The Story Behind the Name Part 3

ICYMI Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

The Catalyst Conference has been around for about 20 years now. It’s a leadership conference primarily targeted at church leaders. I had never been (or heard of it for that matter) when I was invited by my church’s Senior Pastor Jim Matthews. All expenses paid. Which was nice, because at the time I had gone back to school and was a work study and my wife was also going to school full time and working in Americorps. Money was not something we had a lot of. I told Melissa at lunch that I was asked to go and she didn’t say much then besides that I should. That night, however, after I had been my typical depressed jerk all afternoon, (that I had been for too long) she did everything but give me an ultimatum to go and demanded I start to pull it together. I did not want to go. I figured it would be a bunch of old white dudes preaching and quartet singing, which in my defense was pretty much the only kind of church I ever knew. It was the exact opposite of that.

That Wednesday night we departed for Atlanta in the church van. Me and 7 other guys. I instantly regretted going when the discussion turned to politics, and I realized I was very much in the minority in the van on my views. I just remember sitting there fairly quietly on the way there. Thursday morning the conference started with a band doing worship I had never heard, but it was phenomenal. The group was the Steve Fee Band, from North Point Church, which of course I know now but I didn’t then. The first speaker that morning was some guy I had never heard of named Andy Stanley. I’ve been doing the church thing since that day, so I have listened to a lot of communicators and sermons and talks, etc. over the last 15 years but for me, there is no one better than Andy Stanley. His God-given ability to tell a bible story you’ve heard 100 times seem like the first time is just unsurpassed. He talked about integrity, and I had literally never heard anyone like him in “church” before.

Catalyst managed to do something for me that church had not the first 27 years of my life; make me lean in. And my guard went down. And then right after lunch, a guy named Donald Miller spoke, and my life hasn’t been the same since.

The one and only Donald Miller

Donald Miller is the author of multiple books, his best known and perhaps most controversial is “Blue Like Jazz” which came out back in 2003. That day I had no idea who the guy was. I looked all over the internet for a video of this talk since now it had been almost 15 years ago, but alas I found none. His argument was essentially that part of the problem with Western Christianity was that we have spent the last 100 years building a culture around people that just validate our opinions. And then he talked about an illustration his Pastor did at his church one day. Miller said his Pastor wrote “City Bus” on a marker board and asked the people in his church to say what adjectives they thought of when they thought of the city bus. The responses were predictable; smelly, dirty, loud, a hassle, etc. When they were done with all these adjectives that were almost entirely negative the Pastor erased the words “City Bus,” and its place wrote the words “Other People.” That morning I leaned it, that moment I took the punch God had set me up for square on the chin.

Miller went on to warn the 10,000 Christian leaders attendance that we were shutting off other people and if we didn’t reach out and listen instead of being obsessed with “telling” we were heading for…well EXACTLY where we are now as a culture. And he talked at length about how we’ve made the world all about us. We love me some me. One of my favorite lines I’ll always remember from his talk is that he said, “If we don’t get cheap crap quick, we are frustrated.” He talked about learning to see the world from other’s point of views, and he closed with this thought, “Life is not about me. It’s not about us. It’s about God.” As he prayed to close, his session tears welled up in me because I remembered the first line of a book my Dad loved, The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. The first line is “It’s not about you.” My Dad loved that line, he quoted it. And he lived it out.

I went into the bathroom stall at the Gwinnett Area, and I sobbed, and I repented. Because I had made it ALL about me. I had not dealt with my anger and pain and resentment and grief, and I had projected that all over the people who didn’t deserve it.

Not the actual stall

And in that stall, I directed it all at God, and he took it, and there was nothing but an enormous weight lifted and this feeling of love. In that bathroom stall, for the first time really, I really gave my life to God. And as I pulled myself together and went back to my seat trying to act like nothing happened, that’s when I heard it.

“The harvest is plenty, but the workers are few. Will you be my worker?”

Crap. Not this again.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Story Behind the Name Part 2

If you missed it last week, I started the 4 part series on “How the Blog Got Its Name.” Go read part one here. So we pick up right where I left off.

Having dropped out of college might seem like a waste, but it wasn’t a total wash. I was still there for a reason, turns out it was 3 reasons. If the broken attract the broken, then I attracted the broken. I made three of the best friends I’ve ever had in my short time at CBC; Travis Mowell, Adam Irwin (whom we called Beef), and Ryan Shoaff. At the time we were all too young and stupid to disciple each other, but I would not be where I am today without their influence in one way or another. All three of those guys were not your typical CCU student and had ended up at CCU somewhat the same as I did. So that fact we all 3 a bit non-traditional we ended up finding each other, as tends to happen when you are forced into a sea of people who all were kind of cookie cutter Christians. Over many hours of PlayStation and pounds of chicken wings, we became great friends.

NBA In the Zone was our drug of choice

Although they were not significant spiritual influences in my life during college, later in life all three of them were significant influences in my walk. I would not be who I am and where I am without those three. So while Bible College didn’t end the way one might think it should have, I’m firmly convinced I went there to meet those guys and things turned out just the way God intended. Of course, my parents sure didn’t see it that way at the time. Lol!

By the end of 1998, I had made a lot of changes though. I had moved back home and started dating the girl who would become Mrs. Ratliff. Despite being somewhat traumatized by my experience in Bible College, I had enough a faith rooted now it didn’t pull me away from God. I also was able to start the process of casting aside some of my manipulation behavior, and I began to become more honest. By the time I started working for Amazon.com in late ‘99/early 2000 I was a vastly different person that I had been just a couple of years earlier. I was actually beginning to grow-up, to be honest. I got married in June of 2000, and I had my first son 17 years ago on March 12, 2002.

February 1 is a date that will forever be etched in my mind for two reasons; the first is that it’s my sister’s birthday and the second is that on February 1, 2003, my Dad collapsed and never regained consciousness. He passed away on February 6th, 2003. And that began over two years of a deep dark depression that started creeping in and took me over little by little. What faith I had built up eroded over time. I’ll write another post another time about my Dad, but he was my hero (I’ve written about him a little before here). Still is. He was a strong believer, he was an excellent leader in our community, and he was a leader in our church. I could not understand for the life of me why this loving God would steal my Dad from me and especially his only Grandson, just a month shy of his 1st birthday. For about a year afterward I held it together for my Mom, but I didn’t deal with the grief and resentment, and that just builds up over time. And it ended up nearly consuming me.

Career wise? I was still a bit of a train wreck. I spent three years at Amazon.com and left there and went to work for the US Postal Service for a time as a contractor hoping to get on full time. That didn’t work out. I ended up going into I.T. and working on the Help Desk for Marathon Petroleum for a couple of years before we were all outsourced. That’s where I was working when my Dad passed away. They were so incredibly generous with letting me off work to deal with that situation. I was convinced I had finally found my career. And then? Well, Marathon had other plans and got rid of all of us. Some of those folks had put decades in. I felt terrible for them. I ended up missing my last day there because my second son was born on that day, September 30, 2004. Nothing like sitting in the unemployment office the next day with a hospital bracelet on. You are so simultaneously overjoyed you have this kid, but at the same time, you now have no job. I made the decision to go back to school. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but we had the opportunity to go back to school and have part of it paid for since we were outsourced, so I took advantage of that.  Back to school I went having no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew I needed to do something.

In September of 2005, I was sitting at home. I hadn’t been to church in a couple of months. The phone rang, and it was Greg Denton. Greg had been a Deacon on the church board when my Dad was an Elder. Greg was an Elder now, and he was calling to check on me since I hadn’t been to church for a while. And he probably doesn’t even remember the conversation, but I do. He told me he was just checking on me and as I was about to blow him off and get off the phone, he said, “Jeff I just want you to know I really miss your Dad.” And I said that I missed him too. And Greg said he hoped I would come back. But there was a twinge of sadness in his voice and authenticity when he said he missed my Dad that caught me off guard. These were inauthentic people after all right?

After I got off the phone with him, I cried. Conor, my oldest who was 3 at the time, waddled over and just crawled in my lap and asked me not to be sad. I just replied, “I’m trying.”

That Sunday morning, I got up and went to church. And I haven’t missed again, unless I was sick or traveling, since September 25th, 2005. Hasn’t mattered how late a night Saturday was, if I haven’t simply been gone or sick as a dog I go because I get it now.  They all are inauthentic people.  And so I am.  And for hour or so once a week we try to shut out the noise, come together, and find grace and mercy with God and each other.

I don’t know why Greg Denton picked up the phone and called me the Friday before to check on me, but I’m glad he did. Because after the service that Sunday Jim Matthews, the Pastor at the time, pulled me to the side after church and invited me to a conference the next week, all expenses paid.

And that’s when everything really changed. In a bathroom stall in Duluth, Georgia.

TO BE CONTINUED