Windy Curse of the Upper Midwest

So anyone who knows me intimately is aware that I hate three things:

1) The Devil
2) Processed Cheese
3) The greater "Chicagoland" area

I have lived in Los Angeles, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, Spokane, Lawton, Oklahoma and even Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And I have visited many cities, states and towns in this great nation. In the words of Johnny Cash, "I've been everywhere man. I've been everywhere." And I've sat in traffic, inhaled smog, had locals throw stuff at my car, eaten my fair share of colloquial slow roasted swine-based delicacies but of all the places in the contiguous US that I abhor with the utmost sincerity, it has to be Chicagoland.

Anyone who has seen the classic Steve Martin/John Candy movie Planes Trains and Automobiles has ample excuse to avoid the place. Like an obnoxious gnarled knot in your open faced fishing reel, Chicago is nothing but a big headache. I will tell one story in order to illustrate this point but I could probably start an entire blog devoted to this subject. It is one of those topics that merits lengthy discourse like if an Iphone is worth the extra phone bill of if Brett Favre is retired - annoying but a good place to warn others of potential pitfalls and letdowns.

It was an icy windswept day in early December two years ago - a Saturday (my one day off). We were overdue to see my nephews -the craziest kids on the planet. One actually growls at people. Like captive Killer Whales, they are wildly entertaining to watch but it is best keep a little distance or they'll pull you into the tank. My brother in law is one of the coolest guys around but he has one flaw I cannot overlook, he lives in Naperville, a condo-laden high-end suburb of Chicago that boasts an inordinate number of mediocre donut shops and well-groomed yet still hairy middle aged men in black leather jackets, gold chains and Mercedes SUVs. It would mean a 3 hour drive to the "Heart of Darkness." Like Kurtz in the Joseph Conrad novel of the same name, I grew more insane as I drove deeper into the suburban jungle.

Life is full of paradox and contradiction. Theologians call this mysterion. There are several great Mysterion that strike a person on the drive from Milwaukee to Chicago. For the sake of brevity, let us only address one today.

Chicago wants you to pay them to assault your family with their pock-marked excuses for highways. How can you pay a 2 dollar toll every two miles and still hit 25 potholes in between toll booths? Mystics contemplate this one. On this particular journey we hit one pothole that was so deep, it destroyed one of our front tires. About a quarter mile from the pothole was a toll booth that charged me 2 dollars for driving on the road that just cost me 150 dollars damage to my tire. The yellow sign above the toll booth proudly proclaimed "On behalf of Rod Blagojevich, Governor of Illinois, Welcome." That is a whole 'nother post. On this particular trip, I found myself changing tires on the side of the road 3 times! It got so bad, that we spent 9 hours on the road traveling a distance of 200 miles. We got within 15 minutes of my nephews condo
and we turned around and headed back because we ran out of time. My dad argues that there are certain contexts in which a God-fearing man may use words regulary reserved for the godless heathen. And this day I added Chicago to the short list that included such circumstances as smashing your finger with a wrench and being self-employed and trying to do your own taxes.

So I got to thinking about Jesus. If I hate going to Chicago so much, maybe Jesus struggled coming to earth. It must have been cumbersome to put of skin and bones and flesh. It must have been annoying to get tired, need to eat, have to go to the bathroom, etc. Many times we focus on the agony of the cross as the central sacrifice of Jesus. The Eastern Orthodox church sees the "incarnation" or Jesus becoming a person as the greatest loss for Jesus. If Jesus is willing to give up his rights as God in heaven to come to earth because he loved us, I guess I am willing to drive to Chicago for my nephews because I love them too.

Chiseled

I've been watching the winter Olympics about 3 nights a week since they started. Our heat bill was 400 dollars in December so I have the thermostat set at 58 degrees - the same temperature as Vancouver. When I watch the ice-skating, the luge or the nordic combined, it feels like I am actually there. As I cuddle up in an old red Coleman sleeping bag and try to enjoy the "magic" of ice-dancing, the mist of my own breath slightly obstructs my view of the TV.

I've noticed is that everyone is buffed. This should be no surprise to us. To be a champion you'd better be "chiseled." But even the 15 year old figure skater girls are ripped. And the reason they are so "yoked" is that they train day in and day out to be ready for that one moment where all of the training will pay off - the olympics. They train for a single moment every four years. They run, lift weights, stretch for six hours a day and all for a single chance at glory. They spend years preparing for what might be 2 minutes of competition. The apostle Paul talked about training too. He talked about running a race to win and about training ourselves for godliness - about being spiritually "chiseled."

I once heard an artist talk about prayer as allowing God to form us. He compared it to sculpting marble. "The image is already there in the marble. The skilled artist just removes pieces until it is visible." People are like big chunks of marble and prayer allows the master artist access to our lives. He then begins the process of removing pieces. This can be a painful process but the end result is beautiful - glorious.

I guess what I am saying is that every day, no matter how mundane and unimportant it seems to us, is an opportunity to train for godliness. It is a chance to listen to the voice of God and allow him to form us. Paul tells us that we are training for something much more important than medals or victory wreaths, we are training for glory that lasts. Our lives become reflections of God for the world to see but we must allow the Artist to chisel his image onto us. We must train for godliness as we study, fast, pray, practice justice and all of the other disciplines of the Christian life. During this lent, as we allow God to work in our lives and remove those things that hinder us, let's get chiseled for glory awaits.

Body Nacho Believers

Some people say that an idle mind is the Devil's playground. The day I thought of body nachos, the devil must have had an extended recess.

My Senior year in college, I was a Resident Assistant in a freshman dorm. Each week each RA was required to come up with two activities that would interest freshmen and keep them from doing what they really wanted to do: make babies and drink low quality grain liquor. This wouldn't be so hard except that we weren't aloud to repeat activities. In the beginning this was easy. We would play board games, do art, have a movie night. About mid January, we ran out of ideas. There are only so many things that will keep a willful freshman from drinking grain liquor. So we started getting "creative." I had already taken people squirrel fishing and made a giant hottub out of the back of my truck. What was left to do? And then and there my idle and crooked mind hatched an idea for a perverse hybrid of two opposing concepts. Like forcing a cat and a dog to fall in love and make pitties (puppy-kittens), the plan was quite unnatural.

The basics of my plan were rather elementary and are as follows.

A. There are two things most people love: 1) swimming 2) nachos. Perhaps I could combine these two things.

B. I knew I couldn't afford enough nacho cheese for everyone to swim in nachos.

C. I could afford enough for me to swim in a kiddy pool full of nachos while people casually ate nachos off of my body like I was a giant mexican appetizer

Now every idea for an activity must be pitched to the the resident director and to the other RA's for approval. So I pitched the idea and no one understood it so they approved it - just to be nice.

Soon the night of body nachos was upon us. The posters had been hung, 5 gallons of "cheese" had been purchased at Costco. Two restaurant sized bags of tortilla chips were poised upright next to a large blue kiddy pool. About half past 8, I stripped down to my swim trunks and asked for the help of my assistant. Swiftly she commenced wrapping my entire half-naked body in plastic wrap. As I spun, she walked around me. And in about 3 minutes, my hairy chubby body could be seen, pressed and contorted underneath the translucent cellophane. I put my swim goggles on and wide-eyed freshmen gasped and gagged in incomprehensible gutterals of utter digust. Freshmen took turns pouring luke-warm cheese sauce over my chip-lined body. And then, like the Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldron, a couple courageous freshman girls took their first steps into a brave new world. They picked up a dry chip, ran it across my cheesy torso and ate. And they became the first to participate in this unholy tex-mex communion. But others soon followed. It became a sort of dare for them. Who will eat nachos off of the hairy red-headed guy? And then the terrible thing happened. Somebody got the idea of adding canned Jalapenos to the mix - a move I supported at first. As the gallon can of sliced jalapenos was poured on my quivering body, an achilles heel of sorts became shortly apparent. "My armpits! My God, my armpits are burning!" And as quickly as it began, body nachos ended. I lept from the kiddy pool dripping like the swamp thing with velveeta, chips and jalapenos and ran as fast as I could through the dorm to the showers. People screamed and jumped into their rooms as I ran toward them yelping in pain. And I came to rest in the cool refreshment of the shower - a trail of processed cheese behind me.

Maybe we need more crazy Christians - maybe we need more people willing to do things that seem insane in order to get the attention of the world. We have plenty of board game, movie night Christians. We need more Body Nacho Christians. What crazy thing is God calling you to do? Do it. You won't regret it.

Husky Tough Skins

I am not really sure where I am going to go with this but in the mind of those afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder, all points on the cognitive map are equally valid - like wandering the desert without a compass and having a great time doing it. So I will bring you along into my first back to school clothes shopping trip as a kid.

Sometime in the late 1970's my mother had become quite fond of the last dying gasp of 19th century midwest commerce - Sears and Roebuck Co. If you lived in an 1870's goldrush boomtown, you might refer to Sears as a general store. It still is. We bought belt sanders and leather belts, diamond rings and socket wrenches, had our oil changed and our Christmas picture taken. But what I remember most about Sears was that it was the place my mother brought us for the annual retail ritual of ridicule- back to school shopping. And this year we were hunting for jeans.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the concept of politically correct hadn't quite been developed and if you were a chunky kid - the type that likes Nesquick in his milk and hot dogs cut up in his macaroni and cheese, manufacturers of goods and services weren't shy about calling this out for the world to see. For the fat kids of my generation there were separate lines of clothing with names clearly printed on them showcasing your obesity through careful choice of diction.

Like the Lewis and Clarke Expedition on their voyage to the pacific, we could smell the promised destitation before we actually got there - the bold and earthy aroma of canvas and leather. And as we rounded the corner of the washing machine section, twelve foot walls of neatly folded pants, rose from the floor like the cliffs of Dover, only in blue denim. We stood with our necks cocked upward - motionless.

"Can I help you," asked a woman in her forties who smelled like floral perfume and menthol cigarettes. "Well my boys are in need of some jeans. And they are going to have to last all year." "Well for this little guy (referring to my brother who throughout childhood was not only rail thin but was routinely credited by strangers as being as cute as Opie Griffith) we can go with these regular jeans here." She paused, looked quite analytically at my belly, lifted my t-shirt above my waistline and announced to the entire store, "This big guy is going to need extended sizes. He's definitely going to need...Husky Toughskins." And she led my mother to the special section of jeans that I was just fat enough to be qualified for. And I joined the ranks of my fellow husky brothers. The section was small and the choices were limited. But in brown stamped leather on the back of every pair of jeans, the word "Husky" informed all onlookers, as if my large love handles didn't already, that you were larger than a regular person. I just prayed that come Monday at school I wouldn't be forced to do the "truffle shuffle" to amuse older kids.

Now the irony of the brand name didn't become aparent to me until just recently. Any kid who has the word husky emblazened on his jeans and pysche has to have a tough skin. I think they were trying to tout the durability of the pants but instead tested the durability of the wearer.

Reflecting on this experience makes me wonder if there are parts of the church that are reserved for "normal" people and other parts of the church where people are singled out, judged, analyzed and labeled. Parts of church where the whole store is made aware that we are less than "normal." I am curious if anyone has ever felt this way. I would love to hear your comments.

Filet O' Lent

Today is the first day of Lent - a season in the church calendar when believers examine and reorder their lives to prepare for Jesus' resurrection at Easter. It is a time of reflection and self imposed want - in which devoted Christians give up their comfort in exchange for a fuller knowledge of the ultimate reality in Christ.

And for the faithful who observe feast days at the church of the golden arches, it is also the beginning of the Filet O' Fish season when believers prepare for the advent of a non-descript fish breaded in tater tot dust, covered in elastic plastic that doubles for cheese and smeared, ever so lightly, with a viscous mix of mayonaise and sweet relish (aka tarter sauce). Finally, the golden "harvest of the sea" comes to rest on the whitest most sugar-laden bread known to man - a McDonalds hamburger bun. And it awaits the hordes of penitential grease gobblers who have switched from their ordinary Big Mac to the metaphorical "hair-shirt" of the Filet O' Fish. To encourage this serious committment to self-denial, McDonalds in past years has lowered the price of the Filet so that those preferring the more monastic lifestyle can practice both frugality and ascetism as they partake in the loaves and fishes that only their "blessed savior" could provide. For them, this special time of the year can also be best experienced in a combo meal or with a deep fried apple pie.

This year I want more than just another Filet O' Lent. I don't want to exchange one greasy habit for another. I am tired of outward show that really isn't change. I want to see God work and transform my life through denying my appetites that "sow to the flesh" and developing deeper appetites that will provide myself and others with real life. I want what Jesus talks about when he talks about eternal life - "A spring of living water welling up within you." I pray that you might also see God work as you "sow to the Spirit" this Lenten Season.

Don't miss the Forest for the Pine Cones

I pulled an old book off the shelf a couple weeks ago. It has a drawing of a pine cone on it. That about summarizes the book - scratchy, prickly, common and dry. It is by a philosophy professor named Dallas Willard. (The guy has two first names and both are cooler than Tim. Share the wealth buddy.) The book was actually designed for popular consumption but was never really popularly consumed. I think it had something to do with the pine cone cover.

Somebody in the marketing department must have been on their "A-game" that day-"I've got it! A pine cone! We'll put a pine cone on the cover." If I were trying to sell the book to your average Christian, I would have put a cross made of twisted "tribal" black nails or a photo-shopped picture of Mel Gibson hanging on the cross. Or better yet make the cover have a faux finish - tattered and burned like a pirate-map - Christians seem to like stuff like that. But hey I don't even have a profile pic on my blog - but I can promise you it won't be a pine cone.

What is interesting about the Willard book is that I really struggled to read it six years ago. It just wasn't that entertaining. I blazed through it so I could write a highly insightful paper about how it should apply to every Christian and should be second to the Bible as a source of Christian authority. And then... it sat on the shelf for six years like a fine wine waiting for me to mature enough to read it again.

The book is like a pine cone. It is kind of spiky -you wouldn't want to just throw it at someone haphazardly. It is full of 19th century philosophy quotes and it asks the reader to fast and spend long periods of time alone. It even has a chapter on why Christianity has become too fun and not enough about self-denial.

So I am about half way through the book and I just realized what the pine cone is about. It's about life. A pine cone is this really spiky, nasty hard thing that is actually a giant seed - from the pine cone grows some of the largest trees - some hundreds of feet tall. And I guess this is like being a Christian. Following Jesus can sometimes be dry and scratchy and even painful - but it is always about big growth. Maybe the path of least resistance or of most entertainment isn't the path to growth. Maybe us Christian ought to be more pine coney - committed to the difficult things that will produce growth.

If you are interested in becoming a pine cone Christian, the book is called Spirit of the Disciplines.

b

Sinful Salads and the Women who Eat Them

So I have been eating a lot of salad lately. Everyday I buy about a pound and a half of salad from the Metromart about a block from my place of employment. My wife says it costs too much and she's probably right. Most guys my age are in line for pizza or fried chicken at the hot counter across from the salad bar. But I am pretty chubby right now and am trying to make some lifestyle changes so my heart doesn't explode and I end up leaving my wife living in a big house with too many pets and a snowblower she is too small to operate. This would be tragic.

I have learned that I don't exactly fit the "salad demographic." My fellow saladians tend to be older overweight women who perpetually talk about being on a diet. Ok -Maybe only gender separates us. They are well-intentioned in their lettucey leanings but hiding cleverly behind the cabbage crests and broccoli burms lurk high calorie foes ready to strike as my my friends take an innocent stroll on beet boulevard. Most people start out pretty healthy with their salad - usually spinach and micro-greens and hippie stuff like that. At the beginning of the salad bar, most people have good intentions - positing rhetorical questions to themselves as they pile on the cucumbers a celery. "I wonder if Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps eat like this every meal?" "If I keep this up, will I lose 5 pounds by the end of the month." At the begginning of the salad bar, all men (and women) are equal. But as people get further down the sneeze guard, they begin to fall into temptation. It starts innocently enough with things like raisins and sunflower seeds. But they can't let it stop there. Next thing you know some lady in front of you just scooped 4 large laddles full of hard boiled eggs on top of her salad. Like the beachhead at Normandy, the further you progress, the more carnage a person is likely to witness. Sweet Master! - some lady right behind me just dumped about 25 butter flavored croutons on top of that spinach. Hit the deck - she's called in a HiddenValley Ranch airstrike. "I am scared sarge." "We are all scared son." And the victims of the salad bar piled up. We enter into the blast zone - nothing but fatty crackers, parmesan, cheese stuffed olives and ham. At this point, one wonders about what legally consitutes a salad bar and could the metromart be held liable for this section of the "bar." And the worse part is that you can't put the stuff back - that's the rules. Once you dump a half pound of shredded cheddar on your salad, you bought it and have to eat it.

I have made it through the salad bar about 20 times now - like a WWII B-17 pilot I feel either really lucky or divinely protected. But I daily see people who think they are eating healthy walk out with cardiovascular catastrophe packed into their little clear container.

I wonder if we treat sin the same way. We all start out pretty good and imagine ourselves doing the right thing but when we get further down the road and the temptations get bigger, we fall. And the whole time we are deceiving ourselves into thinking that we are actually healthy when we are really not. Maybe we need to be honest about our choices. Maybe we need to either eat the pizza or eat the healthy salad and not try and do something in between and call it healthy.

God made Dirt...

So I thought maybe I would would write several paragraphs about digging a hole. If you have never dug a really deep, non-metaphorical hole before, you will fail to appreciate the satisfaction in such a task. Last summer, Kevin, the youth pastor at our church, and I introduced some neighborhood kids to a joy of digging a really deep hole.

Our church bought this house in a pretty rough neighborhood. In fact, we purchased the ugliest house on the ugliest block. It had broken windows, ripped out plumbing, used condoms, a garage full of trash, etc. This place made a burned down carnival outhouse look like Martha Stewart's summer estate. So our church raised a bunch of money and bought it. People in the suburbs thought we were either lunatics or liberals - viewing the latter as a far more serious psychological condition. Upon reflection, we might have been a little of both (not unlike our own vice president).

The house needed to be gutted and fixed. Most of the tasks required a lot of skill - so I wasn't of much use. The lead pastor and other skilled folks would give me the type of "jobs" that Mr. Miagi might have given Daniel Son - repetitive and simplistic. I was given the job of digging out old concrete fence posts in the backyard. "I am not sure who wants to do this. It is gonna suck," remarked one of the skilled guys will a pencil behind his ear and a speed square in his hand.And so it fell to me. I started digging and like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence, kids started coming out from all over the neighborhood to help me - begging and bargaining to get a chance to dig. We quickly ran out of shovels. I ran home and got a few more. And we dug.

Somewhere around the 2 foot mark, it became apparent that the concrete ran deep. Some of the kids were beginning to get discouraged. But we kept digging. And one middle school kid who was particularly short and stalky barked encouragements to us all like a miniature drill sargent. "Don't give up!" "You can do it!" "Just a little more." And the biggest kid and I were digging furiously and ever more strategically. The little kids were trying to stick their hands in the hole while we dug and one kid almost lost a finger. So there we were digging together. Struggling together. Everybody drawn to one task - taking down an old barrier that was making the neighborhood look like crap. And it hit me. This is church. This is Jesus. We don't need a worship band, a sermon, a preacher. We just need to dig more holes together - to fight together, to struggle together, to make life better for each other. Destroying fences that keep us apart.

We got it out. The concrete ran over four feet underground. Me and some kids.

Selfish Snowday's are for Atheists Too

Everyone becomes self-centered on a snowday (with the possible exception of snow removal professionals but even they are making money when it snows)

At church we are talking about sin and confession right now. My boss is not a Christian but we talk a lot about faith, goodness and the like. She emailed me last night after work about some psychologists who had been doing studies that showed that Christians aren't any more moral than atheists. Apparently Christians and Atheists were uspet. So I sent her this response. I used some big words like altruism and mentioned a philosopher so I thought it was blogworthy. And the context is that it snowed a foot yesterday and no one felt like we should be at work.

People are selfish – all of us. People would rather go home on a snow day and watch TV than work. I wanted to go home early yesterday even though it wasn't snowing that hard. I would have gone home early if you (my boss) had said “What do you think? Should we call it a day?” This is part of who we are. And whether we guise this in altruism or not, it seems that we are not by nature prone to extreme good nor are we naturally prone to extreme evil although we are capable of both. Anyone with a reasonable perception of humanity can see that we are somewhere in between – like a good and evil parfait. The vast majority of orphanages in Haiti are staffed by evangelical Christians yet a group of evangelical Christians is also trafficking kids. The paradox is there. No one is immune.

Christian and Hebrew scriptures never make the claim that people are all good or all evil. In fact, there are some commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures that have never been accomplished due to the severity of the cost. One of these is called the year of Jubilee – you may be familiar with it. In the year of Jubilee – every 49 years, the community of God was to cancel all debts, release all indentured servants and to return all property to its original owner – a total redistribution of wealth. This is one of those commandments we overlook because it is too hard.

I guess what I am saying is that Judeo Christian thought sees God as good. It sees us as made in the image of God – created for good but prone to sin and in need of redemption. Christianity seeks not to create good people but, like AA, to force us to take a serious look at ourselves and to admit our brokenness and capacity to harm others, our inability to fix ourselves. Therefore we must rely on something greater than ourselves for life.

So the distinguishing feature of Judeo-Christianity – grace comes into play. That God wouldn’t call us to be moral beings but forgiven beings who offer forgiveness to others. That we might, in the person of Christ and the crucifixion, see grace and forgiveness personified and then respond - not from compulsion to be better people but from a place of grateful response. Part of goodness is the ability to identify with the sufferings of others – to suffer with them. Christ suffers with us and for us. This is the height of “morality.” And at its best, Christianity is Desmond Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr, William Wilberforce and a host of others who are willing to suffer in order to free others.

What I think is interesting is that everyone, regardless of religion, makes poor moral choices. Where do these ideas about poor moral choices come from? I believe the author (of the forwarded article) makes a valid point to assert that most of our ideas about moral choice hail from a Western cultural norm which is predominantly Judeo Christian. And while we are no longer Judeo Christian in our beliefs about the nature and existence of God, we still hold largely to the morality of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Even our beliefs about tolerance and equality flow from a system of law that was based largely on Judeo Christian ethics.

Alisdair McIntyre – currently a philosopher at Notre Dame wrote an entire book on these issues called, “After Virtue.” It was the greatest philosophical work of the last 30 years in the field of ethics. An atheist before writing the book, he described the irrational nature of trying to call others to a universal ethic while maintaining no rationale for the validity of that ethic. He was also very harsh about the probability of one person being their own moral guide – rather he thought this would justify a person in anything they wanted without recourse. He consequently converted to Catholicism. Perhaps an evolutionary view of ethics (as espoused in the article) is popular – we do what will allow us to survive. But I must at this point agree with C.S. Lewis that if we view everything in life from the viewpoint of natural selection or biological necessity, there is no higher meaning to love, art, poetry, music or social work other than the propagation of the species. This seems to devalue the very things that exhibit our humanity.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
- C.S. Lewis

Artists and Addicts

Tom was a Meth dealer I met a few years back. The first thing I remember was that he was white but he talked like he was black. It wasn't that annoying, fake over the top type of diction that I sometimes see suburban white kids try and spit - Tom was smoother and more authentic - like he actually spent more time with black folks than white folks. He showed up one night to church because his mom asked him to go. He was pleasant and quiet and seemed to put on a good show for everybody. I asked him about the meaning of his tattoos which seemed to spark some interest. And we all sat down to see if you really could substitute some bald artist guy talking about painting for a sermon. That night we had this friend of mine presenting art and talking about how he connected to God through painting. It was abstract art - really abstract. And when something is too abstract, your average southerner often believes it might somehow be linked to the homosexual political agenda. But to the best of my knowledge it wasn't. Tom seemed to really connect with the art. We talked for almost an hour after the church service ended and I learned before he had become an addict, he was an artist. He invited me to come to his house the next week and check out some of his art. But before we could meet, I got a phone call from his mom. Tom had overdosed on cocaine and was in the ICU. Things weren't going well. He had actually "coded" before I got there and was resuscitated by the doctors. I prayed with the family. And they were hoping he would live but more than that they were hoping that this would be close enough to death for him to stop using. I could tell they knew he wouldn't stop using. He was 24 years old and had been in rehab six times. They didn't have enough emotional energy left to hope anymore. They were just tired - they had nothing to offer. Sometimes we hold on tightly to what is killing us. We become spiritual and emotional suicide bombers wrecking havoc on everyone in our path. The apostle Paul calls this being a slave to sin and death. Addicts are slaves. They cannot be free on their own. They will not. They are past the point of decision making. And if we are honest, we are all a little like Tom. We are slaves who have failed rehab over and over again. We need to come close enough to death that we will live again.