For the love of a so-called "Jewish Zombie"...

As far back as I can remember, I was always searching for meaning. I wanted to know that there would one day be an end to pain and suffering. As a child, I spent much of my time thinking about topics such as life and death and the existence (or non-existence) of God. Although I would say that I came to the realization that there was a God and that He had a Son named Jesus at the age of 12, I only put half of my trust in Him. Atheism was never an option for me. For many people , the belief in God is foolish. For me, the sum total of all that I had ever learned or experienced pointed me in the direction that there had to be a God. I wasn't yet fully convinced that the Christian faith and the Bible represented Him. So I studied as many world religions as I could. I read about Divination and experimented with Wicca (witchcraft). I went on a spiritual quest to see if the God of the Bible was who He said He was. I traveled the country with Hare Krishnas, Buddhists, Rastafarians, Wiccans, atheists, New Agers, and the list goes on. I participated in peaceful protests with Tibetan Lamas, and Peyote Ceremonies with Shamans and Hopi Indians. I spent some time at Buddhist and Hare Krishna Temples observing their practices and the ways in which they worshipped. It was during this time that I spent homeless or travelling on a school bus (with a lot of hitchhiking along the way). Every single place I tried to run away from the Christian God, there He was. From strip clubs, to Buddhist Temples, to the mountains in Oregon and the caves underneath New York City. There He was, popping up in the most creative and surreptitious ways; but during this time, as the Catholic Mystic Saint John of the Cross would say, I experienced many dark nights of the soul. Quite honestly, those nights stretched into weeks and months...and nip at my heels even to this day.

A few days ago an atheist friend of mine had posted a quote from a Funny Atheism ad onto his facebook. To me, it is not funny on any level. It actually made me angry to see the Creator of the universe reduced to a pile of rubbish with words. This is what it said:

"The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat a magical tree...yeah, makes perfect sense."

You would be hard-pressed to find a Christian who didn't doubt. We all do. This is why we should talk about it more. Fear and doubt is pretty much a given. These rusty old tools won't be retired anytime soon, but this doesn't mean that we have to be consumed by them.

Maybe you have been up close and personal with the great abyss. Maybe you're experiencing a dark night of the soul right now. I don't know. I can't prove to you or write it out in a mathematical equation, but I can tell you that I have seen the hands of this so-called "Jewish Zombie", and He is alive and well.

The problem isn't that we experience a dark night, it's what we do on those nights that define who we really are. What do you do with your fear?

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see you at the (stripper) pole...

I went directly from living on the streets of Chicago, New York City and the caves of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois (and sometimes on a school bus with a melting pot of people stemming from an assortment of stripes and colors), to living in the ghetto near Detroit with some friends. Even though I was considered to be a prude because I had never been with a man in the biblical sense, I decided to be a waitress at the local Showgirls Club with a roommate. I didn't even make it a day before the girls had talked me into giving dancing a whirl (a classy way of saying stripping) I was thankful that my near-sightedness obscured the faces of that packed club; making it easy for me to pretend that I wasn't being ogled by a bunch of guys, but it did nothing to protect my other senses. Their lust was palpable and the air was heavily laden with hurt and addiction.

It was in that club that I met a dancer who grew up a Christian and had spent most of her teens running from the God she encountered in Sunday school. Somewhere along the way she had lost her faith, but had managed to keep her desire to return to Him...eventually. We talked a lot about Jesus and how He had this peculiar way of showing up wherever we were. We missed Him, but had no idea how to return. We felt as if we were too far gone, and even if we did go back, there was this paradigm problem to address. How did the world that was opened up to us fit into the Christian model that was presented to us in Sunday school? In that moment, we were no longer just strippers. We were two prodigal daughters mourning the loss of a relationship with the Savior; discussing theology, and desperately wanting to be reconciled. Right smack dab in the belly of a strip club, the Almighty broke through. We didn't have a Bible, but I know that the Great I Am was there with us --weeping.


We all have this way of putting God into this neat and tidy little box and He has a knack for blowing the sides out of those boxes. We like to think that He will only show up in X church, in X denomination, in X conversation, in X way; but this is obviously not how He works. I have seen God show up in a strip club. I have seen Him speak truths to me through homeless crack-addicted children. He was there with me as I sat in a bathroom watching a prostitute use a blow-drying wire for a tourniquet so that she could shoot up speed, just as He was with me when I poured my heart out to Him asking Him to rescue me.


People go to the ends of the earth for the people they love. Why would the Creator be any different? In what unconventional places have you encountered God?

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