I used to think being a believer was enough,
but now I know Jesus wants us to participate,
no matter what condition we’re in.
When I got married, we didn’t have any money at all. I was just out of law school and was volunteering as a Young Life leader at one of the local high schools. I think after I sold my rusty Volkswagen we had about three dollars to spend for each person who was coming to the wedding, maybe less. We didn’t get many flowers; instead we got lots of balloons and we found a caterer who felt sorry enough for us to give us some food for cheap. The cake was going to be a big problem, though. Sweet Maria had checked around and a cake was going to cost more than we had for the whole wedding. Then I remembered there was a kid in Young Life whose dad owned a bakery. I asked how big of a cake we could get for about $150 and he said he could make one that would be about four stories tall. That would do.
The wedding went as weddings do. I said “I do,” she said “I do,” and we ran down the aisle. The reception was held at a very swanky clubhouse on a lake in Fairbanks Ranch. In order to live in Fairbanks Ranch I think you need to have invented medicine or energy or something. I was a young lawyer and my boss had purchased a home in the area. With the purchase came the right to use the clubhouse on the lake twice a year—for free. That was just inside our price range. My boss was a generous guy and secured the venue, and we showed up with our bags of balloons, the caterer, and the pasta salad. Because we couldn’t afford much in terms of food to serve, we had the caterers put up a lot of props that couldn’t be eaten but made it look like quite a feast. Big loaves of bread and huge cheese wheels lingered just out of reach and towered like mountains over our pasta salad.
When we got to the reception, I saw that my high-school-age friend had already arrived from the bakery with the cake. What caught my eye was that he was assembling our four-story cake on top of an AV cart in the parking lot. Is that how it’s done? I wondered. He had put all the pillars in place and was already assembling the third floor of our white cake skyscraper as we parked. It looked very impressive as he continued to assemble it in the parking lot like he was building downtown all over again. He had everything up except a crane, scaffolding, and road cones.
I was walking my new bride toward the entrance to the reception as he carefully put the bride and groom ornaments on the pinnacle of his masterpiece. The happy plastic couple towered above the parking lot as they surveyed all that was theirs below them. They would certainly not be eaten at the reception and they stood with a confidence that comes with knowing that. As my young friend started wheeling the high-rise cake toward the clubhouse on the AV cart, its wobbling back left wheel somehow drew attention to what a bad idea it was. Then predictably, as if it was unfolding in slow motion, the cart hit a small rock and abruptly stopped, but the upper levels of the cake didn’t. In rapid succession, each layer of the cake fell off of its pillars and headed toward the parking lot. Three splats later, most of our wedding cake was lying on the asphalt in a pile. We all just kind of stood there without speaking, looking at the pile of cake in stunned silence, the bride and groom ornaments laying silently on top looking like they had just lost a massive food fight.
Calling for some quick thinking as the guests were about to arrive at any minute, I pulled my shell-shocked young baker aside between two parked cars and we hatched a plan. He scooped the cake together and jumped back in his well-used Subaru. Thirty minutes later, he was back with a bucket of shredded cake and an even bigger bucket of freshly made icing from the bakery. In the back room, he iced the shards of cake back into shape, restacked it and—yes, I am a little embarrassed to say—we served it up. Gravel, small bits of asphalt, and all.
Like that cake, my life is full of small rocks, pieces of asphalt, broken and unrepaired relationships, and unwanted debris. But somehow God allows us each to be served up anyway. Jesus talked to social outcasts, loose women, lawyers like me, and religious people and said they would not just be so many decorations or window treatments, but He would serve them up as well. He said this was true even though we’re full of the kind of grit that accumulates over the span of a life and quite a few parking lots. The only thing that Jesus said He couldn’t serve up were people who were full of themselves or believed the lie that they were who they used to be before they met Him.
Jesus seemed to say that all we would need to do is to scrape together the pieces of our lives that had fallen on the ground, bring those pieces to Him, and He would start using them. Jesus didn’t say He would ice over the grit of faults and failures either; He said He would use us in spite of the grit and faults and failures. What we would have to do is decide to move from the parking lot to the party. And He said we can’t do that by just believing all the right stuff anymore; Jesus said He’d help us start doing the right stuff.
At some point I stopped staring at the pile of broken cake on the asphalt that was my life and decided to get some skin in the game. My life had not been shattered into many pieces by a massive tragedy, but it consisted of as many disorganized pieces as it would if it had been. I simply decided that I wasn’t going to let the residual rocks and small pieces of gravel get in the way of me getting served up and used. It has always seemed to me that broken things, just like broken people, get used more; it’s probably because God has more pieces to work with.
Jesus talked about lawyers a lot too. None of it was very flattering, actually. He usually lumped lawyers in with liars and people who didn’t speak the truth. Jesus said they were getting in the way of people knowing God, which is a really bad thing. He said the same thing about religious people too, sometimes in the same sentence. But He also talked about everybody else and what He said to them is that we all could be used, not just when we’re broken, but especially because we’re broken.
I’ve tried to build a few things in my life. I took what I thought were great ideas, I stacked them neatly on pillars, put them on my AV cart, and rolled them out. I’ve hit my share of rocks too, and those rocks have sent parts of my dreams hurling. Yet Jesus continues to select broken and splattered people not just as followers but as participants. He called people like me who can’t even figure out which end of a plastic bag to open His hands, He called people who trip every day His feet, and He called people who can’t figure out which way to turn a screw to tighten it or even stack a cake correctly the ones who would build a kingdom. And then, if we’re willing, He serves us up—rocks, small bits of asphalt, and all.