Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: reflection

  • Thirty-Five…still ALIVE!

    Hampton Coliseum: This Hell in a Bucket became my Altar of Remembrance.

    Like the Old Testament figures who faced a crisis, had an encounter with God, and erected a pillar of stones to commemorate the place, this day on the calendar is my altar of remembrance.

    Today marks 35 years since I was lost enough to let myself be led, to borrow words from my favorite Rich Mullins song, Hard to Get.

    Two questions and one answer forever changed the trajectory of my life and have given me these thirty-five years, quite literally, on the house.

    Question one: Are you having that much fun?

    Question two: How much are you worth?

    Answer: God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son.

    Thirty-five years in, and I’m as amazed today at how and where Jesus found me as in the hour I first believed.

    I’m certain many people are looking for God. They just don’t know they’re looking for Him. 

    Many, like my 21-yr-old self, think they’ve already found Him. He’s the all-inclusive, Grand Cosmic Guru running everything, hidden in everything, maintaining everything, right? He’s the One conducting the Acid Tests. He’s the One encouraging you to Be Here, Now. He’s the one that’s totally cool with you as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, right? Not considering that a life spent groping around in a dark room when there’s a light switch on the wall, hurt’s everyone else…right?

    And believing they already know Him at least as well if not better than the slick, well-dressed TV professionals; carnival hawkers pitching a snake-oil version of God, they aren’t looking in the traditionally right places. Because, face it, most of those places are oh-so-stuffy-and-judgmental, and frankly,…dead.

    They know instinctively God must be bigger than that. And so, rejecting the organizational part of religion, they feel themselves adrift, looking for something in the next port, the next experience, the next drug.

    Bobby Weir, 3-19-86 singing the lyric that led to the Question one. You don’t have to be a televangelist to be used by God.

    They can’t say why they’re pushing every envelope, testing every limit, hopping the fence at every boundary. Like me, they don’t know why they think every door they open, will be THE DOOR of the universe. They just know there must be more to all of this than what the world is selling.

    Let me just say, I feel ya!

    But sometimes in all your manic searching you can get yourself so inextricably tangled up and lost, that you’re ready to hold out your hands and take a Day-Glo green pamphlet from a hippy chick you’ll never meet again, read it, and like a snake shedding it’s skin, walk away a different person. 

    The switch clicks, the Light comes on, and you get found by the One who has been holding you in His outstretched hands. And the only appropriate words, even thirty-five years later, are simply, Thank You. 

    The outside of the tract said, How Much Are You Worth? God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son, was written inside the tract…with an image like this one.

    A few years ago, I wrote out this version of my testimony . I re-read it this morning. It could benefit from some edits, and it’s kind of long, but if you have any interest in whether or not Jesus goes to Grateful Dead shows, it’s there for the reading.

  • Thirty

    I’m calling this one thirty because this is my thirtieth straight day of creating a blog post.

    I committed to create 30 posts in 30 days as a challenge to myself. It was an idea I picked up from another source, and was only supposed to be micro-blogging. The thirty essays were only to be 250 words. Most of mine are many times longer. That doesn’t mean they’re many times better for the overabundance of verbiage, but I’ve learned that I finally have some things to write that I’m going to write, damn it. If my writing is read, wonderful. If not…I’m writing. My heartfelt thanks to any of you who have read each one. Wow! Really!

    Thirty of something is not a lot. 

    If you’re looking backward.

    I remember my thirtieth birthday. I couldn’t believe it. But sure enough, that was the number on the cake in front of me. Looking backward seemed like I’d blinked once, sped through my teens, blinked a second time, blew through my early 20’s, got married, became a dad (three times over), and was leaning over to blow out birthday candles.

    I’m on the uphill climb to summit the second set of thirty years since that day. I’ve accumulated 4 more kids in this second batch, and then, halfway into them, my marriage failed. The fallout from that tried to contaminate everything with blame and shame and the ”whys” of bitterness. But, I reconnected with my high school dream girl and the love of my life a dozen years ago. And thanks to God and her, my heart, though bruised, is healed and whole, and better than it ever was. And unbelievably, I’ve got a few more years to go to hit sixty. I’m looking forward to all that they will unveil.

    I can tell you, looking forward from here, trying to bite off thirty more seems pretty daunting. But God willing, I’m pretty sure I can make it. 

    When it comes to writing on purpose, I’ve shamefully waited and wasted a lot of years…a slave to my fears. 

    Not good enough.

    Who do you think you are?

    You have no credentials!

    You’re too old now, you let all the creative years slip away.

    Those and many other thoughts chained me up in a prison I built to keep from trying. I still have those thoughts. They haven’t gone anywhere, but they aren’t going to have the final word.

    Thirty years from now, I won’t look back and regret this effort. I’d be hella heartsick if I never made the attempt.

    I intend that the accomplishment of this 30 in 30 blog posts be only the first of a never-ending string.

    I’ve proved something to myself. It’s a psychological victory. Those are really the only kind that matter.

    Tomorrow, I’ll start on my next 30 day streak. 

    What are some things you want to do in the next 30 days? Can you go ahead and commit?

    Start today. Thirty feels like a lot looking forward, but sitting here this morning, looking back, it’s not so hard. It would have been much harder to deal with more self-regret. I don’t know where this is gonna go, but I’m gonna go for it, for sure!

  • What Is Your One Question?

    As a kid, I asked questions non-stop. I have early memories of car rides during which I looked out the windows and posed a non-stop  litany of one question after another to my bedraggled mom as she tried her best to answer.

    Being an early reader eventually helped to quiet some questions. I could read STOP signs and such. But it opened up other questions. I must have been about five when driving along one night, we passed a large, brightly lettered sign that I sounded out, ”T-o-p-l-e-ssss G-g-rrr-ll-ss”. ”Mom,” I asked in alarm, ”why don’t the girls in that place have tops?” My five year old imagination was distraught that the poor girls were cut in half.

    My firstborn was quite precocious, and also very inquisitive. She did something unique among her siblings. She created a catch-all word for any object that she didn’t know about. Her word was ”pumen.” When she used it she would scrunch her shoulders up around her little ears. This was her physical question mark to punctuate her inquiry.

    Pointing at something she didn’t know about, she would ask, ”What’s that pumen?”<<scrunch>> For a while we lived in a world chock-full of pumens…and shoulder-scrunches.

    Funny, right?

    And Beth tells the story of her firstborn asking so many questions that after answering her for hours on end, she would finally have to tell her, ”Questions are closed” just to get her to quiet down a moment and take a breath.

    I find that level of curiosity delightful!

    You may have been the same. Or maybe your children, or grandchildren, are similarly filled with curiosity about the world, and they want to know EVERYTHING, right now!

    But what about you? Now? Are you still curious to learn new stuff? Do you have any burning questions?

    It is said of lawyers that they try to never ask a question in court they don’t already know the answer to. Surprise and court are not a good mix. Most of us don’t have that luxury. 

    What I’m wondering is this:

    If you could know the answer to only ONE question, what would that question be?

    That may be worth taking some time and pondering, because if you can nail down that question, you’ll learn what is REALLY important to you.

    If you decide to figure out what your question is, pay attention as well to what it isn’t. I’m guessing if you’re anything like me, a lot of clutter that consumes your mental and emotional energy just isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

    If you feel like sharing your question, feel free to do so in the comments. Not that any of us will have the answers, but we may all benefit from the questions.