A Mess and a Savior

[Tony]
Ryan Lindstedt, James, and myself spent this last weekend at Silver Birch Ranch in Wisconsin for the notorious annual high school retreat, Winter White Out. The focus of the weekend was on surrender, and in order to illustrate the idea of surrender to the high schoolers, we asked them to consider their own stories- their life stories, their pasts, their presents, their accomplishments, their defeats, and so-on. Then we provided a few stories of characters from the bible as examples of “surrender stories.” Anyway, with so much attention to the power of a story, I’d like to share one with you from this weekend. It isn’t a life story, it isn’t even really a surrender story, its kind of, well… a story.
Before our large group service on Saturday night, one of the tenth graders, who was staying in the same cabin I was in, pulled me to the side with a rather stressed look on his face. I asked him what was up- turns out, at some point in the afternoon, someone had clogged the toilet in the cabin. A few students apparently tried very hard to fix the problem themselves (probably so they wouldn’t have to tell me), however, in their attempts to make everything better, everything kept getting worse, until they stopped trying once the toilet flooded over onto the floor of the bathroom.
So, later that night, I went back to the cabin to find that the mess wasn’t actually as bad as I had pictured it, even though there was a little overflow in the floor and the toilet was still plugged. I tried for about fifteen minutes to unplug the toilet before another student came in. On the night we arrived, we were told that if there was any problems late at night, there would be a walkie-talkie available in the dining hall which we could just turn on and start talking into (and a staff person would answer back and come to our aid). So, I sucked up a little bit of pride and asked some of the guys in my cabin to go call for back-up on the walkie-talkie.
I was alone again for about ten minutes, trying to unplug our toilet, when Dave showed up. Dave was apparently the camp handyman. He was short and wiry- the kind of wiry that suggested a certain kind of raw strength that can only be built through the survival of life and its experiences. He had messy grey hair under a winter hat, and a scraggly beard that accented a face that was weathered and windblown, with deep lines around his eyes that spoke of age and hard work, but also suggested, in some way, a depth of wisdom. He wore a one-piece snow suit with a belt full of odd gadgets for fixing whatever random things high schoolers could possibly break (or clog), as they come and go in waves every weekend. His snow suit, his face, his belt, and the plunger in his hand when he walked by me made him look like a simple janitor- even though I knew that he was relied on for the maintenance of so much more every night at the camp.
He greeted me with a genuine apology, which surprised me, even before I could offer an apology of my own. “I’m sorry that the toilet is acting up on you” he said as he passed me by, on a mission for the bathroom. He walked right in with his plunger, assessed the situation and, without second thought or hesitation of the smell, or the other rather undesirable circumstances, started going to town on the toilet. After a while of working diligently on his momentary project, I noticed that he had some interesting little quirks. There was something about his personality that was comforting. He seemed to walk into our cabin screaming “Here I am. I am going to be absolutely nothing but myself. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who you are going to be.” The elements of that moment (and by elements, I also mean the elements on the floor and plugged in the toilet) didn’t seem to exist to him. It seemed to me that the only thing that mattered was that I had a mess that I couldn’t clean up by myself. All he wanted was to make things right- how they were before the mess. He breathed deeply and heavily. He walked rather quickly and deliberately, as if always pursuing something. He mumbled to himself while he worked. At one point, his nose started running, and instead of trying to hide it before I could notice, he wiped it on his sleeve and muttered “boogers, boogers, boogers…” I wasn’t quite sure if it was okay to laugh.
I realized, as I watched him work, that there was something about him that suggested a joy that was deeper than anything I have ever known in my own life. He was trying to unplug a toilet that was plugged by someone he had never met- at 11:30 at night. Yet, everything that I could perceive of him said that he was happier then than I may have ever been in my life. The only thing that could have made him happier would have been the knowledge that he was able to take this mess away so that I would not be burdened any longer with trying to fix it on my own. There was something that he had that I wanted very badly.
After about ten minutes of work, the toilet was finally unplugged. We cleaned up the floor and then, after another set of apologies (as this whole endeavor was apparently more of an inconvenience for me as it was for him…) he left again. Not a minute after he walked out, one of my resident sophomores came in.
“Did you get the toilet fixed?”
“Yeah.”
“By yourself?”
“No.”
“Oh, did Dave already come by?”
“Yeah. He just left. I’m surprised you didn’t see him.”
Then a thought came. My awareness of what might have just happened flooded my mind. I replayed the last ten minutes over and over, each time becoming more disappointed in my obliviousness to who this ‘custodian’ resembled, almost ashamed at the fact that I didn’t see it when he was right in front of me. I smiled at the student who was still standing close to me and said, “Sometimes I ask God to come into my life and I wait- I wait for some extravagant thundercloud with a booming voice like the wind, I wait for a burning pillar of fire, I wait for a burning bush, I wait for a shining, majestic, blue-eyed, fair skinned Jesus to come riding in on the clouds on a valiant white warrior horse. Then, while I’m waiting, Jesus comes into my life. He comes into my cabin, weathered, worn and determined, with a plunger in his hand. He talks to me, while he cleans up the mess I made because I tried to fix it on my own. When I come to these retreats, my desire is that every high schooler finds Jesus. Then, sometimes, I tell them, in indirect ways, how to look for burning bushes and riders on white horses coming through the clouds. I’m sorry that I haven’t been as productive in introducing you to the Jesus that I first fell in love with- the quiet, dirty, wind beaten shepherd who died so that his sheep don’t have to worry about their messes anymore. Sometimes God shows up as a voice on a mountain. Other times, God shows up as a janitor and asks you where your mess is.”