better than Him?

so it’s bloody. and i’m bloody more often than i thought i was supposed to be.  empty pulpits tell no lies…but they also prepare no lives.

too many pretty people sitting around me.  too many people who look like they’ve got spiritual tailors instead of spiritual blacksmiths on speed-dial.  too many suits and not enough swords.  from what i hear in the some of the secret transmissions from base the guys in the suits aren’t even targets anymore, they pose no threat. how weird does it feel when hell tells you, “to hell with you“? do we care that much about being clean?

me, i’ll keep crawling up this beach.  i know its not everest, but it’s my deployment.  He knew where i belonged when He drafted me.  and if i get bloody then i get bloody, at this point i’ve been hit so many times its not my blood i’m bleeding, its His.