A Christian and a Jehovah’s Witness walk into a bar…
A story of 2 pilgrims, fighting to rest in belovedness
I said goodbye really well to all my people a few weeks ago, when I took 2 months worth of luggage to Louisiana. But now I’m home, when I’m not ‘supposed’ to be home yet.
My new cruise company assembled us crew on location for initial onboarding and team-building. Then they unceremoniously returned us to our home cities for an indeterminate stretch. They charged us, “Stay ready. We will send for you and bring you back here again soon.”
So I lugged my big bag 12 latitudes to the North, and touched down quietly in Boston. I told only my sister, who opened her door at midnight and welcomed me back to our city.
My premature return, was accompanied by a powerful inclination to hide and isolate— because I HATE to waste a well-done exit! And, I hate to explain what the heck I’m doing back here, again&again&again.
But my friends figured out pretty quickly that I was in town, and under some duress, I let them draw me back into the regularly scheduled programming of our lives together. About the change of plans that had rendered all my touching farewells unnecessary, I kept whining, “It’s so embarrassinnnnnng”, and they kept reassuring, “We are so glad you are here”. Unconditional love can be really hard to take.
Leaving/being gone is a favorite tactic of my unwell heart: a safeguard against that dread of becoming tiresome. But I’m blessed to belong to people who know what’s good for me (…us), and they don’t give me much chance to cheat us out of it.
While I was struggling to act like I still belonged in the city I had left, some Christian friends encouraged me to join a social event at the Liberty Hotel.
I arrived to the event late, tired from a busy day, and wanting to turn back and go straight home.
I prayed, “Lord, I am tired. I don’t want to work to prove anything tonight. But I want to practice belonging to your people, as one of the family. Can I practice being relaxed in your love… no striving.”
Walking into the buzzy scene of the multi-level hotel bar, I was aware that I was underdressed. At the same time, I did feel the power of my identity as a real princess, loved by God. And I realized, I had no idea where to start looking for my friends.
I slinked into the ladies’ room to check my phone for details on the meeting place. But as it would turn out, I would not be finding my friends tonight.
In the bathroom, I found some ultra-posh-looking woman, gathered around the most magnetic Queen Bee. She was dressed in glitzy, form-fitting fashion, and she was dazzling the other women with her explanations of who she was, and how she had come to be clothed in such finery. She was a well-known public figure on another continent, as well as an influencer and a brand ambassador for high-end labels. But as she showed off her swag, she was flippantly expressing a truth ill-fitting to the scene. “I got liposuction, but even after, I still wear spanx”, she explained with resignation. “That’s just how it is.. I know that no matter what, I’ll never be enough.” When I heard that, I put my phone down, and looked intently at her; my heart heavy. I wanted immediately to banish the lie embedded in her, to displace it with wonderful truth.
But I would have to wait. Her little hive of bar babes would each chime in in turn, as I stood by, held by a sense of responsibility. Eventually, she locked in on my face, and inexplicably, started to launch into a defense, it seemed, for my benefit. “I lived in China for 9 years, and so I just got used to being singled out for being differently shaped.”
I answered her with the high-pitched Chinese words that had been the soundtrack to my own time in China: “Hěn gāo!!” (So very tall!)
I told her, I understand— that happened to me, too, and her eyes opened WIDE. In an instant, I found my arms tightly gripped in her hands as she began running through the ordinary Chinese greetings and introductions, which I returned, as a polite and somewhat uneasy prisoner. A regal type, with an eerily powerful presence, Aurelia* put her designer sunglasses on my face, and said, “You must come have a drink with us.”
She introduced me to the doorman, and told the bartender, “Anything she orders, put it on my fiancé’s tab”. Presenting me to a collection of petite women she had gathered outside, she told them, “This is Emily”, and told me, “These are my munchkins!”
She educated us, “It is a requirement of any man I am going to be with— he has to buy drinks for my girls!!!!”
And with that, we toasted to Liam*, who was standing just at a distance.
*Names must be changed when recounting the sacred space that is the bar
Gin and tonics in our hands, Aurelia held my arm once again, and rapidly downloaded to me the highlight reel of her elite, connected, globe-trotting life. She told me the high highs, and the low, low lows. I still had not been given a moment edgewise, to tell her what I had stopped in the bathroom to tell her. When she found herself depleted of her own words, she started to calculate, out loud, what must be meant to happen next.
“I know that tonight, I met you for a reason. It must be that I am supposed to help you, or give you some advice… I have to figure out what it is.”
I took the opportunity, “Actually…. There is something that I believe I am supposed to tell you.”
I told her, that when I had heard her speaking in the bathroom, it brought me back to a memory from years ago. I was at a church that I had never been to before, and a woman prayed over me, asking God for a word that he might desire to speak over me. The word was “enough”.
“YOU are enough”, I said, “I believe that God wants you to receive that word today: to know, and believe, and be healed… GOD says, YOU. ARE. ENOUGH.”
In the noise and the blur and the fabulousness of the bar on that Summer night, I could feel the electricity of the word from heaven touching her heart like a defibrillator. I could see her eyes brim, and I could see that she was shaken. But Aurelia was not the type of woman who was willing to lose her composure or her high-ground. She grabbed my arm as before, but with a fiercer grip.
Artfully, she danced the immense subject — of the living God who personally loved her — back into a manageable, forgettable, pocket-size.
But after some time, she returned to it.
In the same casually commanding tone as she had said everything else, she confessed the darkest and most helpless of secrets. She said, “I have been crying out for help for so long, and NO ONE hears me.”Her fiancé was beside her, and she repeated what she had said for effect and demonstration. He showed no sign of having heard her frightful words. “You see?”
After a pause she continued, “So I know that God sent you to me tonight. Because I was about to give up.”
She pressed her face close to mine, holding my hands, and gave me a strict disclaimer, lest I might try to speak. She warned me, “I am NOT looking for a friend to tell me the way out. But I am looking for a friend who can hear me, and understand……. that I have been through a lot.”
I showed her with my eyes, and my quiet, listening posture, that I understood her conditions, and I would try to be that friend for her tonight. I said, “Ok.”
She sighed with relief, but then she did something so surprising. With urgency, she begged me, “Tell me the way out!”
“His name is Jesus,” I told her without hesitation, and at his name, she hung her head, and her whole body sighed with exasperation.
“I pray EVERY DAY!”, she cried, and slowly meeting my eyes again, she pronounced each of her next words with incredible significance: “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness!”
The weight of responsibility she felt in the wearing of this mantel, and the gravity of her confession cut through the whole bar
But in a moment, she snapped back into her bulletproof persona, put a heavy hand over my shoulder and shook me. “WHAT are the odds??!!” She asked, “Not ONLY that we have both lived in CHINA, but even more unlikely, we are two women who BOTH KNOW JEHOVAH! It’s unbelievable.”
For the rest of the night, I thought I could understand something of the experience of the ocean’s tides: submitting simply to the push and pull of the irrefutable moon. Aurelia kept me literally in her arm, as she kept the subject of Jesus himself at a muscular arm’s length. She would broach the subject on the offensive, but change it instantly whenever she felt dangerously close to toppling the worldview she had built her life on.
{ **Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe that Jesus is God. They will allow that he is some kind of relevant, but he must be viewed as less than their namesake deity. They believe that in order to obtain approval from Jehovah, they must perform “good works”. But even with good works, not all of them will be ultimately chosen to have a place with Jehovah in the afterlife… only a limited number. If you are a Jehovah’s Witness, it will be impossible to know for a certainty, throughout your entire life, whether you will make the cut.
Christians believe that Jesus IS God. God is relational in his nature: He is, mysteriously, 3 persons: Father, Son and Spirit. Because God is relational, human beings are also made for relationships, with him, and with each other. Christians believe that the relationship between us and Him stands broken by human disobedience, but that God himself is the Repairer. We can’t do the repair; only He can- and he chose to do it in a peculiar way: by a payment of His own blood. If we can only believe it, and ask him to put us on the tab, we can be 100% sure that we will live in His Love forever. }
Aurelia was ordering drinks like it was the last night of the world. She was insisting that the bartender pour her doubles of everything. She was inviting new strangers (new diversions) into the scene at every chance. I had already told her what I came to tell her, and I wanted to leave. I told her it was about time I went to the upper level of the hotel to where my friends would be gathered. But she would not let me go. She got angry, and she made her case:
“God sent you to ME tonight, so you cannot leave me until I’m ready for you to leave.”
I answered her, and said sadly, “I know that you cannot hear me tonight.”
But she gripped me with a savage desperation and pleaded that I bear with her. “You KNOW me… you know that I act like this, but really…. I am listening.”
So I stayed with her for 2 more hours. It was a fight. I silently prayed for her, and sent a quick text asking friends to pray with me. I watched her drinks and her back as she whipped between generating the atmosphere of the party, and warring in her soul. I told her the truth as often as she would let me.
You are called to be free.
You are loved so much that Jesus died for you.
You can’t earn favor with him…. It’s a gift… it’s a free gift, and it’s for you, right now.
You can give up striving. He loves you like this.
She was a daughter of her family’s church, and it was so clear that she had never experienced any kind of freedom in the love of God. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had none of that to offer her. She was being strangled and crushed by standards she could not meet. Her own hypocrisy was eating her alive.
“I feel like such a fraud,” she wailed- pouring the bitter torrent of grief from her isolated heart into mine.
“You probably are!” I told her. “But it is exactly someone like YOU who Christ died for! God’s saving power is for the UNGODLY— for the frauds.”
“No! But I feel like I FAILED!!” She tried again to make me understand.
“You probably did!!” I told her. I hoped she could see the loving confidence in my eyes- “God is not too small to love you and save you in your failure. He loves you in your weakness and in your failure. This is grace.”
Liam, Aurelia’s fiancée was starving, but she wouldn’t budge. He left her in my care, and ran a few blocks over to grab something warm to sustain him. The “munchkins” had abandoned this ship long ago. I was tired, but I stood at this woman’s side, still praying.
She tried to force me to drink. She tried to force me to dance. She said, “I have been real with you— now be real with me. Drink. Dance. Have fun!”
But I said, “That’s not why I’m here.”
She accused me, “Can’t you just say that your faith and mine are equal? Can’t you just say, we can coexist.” She scolded me, “You are not being very nice.”
I told her as sincerely as my tired, captive self could tell her, “I’m sorry if I’m not being nice. But I am just trying to tell you the truth.”
When Liam came back, I asked him, with deep concern, “You are marrying a deeply faithful woman. What is your faith?”
He said, “What is your advice?”
I told him, “Aurelia needs help only Jesus can give her.”
He asked me, “I try my best to take care of her, and give her what she needs. Tell me honestly, do you think I am good enough for her?”
I told him sympathetically, “You are wonderful! But you are just a man. You are not God. Don’t compare yourself.”
He smiled and agreed, “I understand.” He said, “I have been going with her to her meeting place of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But I notice, they never mention Jesus. Only Jehovah.”
In that noisy place, I was able to share with him how Jesus is God-with-us, freely giving us all we need and cannot obtain on our own. He asked me, do you think I should ask Jesus to help me?
And I said, YES.
He said, Wow.
And I said, Do it now.
He looked at Aurelia, trying to drown her pain in gin and white wine, and he knew he needed reinforcements if he was going to love her well. I prayed for him, out loud, and she came near, and I prayed over her, too.
It was still, and warm, and tender, as I prayed that Aurelia would experience the love God feels for her, and know freedom in his love.
But immediately after I had prayed, she wanted to do shots.
I told her, “My love, I am going to my bed.”
She pulled a jeweled clasp from her hair, and gathered my hair up in it, crowning me with honor.
She told me, “Don’t forget me.” And I answered her, “I never will.”
Without ever meeting the friends I had come to see, I walked home, marveling at the ugly way insufficiency eats away at our lives like a moth.
I had arrived, believing I was not enough for the club. Aurelia had arrived believing she was not enough for the world. Liam had been wrestling with the feeling that he wasn’t enough for his wife-to-be. Jesus was there with us, desiring to be sufficiency for all of us. He wanted to adorn us with a beauty, far lovelier than designer shades or glittering clips. He wanted to hold us up, and hold us together, with his righteous, right arm.
I don’t know what has happened to Aurelia and Liam, since I left them at the bar.
Aurelia had given me her US cell phone number, but said she would be crossing oceans in a few days, and when she did, that phone number would expire forever.
Yet God’s invitation to her has not expired, as long as she is living. His invitation to her is into freedom from manmade rules and expectations. To know that His love for her is enough. In his love, she will always be enough.
I am keeping my promise to her. I have not forgotten her, and I continue to pray that she will look to Jesus alone: not riches, not influence, not her own abilities, or her family, or a man, or a clear drink, or a religious institution…. Just Jesus, who alone can transform her mourning into dancing, and her never enough, into forever enough..
I had prayed, “Lord, can I practice belonging in your family… can I practice relaxing and not striving….”
As is so often the case, God answered my prayer, but not in the straightforward way I had envisioned. He gave me the confidence of belonging, and the miracle of a love so secure you can relax in it. He gave me these gifts, not only so I could walk into a bar and hang out with my own community… but so that I could offer them to his beloved daughter, Aurelia.. who had survived her entire life, striving.
Aurelia had put a gorgeous clasp in my hair, while I had pressed gifts from our Father into her palms: gifts of grace and undying love. Even now, I pray, that she will open them, and wear them as one beloved and honored.
