hot sauce

when do you make the desicion to stop spending time with someone, and start sharing your life with them

is it when she smiles at you with her eyes half open after waking from a nap?

is it when you dance together for the first time at a show of your favorite band?

or is it when she asks for your hand in marriage via hot sauce packet at taco bell

maybe i’m just getting old

Autumn - “Why are you all smiley?”

Me - “Becuase you are so very pretty. And I get to spend time with you.“

holy crap…did i really just say that? eat your heart out rico suave. autumn and i recently got engaged, and life is really good right now. it’s an amazing thing when you can feel so comfortable with someone, that you can say anything to them. i’ve heard alot of sermon’s and read article’s about intamacy but experiencing it is something to behold. i didn’t plan on saying that to her. it’s not like i thought up this great line cuz i knew she’d swoon over it. i just said it. because that’s what i was thinking at the time. and she swooned anyway. score one for matt. i never really had a way with words, and never have been one to express myself vocally, so when things like this come along it makes me feel like i’m finally growing up…or maybe i’m just getting old…

When They Become We

i was having lunch in september of last year with a group of people i had just met. we were discussing the kind of work we each did and places we had been, and one man started telling stories about being in the marines. He led one of the first groups into iraq during the gulf war in 1991. He talked about what it was like to enter enemy territory and to be shot at - about the complexities of war - and he had us all at the edge of our seats. During one of the battle’s he and his marines won quickly, they had to arrest the soldiers who had just been shooting at them. they lined them up and were handcuffing them when one of them ran up to him waving a letter, begging to have it sent immediately. the man was frantic and starting to cause a scene. He kept repeating that the letter he was holding had to be sent immediately. He then looked the marine in the eyes and said, “please mail this letter for me. it’s to my father, and he must know that i love him.”

The man telling the story paused, looked around the table at each of us, and said, “he had no idea about the troubled relationship i had with my own father. here i am, out in the middle of nowhere in the desert of iraq, trying to arrest a group of soldiers who moments before were trying to kill me, staring at a man who wants me to mail a letter for him, thinking, i could be him.”

Several years ago a women called the church where i was pastor because seh wanted to talk.We set up a meet, and when she showed up, i asked her how i could help. She said she was a prostitute and didn’t want to live anymore, so she had made a plan to kill her self. She described in detail how she was going to do it, when she was going to do it, and were it was going to happen. she was very thorough. she said she was telling me all this because she had to know whether she would go to heaven or hell when she died. somewhere in the course of telling me her plans, she mentioned that she had a daughter because one of her clients had gotten her pregnant. She was confident that a family member would raise her daughter when she was gone.

i asked her to tell me more about her daughter. She gave a few details. then i asked what her daughters name was.

she replied, “my daughter’s name is Faith.”

faith.

there are thes moments when the enemy all of a sudden becomes just like me.

when a soldier becomes a son.

when a prostitute becomes a mother.

when they become we.

when those become us.

when he becomes me.

moments when all of the ways that we divides ourselves and rank each other and convince ourselves of how different, better, and unalike we are disappear, and we are faced with the fact that first and foremost, we are humans. in this together. and not that much different from each other.

jew. gentile.

marine. iraqi.

orphan. family.

pastor. prostitute.

we could be them.

-Rob Bell-