Bo's Café (17 page)

Andy looks at me. “You follow?”

“Perfectly. Brenda Magnusson, homecoming dance, 1991.”

“Doesn’t matter how competent, intelligent, or accomplished you are. You’ve got it tucked away in there. And nobody can cope
for any great period of time with the feeling of that nakedness. You know what shame does? It takes a particular violation
or several violations from your past, something that really got to you, and convinces you the person you felt like in that
violation is who you’ll always be, for the rest of your life. Sad, huh?”

“Yeah,” I say, looking past him.

“So we fashion some fig leaves to protect ourselves. A manufactured story we create that we think will protect us from feeling
that shame, so others don’t see that nakedness in us. We don’t want others to see us for the person the lie has told us we
are. So we almost unconsciously create a lie to protect us from the lie. Bad combination.”

“Slow down a minute. ‘We don’t want others to see us for the person the lie has told us we are.’ Is that me?”

“We gradually learn to falsely rewrite our own story. We perfect a manipulated story, either of our own inferiority, superiority,
or some pretty schizophrenic combination of the two. It becomes the lens we see our lives through. Folks who feel
inferior
, well, they blame themselves a lot and see themselves as the reason for most of their trouble… and the war in Vietnam. Now,
someone who feels
superior
, he blames others and sees
them
as the reason for all his problems… and the war in Vietnam. Both are based in a lie. The inferior guy, you feel bad for.
The superior guy—he’s a lot of work. He usually thinks his problems are his wife or his coworkers or the guy in front of him
in traffic. He doesn’t need much of anything from anyone.”

Suddenly, he stops like he’s realized something.

“Yes, that’s me,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, blinking as if just remembering where he is. “I wouldn’t, well, uhm… yes. It’s you. Perfect example.”

“I get the point.”

He clears his throat. “Now, the engine for every distorted behavior, like, say, anger, for example, is this central lie we’ve
used to rewrite our story. And unfortunately, it only perpetuates and reenergizes our shame. It may go underground for a while,
but it never goes away. And the saddest part is that it never does what we hope it will. It never covers the shame. And it
certainly never solves it. It can make us feel more presentable, but it does nothing to solve our condition. And meanwhile,
everyone around us is aware of it and is being wounded by a man who feels relatively presentable.”

“I take it this isn’t supposed to be making me feel any better.”

“Nope.” Andy lifts one hand, motioning for me to stop talking.
“
But you were wanting me to fix your shame-fueled anger without giving me access to you and your superiority story.”

“I was, huh?”

“You were just trying to modify bad behavior enough to keep you from getting thrown out of your house again… I’m just saying.”

I shrug.

“See, I knew that game plan wouldn’t work for you any more than it ever worked for me. Only a real friend would ever be allowed
to address the shame driving your behavior.”

His eyes search mine. “I think that’s why you came here today… right?”

I think back to sitting in my driveway earlier, alone, without a hope in the world. “Yeah,” I say. “That sounds a lot like
why I’m here.”

Andy suddenly gets a silly grin.

“Do you know what boat we’re on right now?”

“Of course. This is our company’s boat. I’ve sat on this bench many times.”

Andy runs his hand across a stretch of rail. “Yep, a forty-five-foot princess. She gracefully houses twin turbo diesels and
sexy new v-drives inside a state-of-the-art polished composite fiberglass hull. And she stables five hundred horses in each
corral down below—horses that can fly in water. Inside she’s dressed comfortably in European maple, full leather, and California
Berber. She’s trimmed out with a fifteen-foot beam and radar that can find a tugboat twenty-four miles away. And this sweetheart
can dance at twenty knots before she’s half a mile from the jetty. Twenty knots, my friend.”

I look around the deck of the boat I thought I was so familiar with. “Wow. I’m impressed. I’ve never really paid much attention.
I’m usually in the back, schmoozing potential clients.”

“Part of my job as dockmaster,” he says, still slowly running his hands along the rails, “is to check out the yachts. But
on the side I clean a few and keep the engines fresh. So I tool ’em around the bay a bit. It’s almost like owning several
dozen yachts. What do you say we take the lady out for a spin?”

“You’re aware my life is in shambles, right?”

“Oh, yeah.” He smiles at me. “We’ve established that, I think.”

“And you really think we should… ?”

“Yep.”

“All right. I’m not calling the shots today.”

“Good.”

I find a cushioned seat, sit back, and watch Andy walk the length of the boat, meticulously checking features I never knew
existed. He unlashes ropes and sits down in the captain’s chair to start her up. Responding smoothly with a deep, low growl,
it’s like she belongs to him.

Soon we’re free from the slip and slowly idling our way through the rows and rows of yachts, toward the jetty.

This is like one of those moments you watch in a movie. The setting and circumstances are so funny and out-of-place, it’s
obvious they were prepared a long time ago.
I’m on my boss’s yacht, being driven around by a crazy man in a ball cap, who’s teaching me how to not end up like my boss.

I laugh out loud. I imagine God smiling next to me, slapping me on the back and saying,
“How’s this for a Kodak moment, huh? You might want to listen to this guy. I’ve gone to quite a bit of trouble to get you
here.”

It’s all very peaceful. I hear mast bells lightly clanging in the breeze. Once again I’m enveloped by the low rumble of an
engine steered by Andy. How can this be? I’m missing from work—nobody knows where I am, and, for the moment, I don’t really
care. In the hour of my greatest revealed failure, I’m enjoying the sea for the first time since I was a kid.

Andy picks up his speech where he left off, while maneuvering through the breakwater toward open sea. “Steven, many counselors
are trained to help you work on a particular behavior. That’s called behaviorism.”

I make my way up closer to where Andy is so I can hear over the engine.

“Go ahead,” I say.

“It’s like an elaborate game of Whack-A-Mole. Moles pop out of holes, and you whack ’em with a mallet. You score points by
how many moles you can whack in a certain amount of time. You’re going along just fine for a while, racking up lots of points.
But then the game starts speeding up. We think we’ve ‘fixed’ a behavior, and four more critters pop out. Eventually we’re
spending our entire time whacking moles. Therapists put their kids through college teaching us how to hit the little rodents
quicker.”

Andy looks up from the controls. “But no behavioral mallet can hit the shame that triggers the lie that releases the mole.”

He lets that picture settle in for a time before continuing. “Now, other people will want to work on what they call your ‘root
behaviors.’ That’s psychology
.
You try to find your way back to some event in your early life. You uncover and examine events that help explain why you
needed an inferiority or superiority story. And now the problems in your life will finally be solved. But a good psychologist
will caution you that all you’ve done is identify the elements of and causes for your self-story. While that’s incredibly
helpful, and may feel good, it doesn’t solve anything. Your shame remains unresolved. Because at the end of the day, no psychological
mallet can solve the shame that triggers the lie that releases the mole.”

His voice has gotten progressively louder. We’re skimming along out into deeper water. I want to indicate that I’m following,
but I don’t think he could hear me, so I just keep squinting into the sun.

“Just about the time you’ve become totally disillusioned with your journey, Jesus will step out of the shadows and stand next
to you. He’ll look in your eyes and say, ‘I took your shame for you two thousand years ago. And I won the right to have it
never, ever again define you. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. It’s over. That’s the truth.’ ”

“Is that the ‘come to Jesus’ card?”

“Yeah.” He smiles. “I guess so.”

“See, I gotta tell you. It’s just too much magic for me. Too many mirrors, too much smoke.”

He smiles again. “Humor me, will you?”

He’s turned around in his captain’s chair and is no longer steering.

I point. “Andy, you gonna… ?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” He turns and resumes steering.

“So why don’t we experience that freedom, most of us?” he asks.

I look at him blankly.

“It’s not a rhetorical question. If God took our shame away, then why doesn’t everyone experience that freedom?”

“I guess I don’t know.”

Andy taps the steering wheel. “Well, it’s not because we’re not sincere or educated enough. We haven’t learned how to trust
what He says is true about us. It’s that simple. See, those nice theological concepts don’t do much for you.”

“I’ll say.”

“And it’s not a matter of willpower or screwing yourself up to believe what you don’t yet believe. It’s just being willing
to try on the new clothing. To think about what it would look like if you believed He really took the shame away. The person
my shame has told me I am no longer needs to be listened to.”

Something in what Andy is saying is beginning to make sense.

“Until we believe what Jesus says He did,” Andy says, “it’s hard to accept the lies we tell ourselves and replace them with
the real identity God’s handing us. He offers this new life, the life we were trying to fake our way to with our self-stories.
And it comes without any condemnation. He’s smiling, with His arm around us, looking at our messed-up lives together with
us and saying He’s crazy about us. Nothing surprises Him or makes Him want to run. He’s known about our problems from before
the world began, and He knows where we’re headed now. And that flat-out trounces shame.”

We’ve slowed to an idle in front of the huge ridge of stacked boulders that separates the jetty from the ocean.

“So Jesus asks us to trust Him, not fake it or perform for Him. Slowly we discover there are some others we can grow and introduce
to that trust.” He looks over at me. “Even a guy as screwed up as me can give a friend a safe place. Even a man as flawed
as I am can help a friend rewrite his story with the real story, the true story—of
Christ coming through me
. That’s who Steven Kerner is on his worst day.”

He spins all the way around and says, “Now that dog, I’m telling you, that dog’ll hunt.”

“Okay. I’m starting to follow you,” I say. “But you lost me when you said everyone has shame. I get that some people might
live out of shame. But me? Maybe arrogance or pride. I haven’t suffered ten minutes with shame my entire life.”

“Then tell me this, Steven,” he says, leaning forward. “What drives your need to be right all the time, to defeat anyone in
your path? What drives you to overachieve? What keeps you beating yourself up for not performing to your high expectations?
What keeps you comparing yourself with everyone, looking over your shoulder, and putting down others? Where does that come
from if not a deep, innate fear that you aren’t enough and others might see it? Only one condition motivates such behavior.
It starts with the letter
s
and rhymes with
flame
.”

I look up at him. “Okay, then you tell me this—why didn’t this all get solved at the start when I became a Christian?”

“Great question.”

Andy starts working his way back through the jetty, making big, slow circles as he speaks. “Steven, most of us think that
once we believe in Jesus, we’ll live magically ever after. Cashews and sweet corn will grow year-round in our front yards.”
He pauses. “Then we discover we still know very well how to hurt others and make crappy life choices. And this realization
breaks our hearts. This is where the rewritten story kicks in. It whispers to us that we don’t deserve such a life, that Jesus
is fully disgusted with our failures. So, after beating ourselves up, we start trying to fix ourselves, reform, and relieve
the disgust we presume He has for us. Welcome to much that passes as church. We play right into self-disgust. And many churches
keep their crowds reminded that Jesus is fully disgusted with them. This is the greatest lie in the mix—the conviction that
we can fix ourselves, the conviction that He wants us to try, the conviction that He’s angry at us if we don’t try harder.”

“He doesn’t want us to try to fix ourselves?”

“Steven, if we actually could fix ourselves, why would Jesus have had to die?”

I look at the deck and eventually hold up my palms.

“That whole feeling that I’m not enough, that there’s something uniquely wrong in me? It gets dismantled the same way you
first received grace—by accepting that you can’t earn it. Wrap your head around this, Steven: He offers us an entirely new
story—one with no condemnation, inferiority, inadequacy, or insecurity. No more trying to prove to anyone that I’m someone
I know I’m not. Over. Done.”

“This is
so
not what I’m used to hearing about God,” I say. “Not at all.”

Several yachts and smaller boats are slowly gliding out of slips and into the open harbor. The sun is now high enough to paint
their wakes with shimmering gold and orange. It’s incredibly beautiful out here. I’ve sat here so many times and never noticed
it at all.

Andy interrupts my reflection. “Let me tell you what you’ve gotten yourself into. If you’re honest, it feels really good to
be cared for, to have someone stand with you in what’s been freaking you out for decades.”

I nod. “Yeah.”