Preacher Man

It happened some years ago, on a day not unlike today. A down day, sitting in my cubicle, perusing the web for something to occupy my mind while the clock ticks down 8 hours. One of those days where your heart is weighed down by nothing and everything at the same time. Something feels wrong about life, but you can’t quite place it.

Somehow, I came across the blog of a preacher. A Baptist preacher of all things. In south Texas.  I wish I knew what brought me there, or what the first thing I read was, but like today I remember the effect he had on me that day.

You see, religion and I don’t really get along. I’ve wanted to believe at times. I’ve tried to go to church, to learn their ways. But it just never felt right to me.

But this man. He’s different. He doesn’t tell people how to live life, or quote scripture. He doesn’t shake my hand on the way out and give me the same tired hollow smile the last 200 people got. He’s faceless, just words straight from his heart to my eyes.

He writes from deep inside his heart. Sometimes about how his job drains him, how he squeezes every last drop of love and emotion from himself and gives it to his congregation and comes home empty.  Sometimes it’s about his internal battle trying to consolidate the mystical primitive moonlit world before sunrise with the real adult world, understood by physics and mathematics. Sometimes it’s about the son he always wanted and never got.

So I don’t go to church on Sundays. I don’t read any holy scriptures. But on days when I feel down, I sit at my desk, find a story in his archives, and have my own private modern “sermon.”  It always fills my heart with life again.

For now, that’s as close to religion as I’ll come, and I’m quite happy with it.