Getting My Voice Back

Lou Phelps Faced Booked me. She is the editor of the “Coastal Business Journal” had read a blog that I’d written on the changes planned for Union Mission now that I am no longer there and wanted to interview me for a story.

My initial reaction was to say no. I’ve laid low out of respect for the new leadership at Union Mission. Besides I’ve been on this Sabbatical and these are quiet times. And I’ve lived such a loud and public life. Aside from my daily musings on my blog and on Face Book the people that I’ve chosen to talk to and listen to is very small. I’ve commanded huge audiences and at this point in my life do not have the need to be center stage.

I’ve lived my whole life in the press. For twenty years Union Mission averaged 52 newspaper stories a year. That’s one a week. I was in most of them. That doesn’t count television, radio or regional and national publications. My face was recognized when I would be out and once people figured out who I was they asked for things.

“My son has an addiction problem and I don’t know what to do,” a Mother cried seated beside me at the Breakfast Club one morning.

“Look at my teeth,” a man commanded in fresh meat section of Publix. “Can you help me with them?” and they were yellow and rotting and who can buy fresh meat after that?

“I’m married but there is somebody else. Will God forgive me? I don’t know what to do,” he told me over a lunch at Johnny Harris’s.

At a Chamber of Commerce meeting a Savannah business woman wrote on her napkin and passed it me. “Can I talk to you after this?” I nodded and we did. Her daughter is a waitress and has no health insurance but is sick. I told her about the J. C. Lewis Health Center.

Sitting at the head table of a political “Eggs and Issues” breakfast the Senator sitting beside me leans over. “Hey Mike, I’ve got this …friend… Yeah, friend… Anyway my friend has AIDS. Tell me,” and his voice cracks as he finishes and his eyes grow moist and his voice quivers, “tell me what to do.”

That was my life for the better part of 30 years; raging against injustice in the media while quietly responding to the real needs of real people at the individual level. Both were relentless and on this Sabbatical, I now realize the toil that it all took.

There is this scene in “Jesus Christ Superstar” where the crowds around Jesus become a mob. They all need something from him at the same time.

See my eyes I can hardly see
See me stand I can hardly walk
I believe you can make me whole
See my tongue I can hardly talk

See my skin I’m a mass of blood
See my legs I can hardly stand
I believe you can make me well
See my purse I’m a poor, poor man

It overwhelms Jesus in the end and he scream at the pleading crowd “HEAL THYSELVES!”

No one has ever accused me of being especially Christ like and I certainly never learned to look a hurting person in the aisle of Publix and tell them to fix it themselves. But I got overwhelmed too and the thing about that is how few people give a shit. If you can’t do anything for them … well, then …what good are you?

So I locked my voice away on this Sabbatical because I needed to just be with the people who love me for me. And not for what I could do. It was an amazing lesson to see who is who.

Now thirty years of wounds have healed and I marvel at the scars. And I am grateful beyond expression to those who tended my healing. And I am not done. Thirty years is a long time. “Three years seems like thirty,” Jesus sings in Superstar.

I did my thirty.

So I called Lou and told her that I would do the interview. Rebekah came to participate and stand beside me because my knees are still a bit wobbly from it all. But I got my voice back. And I know what is what. And what isn’t.

And resurrections are funny things. You recognize them when they are happening.