By April Terry

My sister gave me a calendar of religious pictures for Christmas and June happens to be a picture of Jesus sitting facing a woman, both sitting on the edge of a well, sheep surrounding the two on a hillside of green.  In the picture, the woman is a beautiful woman sitting in front of Jesus and smiling beautifully at him.  In my mind’s eye, I don’t see that story that way at all.   To me, it seems too perfect and she is far too beautiful.  The way I see the story is with a woman who is aging rather ungracefully, her dress slightly more seductive than it need be, her eyes worldly and guarded, but a strange man has suddenly captured her attention in a way that she could never have predicted.  We tend to like to pay attention to the pretty people of the world and we are often attracted to beauty, but we don’t know how to handle those who aren’t. 

I am currently reading “Save Me From Myself,” an autobiography by Brian “Head” Welch, former lead guitarist of Korn.  Brian isn’t what people would call pretty, and his life is far from it, but he tells a compelling story of coming from a life of sex, drugs, rock and roll to a life of faith in Christ.  It’s not a pretty story, but it’s a true story.

About a quarter into the book, I admittedly started getting a little annoyed.  Alright already, I thought, I get it…Sex, drugs, rock and roll, repeat.  Now I’m ready for the transformation!  It didn’t play out quite as neat and tidy as I expected it to play out.  His story is a messy story.  It’s a story of love, loss, drugs, addiction, and vices good and bad.  He even said the sinner’s prayer before diving into all his mess, so it doesn’t exactly play out the way most Christians think it should.  There should be a sudden and complete transformation, shouldn’t there? 

Yet, transformation often comes over time and a person’s journey to follow God’s call doesn’t always take a straight path.  The road less travelled is often littered with obstacles, mistakes, heartbreak, and stupidity before someone finally comes to a point of realization that perhaps they need to go to a power higher than themselves.  That’s why it’s not always pretty.  It wasn’t pretty when Jesus faced the woman at the well and told her the ugly truth about herself.   She seemed to have moved beyond pretense, but Jesus didn’t have any reason for pretense in the first place. 

 Jesus had the benefit of foreknowledge, but we often judge a book by its cover.  We look at a person and we start making assumptions about them, but we don’t really know where they are in their journey and we might just be one experience in a long line of experiences.  It took a string of Christians to move Brian Welch along his journey.  We often assume that we have to get someone to “pray the prayer” or that we have to “close the deal,” but God is the one in charge and he is the only one going along each step of the journey with that person.  It’s just as important for us to remember that God’s timing is better than ours and that anyone who comes to God’s altar and humbles themselves, does so, not because of you and me, but because of the One who saved us.

We usually like to focus on the destination, but the journey is where we are right now.  As Bette Davis said, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be bumpy night!”  We can expect difficulties, wrong turns, and ugliness in our lives, but if our journey brings us to a loving God, it’s a journey worth taking. We just need to remember that other people’s lives are riddled with their own bumps and it may take more or less for them to get to the same place we are.