Southern Baptist Sissy

"If we get caught, just remember. You're deft and I don't speak English."

It was Bill Berry, not the former drummer for REM, but the other one.

He was trying to reconstruct how we survived two weeks we spent in Prague, Czech Republic and wrote me out of the blue.

"Wasn't that the strategy?" he asked.

"There was a strategy?" I immediately wrote back.

He hasn't responded.

It'll likely be a couple of months before I hear from him again.

He often drops out of sight for long periods of time but we have that wonderful gift of being able to instantly pick right up where we left off without skipping a beat.

"Hey Remember the time ..." I'll begin.

"Oh yeah that was funny," he'll reply before I even get to what I'm talking about.

"How in the hell do you know what I'm talking about?" I fire.

"Well," he'll say calmly, "aren't you talking about the time we moved all of the furniture out of that woman's house in Havana, Cuba so we could learn to salsa with those students that night?"

"Well, yeah," I tell him.

I don't know how he does that but he does.

Then again, Bill is always calm.

He has a spiritual center that borders on holy.

Unless Markers Mark is involved.

Then he's loud!

I locked him out of the room one day in  Myrtle Beach so I could get some rest. He took offense and started yelling at me through the open doors of our hotel room on the second floor.

Cussing, I stumble to the balcony and look down to see him bouncing on the diving board of swimming pool with a bottle of Makers Mark. He's trying to speak in Hebrew which we'd both taken in Seminary but it's coming out all slurred.

"SHTOK!" I yell telling him to shut up.

He stopped bouncing and considered what I'd said before bouncing again and screaming "Ani yiv-at lecha ba beitsim!"

Shaking my head, both hands covered my crotch I close the sliding glass doors and went to sleep.

When I woke up, he's asleep in the bathtub.

I have no idea how he got inside the room.

Hoo-boy! The adventures we've had!

But he's always available in a heartbeat if I need him. We have long thoughtful talks when we're not pushing one another to do things neither would ever consider by ourselves. We've helped one another through our worse while having the most incredible of adventures. Honestly, I don't know what my life would be without him. It certainly wouldn't have been as much fun.

He's pretty mellow these days and he often drops out of sight for long periods of time.

Well, unless he's with me.

Then we make our own heaven in spite of whatever hell there may be.

Notes From God

"What in the hell?" I said standing in the Pastor's study of the church that  inexpiably employed me.

I was opening the mail and had just read, "Your last sermon really sucked. If you're going to speak for me, don't put words in my mouth."

It was from God.

It was postmarked New York City and I was in Louisville, Kentucky.

Who knew God lived in New York City?

The letter wasn't signed but it did have "Notes From God" embossed on the top so it must have been from God. God's pretty busy so there's not always time to personally sign everything.

I threw it away.

That sermon was great!

My text had been, "Then Samson went into Gaza, and saw there a harlot, and went in unto her," (Judges 16:1).

My message had been about staying on top of things when things get rough.

Imagine my shock the very next day when I opened another "Note From God" postmarked San Francisco which read, "You're terrible when you do hospital visitation. Stop putting words in my mouth. And stop nibbling on the food while pretending to pray with the patient. PLUS ... you suck."

It was true that I hated hospital visits. They are so depressing. This was back in the days before hospitals had coffee bars, boutiques, food courts and they made good movies about bad Candy Stripers. Now the Candy Stripers are good and they don't make movies about them anymore.

But! As a "Professional Christian" I still made the damn hospital visits in spite of such a difficult environment. The money was decent so I did it for God's sake.

I threw the letter away.

Postmarked Chicago, the next one read, "You are the worst dressed preacher ever. What are you? A hippy? A cowboy? A suave urban hipster? A devout Seminarian? You even got me shaking my head. It's why you suck."

God was starting to piss me off.

At the time I was wearing blue jeans in the pulpit with a corduroy jacket, colorful plaid shirt with a sock tie. Hiking boots complemented the ensemble. Tinted glasses, shoulder length hair and a beard made me look really fine.

Obviously God doesn't keep up with modern fashion.

The letters kept arriving for the next month.

Every single day God would personally criticize my ministry.

It was killing me.

The congregation unanimously and instantly granted me a mini-Sabbatical so I went to seek the council of my dear friend Bill Berry, not the former drummer for REM but the other one who was the "Professional Christian" at the Graffiti Baptist Center in New York.

Seeing my agony, Bill immediately took to an Irish Pub on the Lower East Side so we could talk. Not one damn person spoke English. I couldn't understand anything they said.

Anyway Bill listened, put his arm around me, told me how much he loves me and this was all before we got drunk.

The next morning, I woke up on the sofa in Bill and Kathy's massive townhouse with majestic sweeping views of the buildings surrounding it.

They were still asleep so I went looking through their stuff like normal people do when they visit somebody else's place.

"Bastard," I said out loud after rummaging through their desk.

There was the "Notes from God" stationary.

"Forgive me Lord," I said out loud, "but I have been perpetrated by a fraud. I didn't mean all those things I said about you. You really are great! But God, while we're talking, let me ask you this. If REM ever does need a drummer, play a really mean joke on Bill."

And to this day, I love the Lord.